Job

Susan W. Murphy

I read a journal or a book on Job in Logos about 4 years ago.  It was tremendous.  I wish I had written down the name of this journal or book.  It was explaining the use of hyperboles, metaphors, similes, etc. in Job and was the best article I've ever read.  How would I do a search on finding this article, book, journal, whatever?  I would just love to find this.  It covered the entire book of Job.  

Thanks,

Susan Murphy

James Taylor

found this as a possibility...

Wisdom in Revolt: Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job (JSOT Supplement 112, Bible & Literature Series 29)

Here's a review...

Recent publications on the Book of Job testify to its enduring ability to stimulate an enriching variety of scholarly studies, and this volume is no exception. Perdue’s approach is based on the premise of metaphorical theology that all religious language shares certain fundamental metaphors which seek to describe the infinite in terminology drawn from human experience. The book is divided into three parts. The first explores the theology of wisdom literature, the metaphorical process, and those metaphors of cosmology and anthropology and their mythic paradigms that inform this analysis of Job. The second and largest part closely pursues these metaphors and mythic paradigms through the entire Book of Job, including the poem on Wisdom (chap. 28) and the Elihu speeches (chaps. 32–37), which are dealt with in the short third and concluding section.
Job is assigned to the wisdom tradition, a tradition, Perdue indicates, whose theological basis was creation and which provided the sages with a language, i.e., powerful words, to construct and maintain the mythic world in which they existed and found meaning. This use of speech, to empower or to disturb, is one of the chief factors in Perdue’s unravelling of Job’s meaning. Four ways of interpreting the theology of wisdom are identified and evaluated: anthropology, theodicy, cosmology, and a blend of cosmology and anthropology. The latter is selected as most completely encompassing the diverse aspects of creation theology. Though Job is about theodicy, his personal crisis is viewed as a microcosm of the cosmic struggle against chaos.
The investigation is grounded on metaphors of cosmology and anthropology. The metaphorical process applied is one in which the absurdity inherent in any metaphor destabilizes language, destroying literality, thus attracting attention and opening the way through mimesis to a transformation and restabilization in which new meaning is created. The extended metaphors of religious language produce specific genres, such as myth, which was the main vehicle for conceptions of reality in Israel, as elsewhere in the Ancient Near East. The mythic paradigms proposed are those of cosmology, creation by conflict (Enuma Elish), with its metaphors of fertility, artistry, work and struggle, and anthropology, where humans are envisaged as slaves in revolt against the gods (Athra-Hasis) under the metaphors of ruler and slave.
Metaphorical theology, though only briefly examined, is set within the broader context of the meaning and function of religious language. However, though Perdue displays a command of Ancient Near Eastern mythological sources, there is no corresponding discussion of myth that is typically isolated in the “biblical” world and narrowly defined. Indeed, there is some unclarity as to whether myth gives rise to metaphor of vice versa.
The second part opens with a short chapter in which issues of date, form, and literary integrity are conventionally disposed of: the prose narrative is dated to the monarchy, the dialogues to the Exile, and the Wisdom Poem (chap. 28) and the Elihu speeches assigned to the post-exilic period. The form is that of a sapiential, didactic narrative with elements of lament and disputation. In terms of literary integrity, the book is the product of several redactions, but not therefore disjointed as even the post-exilic additions are enunciations of the language of faith.
From the succeeding three cycles of speeches, Perdue selects and examines key passages where Job’s three friends uphold, with increasing acerbity and rigidity, the stock understanding of the metaphors of cosmology and anthropology which Job’s speech, in turn, deconstructs and destabilizes. Perdue’s modus operandi may be illustrated conveniently from the first cycle in Job’s opening speech and Eliphaz’s response. In his initial lament (chap. 3) over the birth which doomed him to the lot of a persecuted slave, Job destabilizes the received metaphors in the myths of origin and maintenance. His words deconstruct creation by word-reversing the pattern of Genesis 1. Fertility is destabilized by being demonstrated as leading to death and not to life, and the Divine Warrior who battles with the chaos monster has been perverted into one who has unleashed his fury on a human qua monster, so traditional meaning has collapsed. Eliphaz’s response, according to Perdue, though it tries to rehabilitate the orthodox understanding of the metaphors of creation and ruler, is actually metaphor that has hardened to dogma, petrifying language and demanding assent rather the fostering a restructuring of faith. This pattern of destabilization and attempted restabilization is repeated as Job moves from a human slave abused by a demonic creator to the primal hero who challenges the justice and rule of God.
For Perdue, Job 3, with its destabiliztion of metaphor and shattering of the hero’s faith, lays the ground for the revolt against the creator. By the end of the first cycle (chap. 11), a complete bouleversement of the cosmos has occurred, which shocks the implied audience into recognition. The second and third cycles continue this process as Job becomes convinced of the utter malevolence of God and finds that he has no choice but to rebel—a process that climaxes in the final summons to God, to whom he presents himself, not as abject slave but as the primeval king who would wrest creation’s rule from a thoroughly corrupt divinity.
The speeches of God and Job’s laconic responses have provoked much debate. Perdue lists eight major interpretations of the divine speeches and argues that the failure to reach any general consensus is because the metaphorical language in the speeches and the mythological traditions from which it derives are not taken seriously. He believes that those speeches rehabilitate the Divine Warrior who holds the forces of chaos in check in an ongoing conflict. The speeches create an elegant and ordered cosmos which, nevertheless, includes features alien and inimical to human life. Despite the insights of metaphorical theology, Perdue’s interpretation of these speeches is less novel than eclectic, combining some of the more positive aspects of previous ones.
Job’s first response, one of silence, is construed as an inability or even an unwillingness to shape a new discourse of faith; his “deconstruction has been disintegrated” (p. 218). His cryptic second reply is understood as one in which Job rejects the content of his lamentation, but does not regret that he engaged in it, for it elicited God’s rejoinder and opened the way to judgment and further instruction. God’s final judgement is made on the basis of language, that Job alone has spoken correctly about God as he took issue with the friends’ retributive theology and cramping dogma.
Along with the favorable verdict, Job is the recipient of substantial damages. Perdue states, in one paragraph, that not only is Job vindicated but God himself is redeemed by his fair ruling and material compensation. In contrast to what has gone before, this brevity is curiously unsatisfying. For example, the specter of dualism is raised by contrasting the “demonic” God of the prologue with the redeemed and beneficent despot of the epilogue—raised but not exorcised. He seems untroubled by the crass materialism of the “happy ending” (p. 240), though in his closing summary he allows that questions remain unanswered and the quest to speak correctly about God, one assumes metaphorically, must go on in a series of collapsing and reassembling metaphors.
The strength of this book lies in its application of metaphorical theology which allows perennial issues in the interpretation of Job to be seen through a new lens. It is well crafted and unites sound learning and emotive potency. Perdue demonstrates how Job is steeped in the rich mythological tradition of the entire Ancient Near East and how it is tied to other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. The identification and investigation of the two mythic patterns of cosmology and anthropology as they permeate and unify the book are especially helpful.

Burns, J. B. (1992). Review of Wisdom in Revolt. Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job by Perdue, Leo G. Critical Review of Books in Religion, 160–162.