Abstract
This article focuses on the theme of illness within the dialogue between the character of Job and his ‘friends’ (Job 3—37). It looks specifically at the different explanatory models used by the characters to interpret and contextualize Job’s condition and explores language of sin and blame in illness. A key contribution of this article is to highlight the problematic nature of moralizing and searching for meaning during illness and to emphasize the need for greater empathy.
The poetic sections of dialogue in the book of Job are among the most emotionally charged in the entire Hebrew Bible. With an earthy rawness, they depict unspeakable tragedy and pain. As they become more firmly entrenched in their positions, the characters talk past one another in the dialogues, which themselves become increasingly heated. On one side of the argument stands Job, who expressively, often morbidly, seeks to describe and interpret his illness. A menacing El (God) is physically attacking for no reason: ‘I was at ease but he smashed and smashed me; seized my neck and bashed and bashed me … He pierced my kidneys without mercy; he spilled my bile on the ground’ (Job 16.12–13). On the other side are Job’s ‘friends’ who reason that Job’s illness is a result of sin. Thus ‘your guilt instructs your mouth! Your own mouth condemns you! … Your own lips testify against you!’ (Job 15.5–6) This latter perspective is a common response to illness in the Hebrew Bible. For example, if one breaks a covenant then illness and death can be expected to follow (Deut. 28.22, 34–35).
With continual accusations from his so-called friends about having brought illness on himself through sin, Job’s physical anguish turns into defensive rage against his obtuse friends and against El. However, what is interesting about the book is the way in which it describes the character’s feelings and reactions to illness. In many ways, the book could be understood as an early description of patients and healers (or, according to Job 13.4, ‘quacks’; the Hebrew is literally Job’s friends … wish to reduce his suffering by espousing an age old moral-theological theory of illness containing both aetiology and cure. Illness emanates from sin, while symptoms are due to divine punishment. To deny wrongdoing is to obstruct the healing process. To get well, Job must repent … If such a disaster could befall Job, their equal or even their better, who can safeguard them from similar catastrophe? To feel safe they need to place Job on the other side of the morality fence. Job refuses to be quarantined in the sinners’ ward, and, by authentically expressing his emotions, he exposes his healers’ ineffectiveness.
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Perhaps a natural extension of this point is to emphasize the impact this social dynamic has on community. For the Old Testament material, in the eyes of onlookers the afflicted body can only ever be a symbol of sin or moral failure and therefore leads to expulsion from social groups. As Pelham argues, ‘[t]he breakdown of the body cannot stand simply for itself, with no larger meaning, for if it did it would not require the expulsion of the afflicted one.’
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Pelham’s statement about illness not standing for itself in Job may be usefully contextualized against Kleinmann’s observations that illnesses are ‘marked with cultural salience in different epochs and societies’.
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In other words, both patients and onlookers socially construct meaning from illness. Similarly, Job and his friends construct meanings from Job’s affliction. The source of contention emerges from the fact that the meanings constructed are different. What Job requires from his friends or ‘healers’ is empathy – as the narrator emphasizes through placing on Job’s lips the phrase ‘Pity me! Pity me! You are my friends’ – what he actually receives is judgement (Job 19.21). As Tham argues, He wants to be heard and understood by his friends, not judged categorically with a mere theoretical link between sin and punishment. It is the subject in distress and not ideas that matter after all. Job wants friendship and empathy rather than a pronouncement of God’s just retribution. He desperately tries to maintain the paradox he is experiencing—simultaneously suffering and guiltlessness—which is not accounted for by his friends’ scholastic theology.
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‘ēḏ) is often used in the sense of a testimony given in a courtroom. Job’s argument here is, as Habel states, that his ‘innocent inner self cannot be heard because the court sees only his gaunt outer self. His very appearance, therefore, militates against the possibility of impartial litigation.’
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The accusatory notion that Job has done something that directly warrants his predicament, which Classens argues ‘offers an excellent example of the stereotypes regarding disability’, is found plentifully throughout the friends’ speeches. 8 To select but a few powerful examples, Bildad suggests in response to Job’s protestations of innocence that ‘your children must have sinned against him’, an obvious allusion to the prologue (Job 8.4; cf. 1.19). Likewise, Eliphaz’s response to Job’s reflection on the limitations and pain of mortal life is ‘the wicked one writhes in pain 9 all his days, and few years are in store for the tyrant’ (Job 15.20). Similarly, Zophar reassures Job with a somatically focused acrostic parable which exploits the eating metaphor: ‘the food in his bowels is turned to asps’ venom within him; The wealth he gorges he vomits. El forces it up from his stomach’ (Job 20.14–15). Thus, the way the narrator portrays Job’s friends is also akin to lawyers defending El in a courtroom. They cannot overcome the paradox of Job’s disfigured body yet claim of innocence. As such they, at best, fail in empathy. At worst, their ‘scholastic’ responses, through failing to recognize a fellow human suffering, are unwittingly shocking, offensive and cruel.
In contrast to the argument concerning illness and litigation, Erikson suggests that corporeal imagery in Job is used ‘to question and invert traditional usage of body imagery, particularly the stock of body images from the Psalms that present the body, the self, and the voice as a manifold unity’.
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Thus, unlike ‘the psalmists, who petition God to restore them to health’, the narrator in Job positions on his lips ‘images of disembodiment and bodily disintegration to separate his broken body from his contention that he is innocent’.
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Eriksen’s perspective here maintains the courtroom metaphor but reformulates the imagery of the broken mind and body into an instrument used to affirm Job’s innocence rather than it being a symbolic counter-narrative which subverts his claims. Perhaps a good example of this is to be found in the ironic parody of Psalm 8. what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care
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for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. (Psalm 8.4–5) What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit
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them every morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
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(Job 7.17–20a)
The notion of blame, or in a religious context, ‘sin’, being ascribed to illness is not confined to the Old Testament. This idea was forcefully criticized during the late 1970s by Susan Sontag who examined stigmatized illnesses such as cancer and Aids. For Sontag, ‘[p]utative notions of disease have a long history’ and the controlling metaphors which describe cancer using military language stigmatize certain illnesses and, by extension, those who are ill.
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As she argues, The persistence of the belief that illness reveals, and is a punishment for, moral laxity or turpitude can be seen in another way, by noting the persistence of descriptions of disorder or corruption as a disease … A theodicy as well as a demonology, it not only stipulates something emblematic of evil but makes this the bearer of a rough, terrible justice.
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A cosmetic difference between Magdalene’s and Sontag’s perspectives is that Sontag’s case pertains only to the secular. Nevertheless, it can sometimes be quite surprising how religious language and concepts permeate beyond the boundaries of religious contexts when illness is the issue at stake. For example, Kutz’s article in the British Medical Journal refers to a ‘54 year old agnostic woman who had developed acute leukaemia’ who also developed something bordering on magical or religious reasoning when asked about her illness. ‘Why [do] I deserve this’ ‘Why, indeed, do you deserve this?’ inquired the consulting psychiatrist. ‘Somebody up there is testing me.’ ‘Who is that somebody?’ ‘Who can it be? I have never been religious, but there’s no doubt in my mind that somebody up there is testing me.’
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For the medical professional, the meaning is to be found in the language of disease. Medical professionals diagnose, thus adding biophysiological states to social states and assigning the meaning of illness to disease. 24 Thus, illness ‘is the patient’s subjective experience of physical or mental states’, which can be social – ‘the experience of some illnesses is not limited to the symptoms but includes a “second illness” – the reactions of the social environment’. 25 To rephrase, disease might be viewed as a biological condition and illness a social meaning of a condition. This is a helpful distinction, although it is sometimes blurred by the ambiguous and uneven use of the term ‘sickness’. 26 Obviously, in a text such as Job it is impossible to make any diagnosis on the basis of disease not least because it is a text which has come together over a period of time, which has been edited and which makes use of various sources in its discussion of the theme of suffering rather than a straightforward description of disease. What is interesting about Job’s description of suffering, however, is the correlation between the types of responses to illness in the text and in modern times, especially the connection of illness and blame, or sin.
A description of a response to illness that aligns well with the aforementioned example of the leukaemia patient can be found in Carel’s lucid reflection on diagnosis. In the early days after my diagnosis I couldn’t think at all … I felt that any more information would only bring with it bad news, more horror, additional grim facts to petrify me. I suffered from what Joan Didion calls ‘magical thinking’: the irrational, self-blaming, mystic thought that is apparently common in situations of distress. I blamed myself for writing a book on death. I blamed myself for going to the doctor so late. I blamed myself for being arrogant and not budgeting for something like this from the beginning. I blamed myself for daring to have a wish list. Later, as I adjusted to my situation, I felt increasingly angry. I spent several months asking: why did this happen to me?
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Perhaps then, there is something to be learned through renewed attention to the language of illness within the book of Job. It is easy to use the medical humanities as a heuristic lens to inform an exegesis of the material itself. This article, however, has attempted to balance the relationship between exegesis of Job and commentary on records of modern-day patient experiences. The book of Job may be seen as one of the earliest descriptions of patients and onlookers coping with illness. Modern illness experiences, and reactions to illness, form an excellent mirror through which to understand the text. However, the text also provides critical comment on the coupling of sin, or blame, with illness. The responses of Job’s friends are exposed as problematic throughout the text by Job’s well-constructed retorts. Like Job, they assume a sort of magical thinking wherein the cause and resolution for illness is beyond their own control, rather than taking responsibility to help through listening and trying to understand Job’s questions. Unfortunately, the same buck-passing logic and lack of authentic engagement between patients and onlookers is sometimes the case nowadays, as Carel states: If I had to pick the human emotion in greatest shortage, it would be empathy. And this is nowhere more evident than in illness. The pain, disability and fear are exacerbated by the apathy and disgust with which you are sometimes confronted when you are ill. There are many terrible things about illness; the lack of empathy hurts the most.
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