An Existential Analysis of Tropes in the Book of Job

The book of Job in the Old Testament is one of the most esoteric books of Wisdom Literature. The Devil makes a pact with God, that is, servant Job is the most devout and most loyal to God because he has blessed him with prosperity. The Devil challenges God to allow him take away his possessions and also be afflicted. Job will then turn against God. Then God allows the Devil to test Job. Job’s material possessions and his children are taken away and he is afflicted bodily. Yet Job remains steadfastly loyal to God and in then end God restores to Job all what is lost.

The Devil in his conversations with God says: you pamper Job like a pet and make sure nothing ever happens to his family or possessions and bless everything he does. This conversation a simile, notes the nature of the Devil which is envy and hatred. The Devil wants to challenge the possessive belongingness of God. This intentionality is a negative archetype. Christianity and Judaism are religions inherent with the Binary divide of God and the Devil.  recherche d’emploi Hatred, envy, covetousness, lust and murder are possessions of a negative archetype. Atheistic existentialism does away with the concept of evil and exhorts a moral relativism. It’s puzzling as to why God lets to rein a negative archetype in Job’s life.

When Job has lost his children and his material possessions, he replies: ‘naked I come from the Mother’s womb and naked I will return to the womb of the earth. ‘ The womb of the earth is a metaphor. Here Job puts the earth in a feminine archetype, the earth being a mother, a womb.

When Job is afflicted with sores and ulcers, he laments: ‘blank out the night I was conceived. Let it be a black hole in space. ‘ It’s true that black holes do exist in space. However used metaphorically it points out to a dismal abyss, a hole of angst where light gets trapped.

Again Job complains ‘may those who are good at cursing, curse the day and unleash the beast Leviathan on it’. The interpretation of this trope is both poetic and apocalyptic. As a poetic trope, it embodies a woe, a pathos of being signified. As an apocalyptic metaphor we find mention of the Leviathan as a beast coming out from the sea in the book of Revelation. A cloned animal-human can be transgenic beast. Leviathan could also signify the entry of warring nations from the sea.

One of the friends of Job asks him: “Will a truly innocent person end up as scrap heap”? Dirt and squalor is manifested in the metaphor. This also an accusation that lays to test Job’s innocence. Job’s friend replies: ‘God the Sovereign trusts no one and then how can he trust humans who are as fragile as moths’? As fragile as moths is an existential simile. Looking at it in a spiritual sense, we are lacking a sense of understanding as to why God allows the Devil to compromise with Job’s integrity. From an existential nihilist point of view, the metaphor conveys a meaningless life. Man can be compared to Camus’ metaphor: the myth of the Sisyphus.

Job replies to his friends: ‘my misery could be weighed; you could pile the whole bitter load on scales; it will be heavier than the sand in the sea. The poison arrows of God are within me’. Scales connote the weighing down of angst. Job is indulging in narcissism of negativity. Angst being heavier than the sea is hyperbolic. God’s decision to be unresponsive to Job’s plight is conveyed in the metaphor: poison arrows. For Sartre, the existential atheist this is incongruous; a nihilist, existentialist should have the power to bear his or her own sorrows.