Let the day perish: The nexus of personification and mythology in Job 3

1. Job’s curses

As the prose frame that introduces Job’s poetic dialogues draws to a close, the narrator describes the arrival of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, three friends who hear of Job’s travails and travel together to console and comfort him. ² Shocked by their friend’s appearance, they sit on the ground, mourning in silence with him because of his suffering. But Job’s suffering does not abate. As the story proceeds, one day turns into two and then three, until a full week has passed. It is only then, with the passage of time, that Job finally gives full voice to his complaints. Gone are the stoic sentiments that God gives and takes away (1.21), that one should receive bad from the hand of God just as one receives good (2.10). Now Job vents his anger, bitterly cursing his treatment at God’s hand.

While Job’s monologue extends to the end of ch. 3, it is the curses he pronounces in the first half of the chapter (vv. 3-10) that are our immediate concern. ³ His invective begins in v. 3:

Let the day perish on which I was born,

 and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived!’ ⁴

That Job curses the day of his birth in the first half of the poetic line is clear enough. More difficult is the matter of determining whether the second half of the line, וְהַלַּיְלָה אָמַר הֹרָה גָבֶר‎, extends Job’s curse to the night of his birthday or to the night of his conception. ⁵ The former option requires an emendation of the MT along the lines of the OG, which records merely, ‘Behold, a male!’ (ἰδοὺ ἄρσεν). But while one can easily imagine why the Greek translator might have removed the unexpected reference to Job’s conception (perhaps taking the Hebrew הרה‎ as an error for הנה‎), it is much more difficult to fathom how this process could have worked in reverse, with a later Hebrew scribe altering the text to add in the unexpected reference to conception.

If the MT remains the preferred reading though, who is intended as the subject of the verb אמר‎? One possibility would be to supply an indefinite subject, ‘The night one said a man-child is conceived’, as in the impersonal rendering in the Vulgate (‘it was said’, in qua dictum est conceptus est homo) and perhaps the OG (‘they said’, ἡ νύξ ἐν ᾗ εἶπαν). ⁶ As Clines notes, though, it is difficult to imagine who this one—able to announce the conception (and gender at conception!) of the child—might be. ⁷

The text avails itself of another reading altogether, however. If, as I argue below, the night mentioned in v. 3 is personified and treated alongside Day as essentially a living entity, it would be this omniscient Night who knows Job’s conception has taken place and proclaims it. Furthermore, it would be this Night which/whom Job goes on to curse in vv. 6-10. ⁸ Further affirmation of the text’s focus on the night of Job’s conception is found in what Michael Fishbane has identified as Job 3’s ‘systematic bouleversement, or reversal, of the cosmicizing acts of creation’ in Gen. 1-2.4a. ⁹ Fishbane notes that Job 3.1-13 duplicates the language and imagery of the Genesis account but does so with the goal of unleashing a ‘counter-cosmic incantation’ that would undo creation itself to relieve his plight. This process of reversal is evident already in the striking inversion of the fixed word-pair, הרה‎ and ילד‎, ‘to conceive’ and ‘to bear’. Of the more than 80 occurrences of these terms together in the Tanakh, Job 3.3 alone mentions giving birth (אִוָּלֶד‎) before mentioning conception (הֹרָה‎). It is the movement from the day of Job’s birth back to the night of his conception that signals the larger pattern of reversal and regression that will characterize his curses. ¹⁰

In the lines that follow, Job expands upon these curses, focusing his invective first upon the day specifically in vv. 4-5 and then on the night in vv. 6-10. Job’s curses upon the day center on depriving that day of light. Each line strikes this chord:

That day—let it be darkness (חשׁך‎)!

 May God above not seek it.

 May light (נהרה‎) not shine (תופע‎) upon it.

May darkness (חשׁך‎) and gloom (צלמות‎) claim it.

 May clouds (עננה‎) settle upon it.

 May a blackness of day (כמרירי יום‎) terrify it.

The jumble of darkness terms employed in this section—חשׁך‎, צלמות‎, ¹¹ עננה‎, כמריר‎ ¹² —while nearly impossible to capture accurately in translation, emphasizes Job’s insistent plea that this day be robbed of daylight. Given his wish, Job would obliterate this day, making it no day at all.

Job’s use of the verbs דרשׁ‎ in v. 4b and גאל‎ in v. 5a heightens his call for the abandonment of day to the personified forces of darkness. While דרשׁ‎ may refer merely to God’s pursuit of and care for an object of his affection (cf. Deut. 11.12; Ps. 142.5), Seow notes that the term carries strong overtones of socio-legal responsibility. ¹³ To seek in this sense is to lay claim to just as an owner of livestock might reclaim a lost ox or sheep (Deut. 22.2; Ezek. 34.10-11). Thus, Job’s call is for God to quit his claim to the day of his birth, in effect, to disown that day. The same idea is present in his use of גאל‎, a term which again suggests reclamation of ownership (cf. Lev. 25.25-54; 27.13-33; Ruth 4.4, 6). ¹⁴ Here, Job personifies day as the offspring of night and asks that the darkness (חשׁך) and gloom (צלמות) of night reassert possession over the same day he would have God abandon. ¹⁵

In vv. 6-10, Job turns from cursing day to cursing night:

That night—let darkness seize it!

 May it not join ¹⁶ the days of the year.

 May it not enter the number of the months.

The casus pendens that opens v. 6, הלילה ההוא‎, parallels the identical construction in v. 4, היום ההוא‎, and gives further indication that Job’s curses are directed toward both the night of his conception and the day of his birth. The supposed difficulty of calling for darkness to seize night has led a number of interpreters to delete the reference to night or to emend the verse to refer again to day. This approach misses the demand of Job’s curse, however, namely that darkness lay hold of night and prevent it from turning into day. Darkness is urged to stop night from producing a day that could enter the service of the calendar.

A reference to the night of Job’s conception is reinforced by the poet’s innuendo in v. 7:

Yes, that night—let it be barren!

 Let no joyful cry be heard in it.

Job’s curse is double-edged. On one hand, he would make this a night in which couples do not seek one another’s embrace and in which the joyful cries of their lovemaking are not heard. On the other hand, though, he would also make the night itself barren. He would ensure that this night is unable to conceive and give birth to the following day.

The intent of Job’s call in v. 8 has vexed interpreters, both ancient and modern: ¹⁷

Let those who bind day curse it,

 Those ready to stir up Leviathan.

The presence of Leviathan in the second half of the poetic line has prompted some to emend the MT’s יום‎, ‘day’, in the first half of the line to ים‎, ‘sea’. ¹⁸ While Sea and Leviathan are found in parallel in the Bible’s poetic works (cf. Ps. 74.13-14; Isa. 27.1), an emendation here creates as many problems as it solves. The verb applied to Leviathan in the second half of the poetic line, ערר‎, carries the sense of rousing someone from inaction or awakening them from slumber. This is the meaning used throughout the book of Job (cf. 8.6; 14.12; 17.8) and is certainly the sense conveyed later in Job when God declares concerning Leviathan, לא־אכזר כי יעורנו‎, ‘None is so fierce as to arouse him’ (41.2). To stir up or arouse Leviathan in Job’s lament in ch. 3 is to awaken and unleash the chaotic forces the monster embodies. But the verb ארר‎, used in the preceding line, has just the opposite meaning; ארר‎ refers not to arousing and awakening but to cursing and binding. ¹⁹ Thus, an emendation of the text from יום‎ to ים‎ would create the untenable situation of having Job wish the Sea be suppressed in one line and then unleashed in the next. There is a lingering element of ambiguity in יום‎ and ים‎, but this ambiguity only points to a deliberate pattern of polyvalence (or more accurately, ambivalence) that runs throughout Job’s curses. In this setting, the more natural parallel to Leviathan would, of course, be Yam. As Fishbane observes, however, the MT’s preservation of the pairing יום‎ / לויתן‎ echoes the Leviathan/Yam parallel while evoking an additional set of images related to the cursing of Day. ²⁰

If יום‎ is to be retained in the first colon, however, it remains to determine who the ‘cursers of day’ were and how their task was thought to be connected with stirring up Leviathan. ²¹ Clines raises the possibility that Leviathan here is depicted as one who causes eclipses by swallowing up the sun or moon. ²² The cursers of day would then be those called upon to cast an ill omen over a day by effecting an eclipse, an action they were thought to accomplish by rousing Leviathan to action. The notion of a group or class standing at the ready to utter curses (the עתידים‎ in our passage) is not without precedent. ²³ In the Balaam pericope in Numbers 22-24, Balaam is treated by Balak as one skilled in cursing and blessing and whose maledictions might thus be effective in thwarting the Israelites’ advance through his territory. The terminology of Job 3.8 occurs throughout these narratives (קבב—Num. 22.11, 17; 23.8, 11, 13, 25, 27; 24.10; ארר‎—Num. 22.6, 12; 23.7; 24.9). ²⁴ What sets Job’s curses apart, however, is the cosmic sweep of their invective. As Fishbane observes, ‘Whereas ancient magic was generally egocentric, with the services of a magician hired for personal ends, Job stands on the rim of the universe and invokes the annihilation of all’.

Verse 9 returns to the original curse of v. 6, namely, that darkness would seize night and refuse to loose its grip:

Let the stars of its dawn ²⁵ be dark.

 Let it hope for light but have none.

 Let it not see the eyelids ²⁶ of the dawn.

Job urges that the morning stars that herald the arrival of dawn remain dark, and even more vividly that night be left hoping for light but find none. Job would curse this night to be one that never sees the rays of the dawn.

It is only at the end of Job’s diatribe against day and night that the reason for his abuse is made clear. Job curses day and night:

Because it did not close the doors of my womb,

 And hide trouble from my eyes.

While it is possible that Job’s charge is leveled solely against the day of his birth, the immediate antecedent to this verse is the night of his conception. This raises the possibility that Job’s description here returns to the original curse in v. 3 and has both night and day in mind. The unusual reference to ‘closing the doors of my womb’ (סגר דלתי בטני‎) may again be a double entendre, referring both to night’s failure to prevent the intercourse by which Job was conceived and to day’s subsequently allowing Job to be born. Both are held responsible for the bitterness of Job’s life; both stand under his curse.

2. Job and Jeremiah

Few texts rival the intensity of the spiritual struggle found in Job’s curses against day and night. The power of Job’s lament is particularly evident when it is set in contrast to the similar curse found in Jer. 20.14-18. ²⁷ As the conclusion to a bitter complaint over his prophetic call, Jeremiah laments,

Cursed be the day

 on which I was born!

The day that my mother bore me,

 let it not be blessed!

Cursed be the man who brought news

 to my father, saying:

‘To you is born a son, a male’,

 making him rejoice greatly.

Let that man be like the cities

 that YHWH overthrew and did not relent.

Let him hear a cry in the morning

 and an alarm at noontime.

Because he did not kill me in the womb,

 so that my mother would have been my grave,

 and her womb be pregnant forever.

Why did I come out from the womb

 only to see toil and grief,

 and pass my days in shame?

One cannot help but be moved by the terrible inner turmoil Jeremiah expresses. The opening lines of his lament in v. 7, ‘YHWH, you seduced me, and I was seduced. / You overpowered me and prevailed’, form one of the most jarring accusations in all of the Bible. Yet, Jeremiah’s curse upon the day of his birth at the end of the lament does not resonate with the same power and passion as does Job’s. ²⁸ The key difference between these two laments, and the feature that lends Job’s lament its uniquely vivid expressiveness, is Job’s dramatic use of personification.

While Jeremiah begins his invective with a curse upon the day on which he was born, he quickly redirects his ire toward a man, the man who brought news of his birth to his father, a man whom he wishes had killed him in the womb instead of announcing his birth. ²⁹ But Jeremiah’s accursed birthday is just that, the day on which he happened to be born. Job does not speak of day and night in this fashion. Job’s day and night are not mere intervals of time. They are living entities who can not only be cursed, but who can speak, rejoice, hope, see, and act. Job’s Day is treated not as an object, but as a being whom he wishes would perish, an entity he wishes darkness would terrify. Job’s Night is omniscient, knowing and proclaiming even the success of his conception. It is a Night that hopes for the light of morning but would be denied that hope by Job’s curses. Greenstein makes the keen observation that Job’s lament replaces the individuals who attend Jeremiah’s birth (mother, father, messenger) with impersonal substitutes: knees, womb, breasts. ³⁰ We may add to this that it is the dramatically personified Day and Night who instead receive Job’s attention.

Through its vivid use of personification, the power of Job’s lament has been dramatically heightened, evoking an intimacy and intensity that Jeremiah’s curse lacks. But if Jeremiah’s curse on the day of his birth is less evocative than Job’s, there is also a sense in which Job’s personification of day and night seems almost too dramatic. Night and day are treated by Job with a hostility so intensely personal that they threaten to break through the bounds of mere personification. Here, we must consider the possibility that it is not Job’s personification that has brought day and night to life but rather that his lament has brought into its orbit elements that were alive already.

3. Day and night personified as deities

In the mythologies of Israel’s ancient neighbors, day and night were often personified as deities in their own right. In Greece, for example, though Day and Night did not play major roles in the culture’s mythology and were not venerated by any particular cult, their divine origins were significant enough to be recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 bce). There, goddess Nyx (Night) gives birth to goddess Hemera (Day), and these two greet one another as they pass the great bronze threshold to Tartarus, one going down into the house while the other comes out at the door (Theog. lines 744-757). The appearance of these two in the Theogony is particularly important given the substantial influence of Near Eastern precedents M.L. West and others have demonstrated in Hesiod’s work. ³¹

Day is also treated as a deity in the Greek myth of Phaethon’s ill-fated attempt to guide Phoebus’s chariot. In Ovid’s retelling of the story, ³² when Phaeton travels to the palace of the Sun to visit his father, an array of minor deities surrounds Phoebus:

Clad in a purple robe, Phoebus sat on his throne gleaming with brilliant emeralds. To right and left stood Day and Month and Year and Century, and the Hours set at equal distances. Young Spring was there, wreathed with a floral crown; Summer, all unclad with garland of ripe grain; Autumn was there, stained with the trodden grape, and icy Winter with white and bristly locks. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.23-30 [Miller, LCL])

Important for our purposes is the fact that Hemera, Day, is here counted among the gods.

Moving closer to Israel, Day and Night were also regularly accorded divine status in Mesopotamia and the Levant. The origins of this mythological construct reach deep into the region’s history. W.G. Lambert, for example, identifies a Sumerian exorcism text (PBS I/2 115 obv. I 13-14) in which day and other divisions of time are invoked to drive off malevolent forces: ³³

zi ud sakar-ud mu-a ḫé (niš u ₄ -mu ár-ḫu u šat-ti)

Be (exorcised) by day, month, and year!

Thorkild Jacobsen notes a similar personification of day and, in this case, night in a late third-millennium Sumerian composition in which a mother mourns for her fallen son Tammuz (here called Damu): ³⁴

I am the mother who gave birth!

Woe to that day, that day! Woe to that night!

…

The day that dawned for my provider,

that dawned for the lad, my Damu!

A day to be wiped out

that I would I could forget,

You night […] that should [never]

have let it go forth.

…

The lad! Woe!

the day destroyed him

lost me a son!

In language quite like that found in Job 3, Day and Night are cursed for letting the son fall and indeed are blamed directly for his death: ‘The Day destroyed him, lost me a son!’

Jacobsen notes an additional example in a lamentation over the destruction of the town of Ur from ca. 2000 bce. Here, though the destruction of the city was accomplished by a hostile army, the mourner blames the defeat on a ‘day of storm’ sent by the gods:

O father Nanna—may that day of storm not alight amidst your city.

May that day of storm be destroyed, all of it.

May, as with the great city gates at night, the doors be barred against it!

May that day of storm not be put into the rosters,

May its accounts be taken down from the peg in Enlil’s temple.

Again, the mourner’s treatment of the ‘day of storm’ as a character holding a place in a roster, ready to carry out the divine will, is quite similar to Job’s language (Job 3.6). ³⁵

This pattern of personifying day and night continues across a wide variety of genres in Akkadian literature. In the Old Babylonian version of Atrahasis (ca. 1635 bce), the mother goddess, Mami, mourns the death of humanity and her own complicity in the decision to send the flood:

The goddess looked and wept,

The midwife of the gods, wise Mami,

’Let that day be dark!

Let it return to gloom!

I, in the assembly of the gods,

How could I decree destruction along with them?’

  (OB Atrahasis III.iii 32-37 [my translation]) ³⁶

Mami’s wish that the day might ‘be dark’ and ‘return to gloom’ is, like Job’s call in Job 3.4-5, an attempt to have the day recede back into the darkness from which it emerged. It is a wish that the day of destruction might never have become a day at all.

The adaptation of the Atrahasis flood story preserved in the Neo-Assyrian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh offers a similar lament: ³⁷

Bēlet-ilī, sweet of voice, wailed:

’O that that Day had turned to clay,

because I spoke evil in the assembly of the gods!

How could I have spoken evil in the assembly of the gods?

How could I order an attack to destroy my people?’

  (Gilgamesh XI.118-122 [my translation])

Here, Day is treated as a living thing, a being against whom Bēlet-ilī can utter her maledictions. Accentuating the personification of Day is the poet’s clever turn of phrase, ‘turn to clay’, a phrase regularly used as an expression for the death of humans and their inevitable return to the dust from which they came. ³⁸ Bēlet-ilī‘s wish is that thet day of humanity’s death might experience the very death that day had inflicted on humanity. ³⁹

In these mythological texts, day is admittedly more personified than deified. Elsewhere, the treatment of day and night as divine figures is more readily apparent. Lambert, for example, notes a Late Babylonian hymn in which day and other ‘calendrical elements’ are included alongside various deities called upon to bless Marduk: ⁴⁰

Shamash, bless Marduk. Enlil, bless the lord of Esagil. (obv. l. 5)

Day, month, and year, […] (obv. l. 8)

Day, month, and year, bless Bel. (obv. l. 10)

  (BM 68593 [82-9-18, 8592])

The early first-millennium Maqlû series provides a similar example. In the first tablet of the series, the patient, aided by the exorcist, cries out,

I call upon you, O gods of the night,

To you I called, O Night, O bride veiled.

I called the evening watch and the midnight watch and the dawn

because a witch cast a spell on me.

  (Maqlû I, 2 [my translation]) ⁴¹

Here, Night and the gods of the night blend seamlessly together as the patient asks for protection from the evil influences of the witch he believes has afflicted him.

As we move from Babylonia to the Late Bronze Age materials from Ugarit (ca. 1550-1200 bce), the evidence for the treatment of day and night as deities grows even stronger. In a trilingual god-list from Ugarit (Ug V No. 137 IVa:17), Day appears as the equivalent of Shamash with the syllabic ya-mu standing parallel to the ^dU₄ sign representing Utu/Shamash. ⁴² Bob Becking finds additional support for the identification of these two at Ugarit in a text from the Baal Epic (KTU 1.4 vii:53-56). Here, Baal proclaims,

Look, Gupanu-and-Ugaru!

The sons of darkness obscure Day (ym),

The sons of deep darkness, the Exalted Princess (rmt prʿt).

Becking argues the epithet rmt prʿt, ‘Exalted Princess’, which parallels ym in the preceding line, suggests ym is to be understood as a reference to the sun goddess, Shapshu. ⁴³

Elsewhere, Wilfred Watson has argued that the well-known goddess from Ugaritic literature, Athirat, should also be connected with Day and not, as is usually thought, with the Sea. ⁴⁴ Watson argues that the name Athirat is derived from a root *aṯr, cognate to the Akkadian ašāru, meaning ‘to muster, organize, check, control’ (CAD A/2, 420b-422a). He thus renders the epithet aṯrt ym not as ‘Athirat of the sea’ but ‘She who determines the Day’. ⁴⁵ While she does not follow Watson in the etymology he posits for aṯrt, Tilde Binger does argue in favor of understanding Asherah/Athirat as a goddess associated with Day rather than the Sea. ⁴⁶ Binger notes that although Athirat’s connection with the sea is regularly assumed, it is actually based on quite slender evidence. ⁴⁷ She finds more compelling the various indications that Athirat may have been loosely connected with the sun goddess, Shapshu. Among the pieces of evidence she cites in favor of such a connection is the theogonic text, KTU 1.23. In this text, translated here by Mark Smith, El’s seduction of either one or a pair of goddesses is vividly described:

He bends down, kisses their lips,

See how sweet their lips are,

Sweet as pomegranates.

As he kisses, there’s conception,

As he embraces, there’s passion.

  (lines 49b-51a) ⁴⁸

While these lines do not specify the exact identities of the goddess(es), the preceding context suggests they may be Athirat and Shapshu. Lines 24-25 describe the offspring of El’s conquest as those ‘who suck the nipple of Athirat’s breast / Shapshu braids their branches’. ⁴⁹ Although the end of line 24 contains a lacuna that renders the precise meaning of the text uncertain, the apparent parallel between Athirat and Shapshu suggests some connection between the two. The offspring produced by this union are the well-known gods of dawn and dusk, Shaḫar (Dawn) and Shalim (Dusk):

The two crouch and give birth to Dawn and Dusk.

Word to El was brought:

El’s two wives have given birth.

What have they born?

A newborn pair, Dawn and Dusk.

  (lines 51b-53)

The link between Dawn and Dusk and a Day/Sun goddess would be a natural one and finds further support in the fact that elsewhere in the text (lines 58b-59a) these two are actually described as bn ym, an epithet that is as readily understood as ‘sons of Day’ as ‘sons of the Sea’. ⁵⁰

Two final examples of the deification of day and night—both in Aramaic, though widely separated in provenance—may be noted. The first is found in the Bar-Ga’yah treaty from Sefire (KAI 222 A:12), which dates to the 8th century bce. Here, Day and Night conclude a list of paired deities serving as witnesses to the treaty. These are included along with the other gods who are enjoined:

All the gods of KTK and the gods of Arpad, Open your eyes to see the treaty of Bar-ga’yah with Mati’el king of Arpad! ⁵¹

The second example is found in a Mandaic magical text analyzed by Christa Müller-Kessler (BM 125794 II). ⁵² In this text, ‘days and daytimes’ (11.33-34, ywmy’ wywm‘my’) and ‘nights’ (1. 36, lyly<w>‘t’) are counted among various demons to be warded off. The Mandaic incantation bowls obviously date to a much later period than the other materials considered here (the 3rd to 7th centuries ce). The continued presence of day and night as personified supernatural powers in these late materials attests, however, to the extraordinary longevity of this mythological construct. From third-millennium bce Sumerian laments to first-millennium ce Aramaic incantations, from Greece to Mesopotamia and the Levant, day and night regularly appear in personified form as deities or as the emissaries used by these deities to enact their divine decrees.

While not as prominent as the more visible deities of sun and moon, it is clear that day and night were nevertheless accorded a role alongside the gods in the mythologies of Israel’s ancient neighbors. It is this rich mythological background that serves as a backdrop for the dramatic personification found in Job’s curses against day and night. Job’s treatment of day and night falls short of regarding them as actual deities or demonic forces. By the time they appear in Job, day and night have already been largely demythologized and naturalized. But they are naturalized with the baggage of their mythological past in tow, making them ripe for use in Job’s lament.

4. Personification and mythology

Job’s treatment of night and day reveals an important nexus between personification and mythology. It is in this fertile ‘middle ground’ that some of the Tanakh’s most powerful imagery emerges. The vivid theophany in Habakkuk 3 parallels Job 3 in its combination of personification and mythology. Describing the Deity’s awe-inspiring procession, the prophet declares in v. 5: לפניו ילך דבר ויצא רשׁף לרגליו‎, ‘Before him went pestilence/dever, and plague/resheph went out at his heels’. Among Israel’s neighbors, Resheph and Dever were regarded as demons who unleashed their dread assaults upon humanity. ⁵³ While Habakkuk appears to use these terms to describe pestilence and plague and not the demons Dever and Resheph per se, the demonic background of these characters reverberates prominently in the text. These natural phenomena have been revivified, re-personified as entities who follow in God’s train, wreaking havoc upon his enemies.

Habakkuk’s language suggests the demonic significance of Dever and Resheph must still have been well known to his audience. In this regard, the prophet’s allusion to these mythologically potent entities is subject to the same dynamics as any other sort of literary allusion. In an allusion, the author of one text activates another by imitating features of its language, plot, setting, or structure. For an allusion to be successful, two conditions must be met: first, the signals used by the allusive author must be sufficiently strong to be perceived by that author’s audience; second, the audience must be cognizant of the secondary reference to which the author’s signals point. In the present text in Habakkuk, the allusive signal—the combination of both dever and resheph and the use of additional mythological tropes in the verses that follow—is particularly strong. It follows that the prophet would have used these heightening elements because he knew his audience would understand the import of their background. ⁵⁴

Habakkuk’s mythological language continues in v. 8 as he describes God in language familiar from Ugarit as a driver of chariot and horse against Neharim and Yam, the rivers and the sea. ⁵⁵ The prophet then returns to personification in vv. 9b-11:

With rivers you split the earth;

 the mountains saw you and writhed.

A torrent of water swept by.

 The deep gave forth its voice,

The sun raised high its hands;

 the moon stood still in its lofty abode.

It is the combination of mythological language and personification that adds to the intensity of Habakkuk’s theophanic description. The lingering echoes of the living entities Resheph, Dever, Yam, and Nahar give added life to the personified mountains, deep, sun, and moon. These were echoes which must still have resonated among the prophet’s audience, even if these specific entities were no longer accorded fully divine status in Israel.

Psalm 77.17-21 offers a similar example. Here, the psalmist’s description of the exodus is dramatically heightened through his blending of personification and mythological language:

The waters saw you, O God;

 the waters saw you and writhed.

 Indeed, the deeps trembled.

Clouds poured forth waters;

 the skies gave forth their voice.

Indeed, your arrows flew about.

The sound of your thunder was in the whirlwind; ⁵⁶

 lightnings lit up the world.

 The land trembled and convulsed.

Your way was through the sea,

 and your path was through the mighty waters,

 and your footprints were unknown.

You led your people like a flock,

 by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

The mythological language of the storm god captured in the images of thunder and lightning, whirlwind and arrows, is coupled with the language of personification: waters see and are afraid, deep trembles, earth trembles and shakes. The effect of this combination is to transform the exodus into an event of cosmic proportions.

5. Personification and mythology in Job

In these and in other examples beyond the scope of this study, mythological elements, once domesticated, have been reenergized with mythological force through personification. It is this phenomenon that we find at work in the curses of Job 3. Here, in the meeting ground between mythology and personification, Job breathes new life into day and night. Day and night are not treated in Job 3 as actual deities, and their ordinarily benevolent character suggests they were not regarded as demonic, at least not in this context. ⁵⁷ Job’s day and night appear to be just that, the night of his conception and the day of his birth. But their vivid personification taps into a reservoir of mythological language that gives added force to Job’s curses. In the hands of Job, and with the lingering background of their appearance as deities among Israel’s neighbors, day and night are once again alive.

Job’s treatment of day and night raises questions about the line between personification and mythology elsewhere in the book. While the book of Job makes ample use of figures with strong mythological connections, it is interesting to note how rarely these figures appear in unreservedly mythological forms. In his consideration of the sea, Job does ask, ‘Am I the sea or the dragon that you set a guard over me?’ (7.12). He despairs of ever challenging God, noting that even ‘the helpers of Rahab bowed beneath him’ (9.13), and elsewhere, he declares,

By his power he stilled ⁵⁸ the Sea;

 by his understanding he struck down Rahab.

By his wind the heavens were made fair;

 his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. (Job 26.12-13)

Even here, though, there are examples which are better described as personification than mythological language. When God interrogates Job, he demands,

Who shut in the sea with doors,

 when bursting out of the womb, it went forth?

When I made a cloud for its clothing,

 and deep darkness its swaddling bands?

And prescribed for it my boundaries,

 and set bars and doors.

And said, ‘Thus far you may come and no farther,

 and here shall your proud waves stop’. (Job 38.8-11)

In this passage, which bears strong intertextual links with Job 3, the sea is depicted in a way that does not fit the mythologies of ancient Israel or her neighbors. ⁵⁹ Here, the sea is personified as an unruly child, not as an enemy to be defeated in a primordial Chaoskampf.

Another example is found in ch. 28, when Job asks concerning wisdom:

But as for wisdom, where shall it be found?

 and where is the place of understanding?

No human knows its worth.

 and it is not found in the land of the living.

The deep says, ‘It is not in me’,

 and the sea says, ‘It is not with me’. (Job 28.12-14)

Once again, this is the language of personification, albeit personification made more vivid by the mythological background of the sea and its waters.

A similar situation obtains in the book’s description of the terrors, fears, and winds that wreak such havoc in the book. Although the poetic heart of the book does not treat Job’s suffering as the result of demonic attack, the various terrors and fears that assail Job are personified, though, and sometimes dramatically so. ⁶⁰ In ch. 27, Job describes the fate of the wicked:

Terrors overtake him like a flood;

 in the night a stormwind steals him away.

 and it sweeps him from his place.

It hurls against him and does not pity;

 he would indeed flee from his hand.

It claps its hands at him,

 and hisses at him from its place. (Job 27.20-23)

Bildad suggests a similar fate in ch. 18:

All around, terrors frighten him,

 and drive him to his feet.

Disaster becomes hungry for him, ⁶¹

 and calamity waits for him to stumble.

By disease his skin is devoured, ⁶²

 the firstborn of Death consumes his limbs.

His confidence is torn away from his tent,

 and is marched off to the king of terrors. (Job 18.11-15)

These personifications of the terrors that attack the wicked are made more bold by the mythological echoes they carry with them.

The wedding of personification and mythological language in Job may also shed light on the vexing Behemoth and Leviathan introduced as the climax of the divine speeches in chs. 38-41. Even among those of us who fail to find in this pair dinosaurian survivors from an antediluvian age, it is difficult to draw a firm conclusion as to just which creatures the book intends to describe. If these beasts are straightforwardly mythological, why are they described in such naturalistic terms? The Behemoth is said to get its food from the mountains where the wild animals play (40.20). It lies under lotus plants in the covert of the reeds and marsh (40.21). It lives in a wadi with a river rushing past it, perhaps even the Jordan itself (40.22-23). It can be assaulted, though apparently not successfully, with hooks and snares (40.24). The Leviathan is similar. The gods may be terrified at the sight of it, but the sight of it remains a possibility (41.1). It stirs up the sea, leaving the white foams of its wake behind it (41.23-24). Its armored back with its impenetrable scales can be described (41.7-8, 15). And though to do so might be folly, it can apparently be hunted with fishhook, rope, harpoon, and spear (40.25-26, 31).

It is no wonder that scholars have been divided over the identification of these beasts as natural creatures or mythical monsters. The example of Job 3 may suggest that they are both. Job’s Day and Night left their lofty perches to become mere intervals of time in Israel. Through Job’s curses, though, they are revivified, re-personified, and wrapped again in mythological language. Job’s Behemoth and Leviathan appear to have done the same. Drawing on an ample store of mythological language, Job personifies, deifies, and re-mythologizes natural beasts, perhaps hippopotamus or whale and crocodile, turning them into something far more evocative than their natural forms would suggest. Again, for the resurrection of these figures to have taken place, the mythologically potent status of the monstrous entities must still have rested within living memory for the book’s audience. What Job has done is to take these ‘living memories’ and use them as a means of dramatically heightening his own poetic language. ⁶³

6. Conclusion

Returning to Job 3 and the moving lament that lies at the heart of this study, it seems clear that Job has made dramatic use of personification to raise his complaint beyond the bounds of an ordinary curse. Drawing upon Day and Night’s mythological forebears, he has set his curse on a cosmic level: Job would throw creation itself into disarray to find relief from the injustice that has befallen him. And yet, it is not this cosmic component that gives Job’s lament such enduring resonance. It is the persistent cry of a very human soul that sounds its most powerful note of desperation:

Why did I not die from the womb,

 come forth from the belly and perish?

Why did knees receive me?

 Why breasts that I should suck?

For now I would be lying down and quiet.

 I would be asleep; then there would be rest for me.

Why is light given to one who is miserable

 and life to the bitter in soul?

Who long for death but do not find it?

 and dig for it more than for hidden treasures?

Who rejoice to exultation,

 and are glad when they find the grave. (Job 3.11-13, 20-22)