The Vision in Job 4 and Its Role in the Book: Reframing the Development of the Joban Dialogues by Ken Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Vision in Job 4 and Its Role in the Book: Reframing the Development of the Joban Dialogues by Ken Brown Edward L. Greenstein Ken Brown. The Vision in Job 4 and Its Role in the Book: Reframing the Development of the Joban Dialogues. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 75. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. xi + 350 pp. It is unusual in biblical studies to encounter a monograph of this quality, combining sustained and high-caliber philological work with a broad hermeneutical agenda. Ken Brown’s Vision is a modestly revised doctoral dissertation written at the Georg-August University in Göttingen under the joint supervision of Hermann Spieckermann and Nathan MacDonald (of Cambridge University). The starting point of the analysis is the literally hair-raising vision of a spirit belonging to the divine circle reported in Job 4:12–21. According to the spirit, the deity finds fault with the angels, kal va-ḥomer with lowly human beings. N. H. Tur-Sinai (Torczyner), H. L. Ginsberg, G. V. Smith, and E. L. Greenstein, in particular, had advanced arguments maintaining that this vision, related early in the book of Job, is misplaced.1 In the received text, it appears in the middle of the first discourse of Eliphaz. It should, however, be attributed to Job. Brown writes that he originally set out to disprove this thesis, which had been largely ignored by scholars, even though it was promulgated at first by two of the greatest modern Hebrew philologists, Tur-Sinai and Ginsberg. But as Brown studied the [End Page 197] evidence and arguments more thoroughly—including, it should be mentioned to his credit, my lengthy Hebrew article (Greenstein 2005)—he concluded that the report of the vision was indeed misplaced and should be understood as the conclusion to Job’s opening discourse (3:1–26). Among the arguments supporting the attribution to Job are the following: the theology is much closer to Job’s than to any of the friends’; it is Job who complains of nightmares; Eliphaz quotes a parody of the spirit’s words back to Job (see 15:12–13, which introduce direct discourse); Elihu, who expressly seeks to refute Job, not the friends, quotes from the vision; Eliphaz in his first discourse responds to the vision; and Job refuses to suppress it (6:10). To these arguments Brown adds that Job’s two revelatory experiences frame the dialogues in the book (but see already Greenstein 1996), and he performs a close linguistic and stylistic analysis to demonstrate that the rhetoric of the vision is highly Joban. Having established on a sound philological basis that the vision is Job’s, Brown shows that the vision is far more central and influential in the dialogues of Job than had hitherto been thought. The vision and its disturbing message are reflected throughout the discussion between Job and his companions, and they figure prominently in the speeches of Elihu and in Job’s response to the divine speeches from the whirlwind. These interrelations Brown establishes through a meticulous study of the discourses. The real innovation in Brown’s study is the suggestion of a direct connection between the displacement of the vision in 4:12–21, which had been explained as a mechanical mishap, and the widely acknowledged disarray of several passages in the third, seemingly truncated, cycle of the dialogues, between chapters 25 and 27. Material in chapters 25–26 attributed there to Job appears to belong to Bildad, and material in chapter 27 attributed to Job appears to belong to one of the companions, probably Zophar, who otherwise has no discourse in the third and final cycle. Brown ingeniously suggests that the rearrangement of chapters 25 through 27 is not accidental but intentional—the work of a redactor who wanted to change the thrust of the book. Brown then proceeds to suggest, cleverly and sensitively, that the deliberate rearrangement of chapters 25–27 is connected to the dislocation of the terrifying vision of chapter 4. The vision was moved from its original place just as the speeches in chapters 25–27 were rearranged—and for a similar purpose: to bring the positions of Job, Eliphaz...