When dealing with a passage from the Bible, one encounters another set of layers or voices in this dialogue, for the Canon itself is a reception of previous utterances. The book of Job preceded the Canon and perhaps the dialogues of the book of Job preceded the book of Job. The receptions of Job encountered in this thesis complicate the dialogue even further since they treat the book of Job as an utterance in the larger biblical Canon rather than an utterance that stands on its own.
63 See again, for instance, Stephen J. Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World.; and Stephen J. Vicchio, Job in the
Modern World. There is very little room in these surveys of Job in the history of interpretation for analysis or engagement with the texts.
64 For a potential example of passive acceptance (or perhaps more likely, a clever avoidance of conflict with
authorities), note the final line in the prologue to Thomas Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job. In discussing his goal of expounding the literal sense of Job rather than a spiritual or mystical sense, he writes, “Blessed Pope Gregory has already disclosed to us its mysteries so subtly and clearly that there seems no need to add anything further to them” (Martin D. Yaffe, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Literal Exposition on Job By Thomas Aquinas, The American Academy of Religion Classics in Religious Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 69.)
Consider Kierkegaard, Vischer, and Barth’s interpretations in comparison to Kant’s. One major difference between Kant’s interpretation of Job and the three interpreters that lie at the centre of this project, besides the obviously huge difference in length, is his view of the Bible. Kant certainly did not hold the Scripture in as high regard as the others. More importantly, however, is the fact that he fails to mention any other biblical texts in his discourse on Job as both Barth and Vischer do. Kierkegaard also appears not to raise other texts during his discourse on Job in Repetition, but as I shall argue, his publishing Fear and Trembling on the same day as Repetition (but under a different pseudonym) shows he sees the need to read those two texts in proximity—two texts which include lengthy exegeses of the Akadah and Job. Kierkegaard also elsewhere waxes about the authority of all texts in the Canon, so we need not belabor the point.
We will, in their respective chapters, give each interpreter their due. In these early stages, however, it behoves us to generalise Kierkegaard, Barth, and Vischer as exegetes who hold the biblical Canon in a higher authority than many other scholars of their eras. All three recognise the importance of historical criticism and do not often begrudge those who practice the more wissenschaftlich aspects of biblical studies. However, the results of those studies make up only minor portions of their own exegesis and certainly do not satisfy them as the ends of biblical study.
Of course, their attitudes toward the scriptures, though idiosyncratic in some respects, reflect the norm over the course of the history of biblical interpretation. Most exegetes utilise some manifestation of theological exegesis and generally treat the Bible as a whole rather than a mere anthology of disparate texts. However, I do not want to take this for granted. In the current epoch, the norm in academia still finds much to scorn with theological exegesis, Canonical approaches to exegesis, as well as the reception history of biblical texts. In the following section, I continue to lay the hermeneutical groundwork for approaching the
book of Job in these respects, continuing to use Bakhtin as an aid in the undergirding.
Kierkegaard, Vischer, and Barth are not grand proponents of the reception history of biblical texts for exegesis, but they do approach texts theologically and with attention to the Canon. Bakhtin’s theories, which help defend the use of reception history also aid in defence of proto-Canonical approaches—especially his theories of the utterance versus the sentence.
The Utterance versus the Sentence
In some of Bakhtin’s later essays he incorporates his earlier misgivings about Kant’s desire for objective analysis in ethics illustrated in his tract “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” into his more mature work on literary theory. Bakhtin expresses a frustration towards modern linguistic analysis because it focuses too much on the objective data found in the sentence.
His problems with the sentence, best exemplified in his essay “The Problem of Speech Genres” are that these basic units of communication lack much of the intangible information that makes up a dialogue. To begin to rectify the problem of the abstract and objective data that cannot take into account aspects of genre like irony, Bakhtin proposes using the “utterance” as a unit of speech instead.
One cannot measure an utterance in the same way as one measures a sentence.65 While a sentence generally consists of a subject and a predicate, an utterance can consist of any number of combinations of words. Indeed, an utterance need not consist of any words at all, for a grunt can communicate more than a long string of words in certain contexts. One very telling difference between an utterance and a sentence is that a sentence is repeatable while an utterance is not. The same sentence in different contexts makes for different
65 Even the sentence, however, confounds. Many linguists have argued how one determines the limits of the
utterances. Despite being verbally identical, two utterances actually carry different contextual meanings while the sentences carry the same abstract meaning.66 To show the significance of this for a biblical passage, let us see how one might view a single verse from Job as multiple utterances when it is repeated in different contexts. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes,” says Job in 3:26 concluding his first speech.67 The verse as recorded in the Leningrad Codex expresses anguish in typical Hebrew parallelism. As a sentence, one has much to explore. Three parallel clauses—a negation followed by a first person singular Qalqatal intransitive verb—give way to a fourth clause with a third person positive transitive verb that rhymes with the previously thrice repeated negation lo´ and an abstract subject.
However much the sentence expresses, it does not explain much without viewing it in its larger context. The entire utterance takes up the entire chapter where the reader gets more of a sense of what has led to this finale of misery. But even in the context of chapter 3 Job’s specific misfortunes remain a mystery. Some scholars devoted to the Wissenschaft of the text might resist seeing chapter 3 in the context of the whole book of Job. There are many reasons to believe that the prologue to Job and the dialogues do not share the same author or era of production. In this context, the dialogues of Job and his friends remain mute regarding the cause of Job’s exasperation. On the other hand, the larger context in which chapter 3 falls can include the first two chapters which lay out the cause of Job’s suffering, both the heavenly motivation and the physical stripping away of Job’s family, possessions, and health. If the sentence that concludes chapter 3 has these first two chapters as its context, the grammar of 3:26 does not change but the utterance does.
66 Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 126-27. 67 זגראביויתחנ־אלויתטקשאלויתולשאל
This generates little controversy. However, Barth and Vischer in particular, read the book of Job not merely as a whole utterance, but also in the context of the biblical Canon. In this case, Job 3:26 not only gains specificity from its proximity to Job 1-2 but also ironically foreshadows Christ’s resurrection after Jesus experiences a similar turmoil to Job during his incarnation and passion.
Viewing the utterance in this larger context does not negate the validity of the more grammatical-critical reading; it merely points to the importance of the subjectivity of the individual reader. One who accepts the Christian Canon as a single secondary genre made up of multiple primary genres like Job chapter 3 will react differently to Job 3:26 than someone who views all utterances in the Bible as singular and disparate.68 The final form of the book of Job (if one can even use such a phrase, considering the unfinalizability of any utterance in the hermeneutic of Bakhtin) is less a product of an author, or even a redactor, as it is an occurrence in the course of an ongoing dialogue.
What Bakhtin’s musings on great time imply and what he discusses more explicitly in his essay on speech genres is the dialogical nature of all utterances. Each utterance responds to a previously uttered statement and also anticipates future responses.69 Bakhtin writes, “each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.”70 Noting that Job does not appear as if from nowhere, we must acknowledge that it enters great time in response to previous utterances. These previous utterances may include the work of the Deuteronomist or the sage
68 Bakhtin discusses the difference between a primary speech genre and a secondary speech genre in Bakhtin,
Speech Genres, 72 ff. In the case of the book of Job, chapter 3 would be a primary genre as would chapters 1-2; the book as a whole would be a secondary genre incorporating multiple primary genres. I am suggesting that the Bible itself can also be a secondary genre made up of many primary genres.
69 Similarly, Ricoeur writes, “My experience cannot directly become your experience. An event belonging to
one stream of consciousness cannot be transferred as such into another stream of consciousness. Yet, nevertheless, something passes from me to you. Something is transferred from one sphere of life to another.” Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 16.
of Proverbs as is often surmised. Bakhtin, however, implies that it anticipates responses as well. This is easy to imagine. Consider the arguments of the friends. They not only express the likely sentiments of many sages within their own tradition, but also lend the potential arguments of other future sages to the argument in order to flesh out the meaning of the book of Job as a whole.
However, despite anticipating the response, it does not obviate response. The dialogue continues. In some ways, we see a response in the New Testament. Though
mention of Job in the New Testament is rare or even debatable, what is not debatable is that the authors of the New Testament and the authors of Job share a literary culture where the themes that arise in both utterances relate to one another in various ways. Perhaps one could think of the authors as attendees at a dinner party sitting on different ends of the table. They may not respond directly to one another, but all those seated around the table assure that the themes of the conversations overlap in some respect. Perhaps they even overhear the other’s words, which influence their own thoughts.
Before moving on, one might note that much of what came above can be buttressed further by some of Kierkegaard’s own ideas that emerge in his book Repetition. Besides containing much of his work on Job, Repetition also introduces the category of repetition. I deal with the category of repetition at length in chapter three, but some things deserve mentioning here in the context of reception history of a biblical text.
Consider first, the word repetition, which has a specialized meaning in the work of Kierkegaard. In its most basic form, repetition suggests taking something that occurred in the past and bringing it into the present. Kierkegaard seems to suggest that it goes into the future as well, but clearly a forward moving focus is implied in some way. When the young man
“repeats” the book of Job in the second half of Repetition, he moves the book of Job into the present.
One might protest the semblance of repetition with Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance. Recall that an utterance is unrepeatable, which seems to fly in the face of the very idea of “repetition.” However, as will become obvious later, some scholars have problems with the translation of the Danish word Gjentagelsen as “repetition” and believe that a better
translation might be “resumption”71 or “retaking”72 since it has more to do with the
existential reality of the interpreter than the text itself. Jolita Pons begins her exploration of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics with a discussion on the use of biblical quotation and the nature of quotation in general. She notes that, apropos to Bakhtin’s theories on the utterance, “a verbally exact quotation that would seem to be a perfect repetition is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether it can keep its integrity in the new context.”73 Clearly, the young man’s interpretation of Job reflects this ambiguity.
Also, what will become more evident when we look more closely at Repetition and the interpretation of Job within the book is that when the young man does appropriate the book of Job into his own life, he does not attempt so much to enter into the mind of Job or the author(s) of the book of Job as he attempts to bring Job into his own mind.
The young man’s goal does in some ways seem to fit Ricoeur’s goal, as mentioned above, of the hermeneut over Bakhtin’s. The young man does not seem to want to locate himself outside the text, but Bakhtin writes of the importance of being located “outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture,” and the young
71 T. H. Croxall, Kierkegaard Commentary (London: James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, 1956), 128-29.
72 Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology From
Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death (Routledge, 1996), 28.
73 Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms and the Bible, Perspectives in Continental
man does remain in his own time, space, and culture as will become evident in chapter three. Notably, once the receiver appropriates the text into his life, in the hermeneutics of
Kierkegaard, the text does not transform, but is the agent of transformation. Iben Damgaard observes that in the upbuilding discourse that discusses Job, which Kierkegaard published the same year as Repetition, the good reader of Job should transform the text into action (and could not interpretation be included under the label action?).74
Perhaps one will argue that Kierkegaard and the young man take things too far. There may be a place for ostensible objective analysis that bypasses the history of the text in great time. However, any analysis of any text from the past will need to take the text out of its own context in order to analyze it. Pons writes:
Quotation introduces an object into circulation. This object might acquire a new value from that which it originally had. Because quotation detaches fragments of text from their respective contexts and attaches them to other contexts, there arises a tension between their independent value and the sense that the quotation might have had in its original context.75
Pons is discussing quotations of text, which may be very brief, but they also may be very long. On the surface there is a difference between a quotation used to defend one’s own opinion, as someone may do with the platitudes Polonius recites to Laertes in Hamlet, and a commentary of a biblical book in the Old Testament Library, but the tension exists in some form in both examples.
Kierkegaard embraces the inevitable. The history of Job interpretation shows how the book’s meaning is dependent at least partially on the context of the interpreter him or
herself. Those who attempt to gain a pure and objective interpretation of the ancient book will be partially hindered by the distance between the interpreter and the context of the
74 Iben Damgaard, “'My Dear Reader' Kierkegaard's Reader and Kierkegaard as a Reader of the Book of Job,”
in Receptions and Transformations of the Bible, ed. Kirsten Nielsen, Religion and Normativity Volume 2 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009), 101.
original text but also he or she will be hindered by the impossibility of escaping one’s own context. The reception history of a biblical text is an important component of the meaning of the text for all the reasons cited above, but it also is important because once a person in the present makes a final claim on the meaning of the text, the present becomes a part of that reception history. The text appropriates each successive attempt at interpretation as it moves through great time.
Inherent in the movement through great time is an assumption of the unity of time itself. Each utterance responds to a previous utterance and so each utterance relates in some way to other utterances in the dialogue. It goes without saying that all utterances in the dialogue are connected. This same theory of utterances’ relation to the unity of time lies behind typological interpretations of biblical texts, for typological interpretation assumes unity in the temporal. The typological imagination of Kierkegaard, Vischer, and Barth in their interpretations of Job follows.