The Logic of in Tragedy Hanoch Levin’s Drama The Torments of Job Freddie Rokem (original) (raw)

Finally Job cried out: God damn the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb. On that daylet there be darkness; let it never have been created; let it sink back into the void. The Book of Job 1 The Book of Job holds a unique position in the Hebrew Bible. Its action takes place in a strange, completely unknown country, Uz, about which we do not know anything. And Job, the protagonist, is not even directly identified as an Israelite. The Book of Job also has an unmistakeable dramatic structure, not at all typical for biblical texts, based on concrete situations and dialogue between the characters involved in conflictswhat the Greeks termed agon. It is a text that is closely related to classical Greek drama in many ways. 2 It is also a text that contains quite subversive messages, like the opening lines of chapter three, quoted as the motto for this article, where Job damns the day he was born, calling God to 'uncreate' the world and let it sink back again into the darkness and the chaotic void from which it was initially formed, an idea that even sounds uncannily modern to a twentieth and twenty-first century reader. The major aim of this article, however, is not to analyse the biblical Book of Job. Instead, it will focus on the adaptation of the Book of Job for the stage by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin (1943-99). But when examining this contemporary adaptation, we also need to consider the horizon of expectations created by the ancient biblical narrative, according to which, after having endured extreme suffering, Job was "rewarded" with a new family and his wealth was restored. Israeli readers and audiences are quite