John H. Walton, Job (NIVAC, Zondervan, 2012) in Bulletin for Biblical Research 23/3 (2013): 421-423. (original) (raw)
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The bool of Job is one of the greatest, if not the greatest literary accomplishment of the ancient world, yet in many ways it is just as relevant now as it was then. This textbook examines Job from a comparative theological perspective in order to help contemporary readers access it, learn from it, and apply its insights to modern life.
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This is a full length thematic commentary on Job putting forward a parabolic reading developing and correcting the published approach of David Wolfers' 1994 Eerdmans commentary. It reads Job as a script for a play debating and discussing the problem of the suffering of Hezekiah and the nation during the Assyrian crisis of 701. The contribution of the commentary is that it gives an exegesis of all the book in this light and from a conservative standpoint. Wolfers' commentary gave a critical exegesis of the material that was more amenable to a parabolic reading leaving the more difficult stuff to one side. We address this deficiency. The intertextual connections with Isaiah and the Hezekiah psalms make up our argument. Job has been traditionally read on the surface in the genre of Wisdom literature but it is in fact prophetic commentary on what was recent Israelite history
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Job's piety in The Book of Job is so ideal that it becomes problematic on two levels. First, it renders God a tyrant. Second, no one can fully identify with Job. Surely, we may suffer just as much as Job does and even feel that God is unjust, but no man can ever claim to be as pious as Job. Limited to a few examples of the fate of Job in Jewish tradition and concerned with Scripture's role with respect to religious normativity, this article will be guided by the following question: How can The Book of Job maintain its role within Jewish tradition as a normative text? My reading suggests that The Book of Job in itself is not normative. Rather, it serves as a counterpoint up against which the reception and transformation of Jewish theology can unfold and as such The Book of Job exerts its function on Jewish religiosity.
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The book of Job presents a unique and detailed contrastive study of two fundamental and fundamentally opposed religious personae: Job, on the one hand, and the collective image of his friends on the other. It is a normative dispute about the religion’s most basic norm of disposition. How is one to respond to inexplicable disaster when one believes one is blameless? What is the religiously appropriate response to catastrophe? To confront God’s judgment as did Job, or to submissively surrender to it, as his four friends insist he should? Is one supposed to question divine justice when deemed to be wanting, as did Job, or to suppress any thought to the contrary and deem it to be just, come what may? Rather than expound (once again) upon the theological implications of the Job dispute, this paper focuses on its theological-political dimensions, and its looming and vivid, yet largely overlooked presence in the Hebrew Bible’s master narrative; and more specifically, on the marked, if inevitable antinomian nature of the Jobian side to the divide.