A PLAY FOR VOICES

“If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient? But who can keep from speaking?” (4:2)

All the characters in this book seem impatient to get a word in edgewise, and all are quick to criticize one another for talking too much. From every quarter (including Job’s) the air is thick with charges of “blustering wind” (8:2), “idle talk” (11:3), and “long-winded speeches” (16:3). How true to life it is to see passionate debaters continually brushing off the arguments of their opponents like so much lint from their sleeves, even while stabbing their own fingers into the table and yelling, “Now just listen to this!”

Such lively dramatic detail reminds us that the book of Job consists almost entirely of talk. Talk, talk, talk. The lives of five busy, important men grind to a complete halt, and the bulk of the story takes place in an immense and stultifying stasis in which hardly anything at all actually happens apart from the flapping of jaws. By the end of Chapter 31, when young Elihu appears on the scene with a fresh wind, one has the impression that the four other fellows have literally talked themselves hoarse.

The unusually sustained oral emphasis of Job points to the fact that in its literary form this book is essentially a drama. It is, first and foremost, neither a story nor a history nor an epic poem, but rather a play—not a stage play, to be sure, but a play for voices. If this is true, then it makes this work the only example of drama (or the closest thing to it) in the entire canon of Scripture. Moreover, this in turn may be an important clue suggesting that the book did not arise directly out of Israelite culture (in which a deep-seated taboo against theater prevailed) but rather was a product of the Gentile world. Such a theory would place the book in the curious category of being the only Gentile-authored composition in the Old Testament.

In any case, the intensely verbal character of Job has an enormous impact on the way the reader must approach and interpret this work. For by and large the writing in the Bible addresses its audience directly, whereas the genre of drama, like that of fiction, by its very nature speaks with considerable indirectness and artistic subtlety. Granted, the history books of the Old Testament have a style of narration that tends toward magnificent understatement; often events are related baldly, with very little by way of editorial comment. In the case of bizarre characters such as Balaam or Samson we are left to judge pretty much for ourselves the quality of their godliness and the rightness or wrongness of their actions. In Job, however, this hermeneutic complexity is compounded further still, for apart from some scraps of information in the brief prose sections, and a smattering of stage directions embedded in the text itself, the only standards we have for evaluating these people and their opinions are what they say about themselves and about one another. In the rest of Scripture this is unheard of. For humanity alone to occupy the stage is a mark of secularism. In other parts of the Bible is not God Himself a prominent speaker on nearly every page? But in Job the Lord is ominously silent (at least for the great majority of the book), and for thirty-five chapters the curtain goes up on human speech alone.

This is the trait that places Job in the category of drama, and that makes it impossible to understand this work through a straightforward reading of the words alone. Here is a book that requires uniquely to be read not just as a book, but as a script. Throughout the long Dialogue section we must read between the lines, carefully weighing such theatrical factors as characterization, set, tone of voice, mood, and even gesture or body language. For in drama as in real life, what happens on the surface of conversation, what is actually said, matters little in comparison with the underlying drama of attitudes and actions, the script behind the script. As Job himself puts it, “Does not the ear test words as the tongue tastes food?” (12:11). Ideally this entire book needs to be read aloud, or at least taken in at a single sitting, so as to be grasped whole in a kind of gestalt. This is the only way to appreciate fully what is essentially a work of drama, a living art form so finely wrought as to be just one step removed from the delicate intricacies of real life itself.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.