Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience by Samuel E. Balentine

This is a magnificent book. For more than a decade, Samuel E. Balentine, Professor of Old Testament and Director of Graduate Studies at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, has immersed himself in the world of Job. Now he tells the story of Job’s impact on ancient and modern audiences. Throughout his masterful 2006 theological commentary on the book (Job, SHBC 10, Smith & Helwys) Balentine scattered snippets and excerpts illustrating the reception of Job through the centuries. This volume advances that work significantly by providing a full-scale narrative account.

Have You Considered My Servant Job? is organized around the biblical book’s multiple parts—roughly, the prose prologue, the poetic middle, and the prose epilogue. Those who are looking for a chronological history of Job’s reception will not find it here, but this is not a blemish of the book; rather, it is a virtue. Using the book of Job itself as the organizing principle saves the work from what might easily have become a lesson in ancient and modern history. Balentine still carefully situates the examples he cites in historical context, but theological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns, not chronological ones, drive the discussion. Accordingly, he offers beautifully crafted narrative syntheses and analyses rather than simply short summaries.

No work on the reception of the book of Job can pretend to be comprehensive, but in only 220 pages Balentine does a remarkable job of covering the bases—from Chaucer to Calvin, from Gregory to Goethe, from Jerome to Jung, from Maimonides to Melville, from Wells to Wiesel. And these are only a few. All along Balentine writes and reflects eloquently on the contribution of each of these works. Here is an example that follows his discussion of Kafka and the Promethean myth:

If the substratum of truth that grounds righteous defiance and the refusal to bless the world God has created become a forgotten footnote to a story that is simply a good read, then why bother to wrestle with the inexplicable questions such as “Why?” If there is nothing more to say about the Joban story than what can be summed up in a Brothers Grimm truism—“In the beginning … and they all lived happily ever after”—then defiance may remain an aesthetic curiosity, but it will not likely translate into a culture-critical consciousness. (133)

Even readers who are well acquainted with the history of Job the figure and Job the book will be surprised anew at just how plastic “Job” is as a figure, as a concept, as a virtue, or as a literary work. Yet if we allow painting with a broad brush, we can trace interpretive tendencies in certain historical periods. By and large, interpreters from antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation focused on the God-fearing Job of the prose tale, whereas interpreters from the early modern period to the present have given far more attention to the rebellious Job of the dialogues, commonly characterizing Job’s rebellion as courageous or even a form of piety. Balentine’s narrative confirms that sketch, with a few notable exceptions.

About mid-way through the book, Balentine begins to offer more extensive theological reflection in the light of modern reception of Job, suggesting that this is where his sympathies lie. It seems fair to say that he favors the modern Job, which is neither a flaw in-and-of-itself nor surprising for a 21st century interpreter. One concern I had was that the work may perpetuate the modern dismissal of the prose tale as naïve (which is to say, unimportant), while focusing primarily on Job as a modern “everyman”—a viewpoint that the prologue clearly contradicts. If Balentine has shown us anything, however, it is that the book of Job can bear all of these interpretations and many more. Balentine has done us all a great service by guiding us into the maze of this masterpiece so that we can wrestle with Job as Job wrestled with God.