Response to My Professor

After reading my Job paper, the professor, for whom I wrote it, gave me feedback, and asked me a couple of questions. Below is an edited version of what she wrote to me, and my reply. I have not changed any of her words, but I did remove the surrounding, conversational content of both of our email correspondence. 

I was hoping you would talk about the Babylonian Theodicy, though this isn't directly relevant to your project (although I can see how you could make some connections). The similarities between the two texts is so striking. Job, IMO, is a retelling of the Babylonian Theodicy, a story they would have heard frequently during the Babylonian Exile. If this is so, would that change how we should understand the text (as a co-opting and YHWH-izing of a great story)? All the more so that this story might have (for them) expressed/embodied their feelings of suffering and persecution during this time, a time so brutally awful that they resorted to cannibalizing their own children in some cases (if we are to take these accounts to be true)?

Dr. Carol V. A. Quinn
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

As far as the Babylonian Theodicy question goes:

I think the very good points you bring up, as you said, are not really part of my project. However, if we take your position as truth, for the sake of the conversation (I am agnostic on it, because though I am aware of the issue, I haven't studied it deeply to form my own position), having an earlier story or text doesn't undermine the one in the cannon, nor does it my position. There is plagiarism, there is what is derivative, there are covers, there is coopting, and then there are tributes. Take jazz, it is a constant, respectful reworking of that which has come before it which we know to be jazz. For a jazz artist to elbow his/her way to the table, he/she must simultaneously pay homage to all the others who have sat at the table previously, while making his/her unique, signature contribution which must be currently relevant, but not so far unique as to be not-jazz. The deep 'hearing' of that contribution is not undermined by the roots, all of which culminate (at least until the next contribution) in that one performance. To deeply hear that one contribution is to hear the whole heritage, the whole pedigree, of what composes the identity of that one contribution, even if one has not actually heard the particular songs, which have come before. 

Besides all of that though, often, later contributions end up being the most pleasurable, and the most useful. I would much rather listen to Led Zeppelin's take on the songs they have reworked than the original versions (http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/led-zeppelins-10-boldest-rip-offs-20160622). Surely, by playing tribute to the songs they did, Zeppelin both sealed those songs in the permanent annals of history (those songs would likely have been forgotten otherwise), and gave the world something worth not forgetting in their superior renditions. 

As another example, Nine Inch Nails' Hurt was disturbingly, and wondrously profound, but what Johnny Cash did with it was unsurpassed. Had Cash just made up the song from scratch, it would have been something, but that he reworked Trent Reznor's contribution, is what gives Cash's rendition its power. Hurt's preexisting condition is what enabled Cash to make some of his most important artistic statements. 

The doing of theology ought to be something like all this. The believing community has always been obsessed with finding that 'pristine moment', that authoritative, official, earliest, orthodox, etc., way of: thinking, believing, expressing, living... there is, however, no such thing. What Ezekiel was doing, for example, was retelling the story for the bazillionth time, for his current moment, which would have eternal implications. He was doing it in the way I have described the doing of jazz. It matters that something came before it; only because that's what gives it its power. It's preexistent form does not undermine his work; it makes it relevant. Cash’s work is not derivative, it is a great act of deep commitment to what has come before, a sacred respect, as well as a refusal to let the past be forgotten, or to die a death of obscuring relevance. 

So Job has a preexistent form (sigh of relief); so it is equipped with power-potential for the believing community. If you are correct, then all of the tears of Babylonian exile are accounted for, and interwoven in the Book of Job; they are not lost to history, they are permanently memorialized in the Book of Job. The blood, sweat, and tears lead us to understand that we aren't just left knowing of something out there, but that suffering matters, and that adversity just might bring the transformative process which brings us to a knowing of God. From what I know, the Babylonian Job couldn't do all of that. The Babylonian Job gets us steps in that direction, but it falls short of producing the hope of transformation. One more thing, if YHWH did create, and can skillfully orchestrate the evolutionary development of His creation, and if communication to that creation is important enough for Him to attempt communication, logic would dictate that He is also competent in the overseeing of the developmental telling of His story.

Adam