a5194769e8 He is no longer primarily a rich man bereft of his possessions and heartbroken over his dead children (they are mentioned only once in the poem). God will not hear Job, but Job will see God. In a wonderfully ironic sense, the Accusers dirty work has resulted in an epidemic of accusations. Finally, the vast, unnamable God appears. He suffers not only his own personal pain, but the pain of all the poor and despised. It tells the story of a righteous man beset by torment and misfortune through no fault of his own. (We may recall another great sufferer, Oedipus at Colonus, whose chorus offers something very similar to Jobs death-wish as its wisdom: It is best never to have been born; next best is to leave the womb and die immediately.) In his curse, Job allies himself with the primal forces of darkness and chaos, and with the archetypal symbol of evil, the Serpent Leviathan, whom we will meet again at the poems conclusion. Therefore Job is guilty. It is as if, once Job has learned to surrender, his world too gives up the male compulsion to control. Even if the friends are right about Gods justice, their timing is bad.
With Homer, at least, we can picture a society of competing principalities, each with its warriors and court and ceremonial feasts where the bard recites his ancient songs to the accompaniment of the lyre, like blind Demodocus in the Odyssey. Audiobooks Were Restored to Your Cart [ShoppingCartItemsAddedOnMerge] audiobook(s) were left in your cart from a previous visit, and saved to your account for your convenience. The Voice now, in a series of gruff, most ironical questions, begins to speak explicitly about good and evil. We need to penetrate more deeply. Jobs own voice has freed him so that he can move from the curses of his first speech to the final self-affirmation as his own attorney for the defense. It is a Gods-eye view of creation before man, beyond good and evil, marked by the innocence of a mind that has stepped outside the circle of human values. (When I was a very young Zen student, caught up in the problem of evil, I once asked my teacher, Why does shit smell so bad? He said, If you were a fly, it would taste like candy.). He will have to struggle with it until he is exhausted, like a child crying itself to sleep. He must enter the whirlwind of his own psychic chaos before he can hear the Voice.
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