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Clay Spence cspence16@cmc.edu

Professor Robert Faggen (713)-202-9634

The Bible

12/14/2014

God’s Speech from the Whirlwind as a Repudiation of Genesis 1

On the Tanakh ordering, Job seems to be a repetition of old ideas on unjust suffering and

attempts at theodicy. Though a part of Hebrew “wisdom literature,” much of the hokmah in Job

appears elsewhere. Take for instance Isaiah 45:7-9: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make

peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things…Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker!

Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it,

what makest thou?”1 Alternately, an essential aspect of God’s speech is captured in Isaiah 55:9

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my

thoughts than your thoughts.” Following Jack Miles, it is difficult not to see Job as a

“culmination rather than an inauguration” of “those dark intuitions about the destructive,

inimical side of God” (Miles, 304).

More broadly speaking, the problem of evil is not a uniquely Jewish idea. Narratives

highlighting the problem of evil appear in other religious texts in the region. Take for instance

the Babylonian “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer”:

What seems good to oneself is worthless before the god/ And what is rejected by one’s heart finds favor with the god/ Who will comprehend the will of the gods in the midst of the heavens/ The counsel of the god is full of obscurity; who will know it?/ How will mortals learn the way of the god?” (Interpreter’s Bible, 881).

In other respects, Job is a highly original text. The language in Job’s dialogue with his so-

called “comforters” is packed with a raw desperation and fervid eloquence which far outdoes any

comparable text – for example, Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Job’s immortal opening line:

1 All quotations will be from the KJV unless specified otherwise.

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“God damn the day I was born, and the night that forced me from the womb” (Mitchell, 13).

Moreover, Job is structurally unique because it terminates in God’s answer from the whirlwind,

the only divine speech on the subject of unjust suffering. The intractable and seemingly

interminable disagreement between Job and his comforters on the justice of Job’s condition takes

up the majority of the Book of Job, spanning chapters 3 to 38. Yet God’s final speech from the

whirlwind scatters the discourse of the preceding chapters like dust. It is on this speech –

particularly the second portion of God’s speech – that this paper will focus.

This paper will not attempt a theodical analysis of God’s answer, per se. Such attempts

are uniformly unsatisfactory, and belong to the domain of theology anyway. And regardless of

one’s theological views on the subject, one has to agree at a minimum that those reasons are not

made clear in Job. Denys Turner writes that “It makes sense to say of our language about God

that it gets to the point of ‘stretch’ at which its categories of similarity and difference fail, so that,

when stretched out to God, our language encounters its own failure to name the difference it

stretches out across” (Turner, 43). This claim seems especially true of God’s speech, in which

the Joban author seems to run up against the problem of evil and then do his very best to avoid

an apophatic2 silence on the issue. Consequently, it is left to us to make what sense of God’s

speech as we can. This paper will attempt to characterize God’s speech as a repudiation of the

first creation account in Genesis in favor of a non-anthropocentric view of creation – and of the

Deity Himself.

God’s speech from the whirlwind is split into two parts. Both take the form of a series of

questions that appear to be directed as challenges to Job’s diatribe. The first section (38:1-40:2)

2 Where ‘Apophaticism’ is an ignorance of God acquired through critical reflection; theology as a negative strategy for coming to terms with God’s basic inscrutability. I take the problem of evil to be derivative of the broader problem of not being able to conceptualize the nature of God.

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concerns God’s total knowledge of creation – from the inanimate foundations of the earth to an

assortment of animals that dwell upon it. Here God describes in soaring language the creation of

the world in the form of a litany of biting rhetorical questions such as: “Where wast thou when I

laid the foundations of the earth...When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God

shouted for joy?” (38:4,7). In the latter speech (40:6-41:34), God thunders “Wilt thou condemn

me that thou mayest be righteous?,” and then proceeds in an extreme non-sequitur to describe

two powerful beings that most critics transliterate as “Behemoth” and “Leviathan”. Behemoth is

a grass-eating, ox-like creature with bones “like bars of iron” (40:18) whose “penis stiffens like a

pine” (Mitchell, 85).3 Leviathan is a fire-breathing sea-serpent cloaked in an armor impenetrable

scales, “a king over all the children of pride” (41:34).

The two sections are separated by an interlude in which Job abases himself and returns to

silence – an interlude which is highly relevant to interpretation of the speech as a whole. Though

I do not share his rationale, I agree with J.V. Kinnier Wilson’s claim that:

The two cycles of speeches from the whirlwind must be seen to be quite different in their motivation, and need to be separated from each other…It is mistaken, we think, to suggest that Behemoth and Leviathan belong properly in the same milieu as the lioness, mountain goat, wild ass, and other animals of the first speech. (Kinnier, 13)

Explanations of God’s speech from the whirlwind that do not take into consideration the

brief interlude of Job’s speech fail to do justice to its structure. Generally critics riff on the

following three themes in God’s “theophany”: first, that God is supremely powerful4, second that

Job lacks understanding or knowledge, and third that Job ought to celebrate with God the beauty

and majesty of the created world.5 However, none of these interpretations explains the separation

3 The alternate translation here is “He moveth his tail like a cedar” but I follow Mitchell in thinking that “tail” is obviously a sex-euphemism – the implication here being that the Behemoth is a highly virile alpha-male animal (whether supernatural, or just extraordinarily large).4 Which Hobbes took to be the main sense of God’s speech in his repurposing of the biblical passage for Leviathan, his canonical work of political philosophy.5 See, e.g. Wesley Morriston’s “God’s Answer to Job” for a defense of these claims.

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between the speeches. Why does God continue to lecture after the shell-shocked Job abandons

his complaint and vows silence? Isn’t God’s aim accomplished after the first speech? Since the

author of Job was anything but thoughtless in his construction of the book, God’s second speech

is almost certainly not redundant. Any sustainable account of God’s speech from the whirlwind

must therefore grapple seriously with the caesura in God’s discourse.

God’s speech from the whirlwind is a panorama of creation – a hint and a glimpse at

God’s staggeringly broad divine knowledge of the cosmos. In scope (and to a lesser degree in

structure), God’s speech strongly parallels the first creation account in Genesis (1:1-2:3). The

Genesis 1 creation account is familiar: On the first day God divided light from darkness, on the

second he created the sky; on the third day God created dry land and plants, on the fourth the

sun, moon and stars; on the fifth day God created birds, fish and the great sea monsters6, and on

the sixth day God created the beasts of the earth, and man in his image, after his likeness, to have

dominion over all living things. Though it does not retain Genesis 1’s formulaic structure, eerie

abstractness, and absence of sensory detail, God’s first speech in Job is obviously a variant on

the same theme. God describes the laying of the foundations of the earth and the shutting up of

the sea; the commanding of the dawn to rise and rain to fall on the wastes of the earth; the

movements of the constellations and a parade of animals: the lion, the raven, the wild ass, the

unicorn, the ostrich, the magnificent horse, the hawk and the eagle. But in His second speech in

Job, God radically departs from the Genesis template, describing in close detail the Behemoth

(which does not appear in Genesis) and the Leviathan (which may be very obliquely alluded to

by the phrase “great sea monsters”).

6 The KJV translates the Hebrew word “tan·nî·nim” as “great whales,” but a more appropriate translation is the Jewish Study Bible Tanakh Translation’s “sea monsters.” Variants on the word are used 27 times over the course of the Hebrew bible, and the sense of most translations is “serpent,” “dragon,” or “sea monster” – all decidedly reptilian. I break with Melville here.

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Why are the Behemoth and the Leviathan elevated to this final position of prominence,

and described in such painstaking detail? I submit to you the answer is that God’s speech in Job

is a reversal of the anthropocentric account of creation present in the first creation speech in

Genesis. In God’s speech from the whirlwind, man is no longer in the final position, nor is there

any reference to man being made in God’s image – human beings don’t appear at all in God’s

speech in Job. In Genesis an anthropic bias is unmistakable. God creates human beings with the

express purpose of “let[ting] them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of

the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth

upon the earth” (1:26). God says to man: “replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion

over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth

upon the earth” (1:27). In Job one notices a bias in another direction. The Behemoth is “chief of

the ways of God” (40:19), and the invincible Leviathan is accorded dominion – “He beholdeth

all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride” (41:34). The main thrust of God’s

speech from the whirlwind is that man is only one creation, not as great as others, and

insignificant compared to the Behemoth and the Leviathan.7 What can Job do in response to such

a paradigm-shifting onslaught but cower, boil-ridden, in the dust and ashes?

In this sense, God’s speech in Job seems to renounce any special relationship with man –

whether existential or in the form of covenant. As one critic puts it, “human life has been taught

to think of itself as a blob of protoplasm, an itch on the epidermis of a pigmy planet, an accident

of matter” (Interpreter’s Bible, 1172). Like much of Job, this is not an especially new revelation

– a similar abandonment of anthropocentric reasoning is captured eloquently in Ecclesiastes:

7 I find further confirmational evidence for this view in the fact that God’s speech is explicitly comparative between Job (a representative of mankind) and the Leviathan. God challenges Job: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?...Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?” (41:1,7).

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For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth. (3:19-21)

David Wolfers, on a creative translation of the phrase “Behemoth, which I made with

thee” (40:15) as “Behemoth, which I have saddled thee with,” takes the reversal of the Genesis

value-orientation in God’s speech from the whirlwind as evidence for man’s bestial nature.8

However the non-anthropocentrism in Job isn’t a comment on human nature at all – it is a

revelation of divine nature. The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind is an essentially

panentheistic entity,9 for whom the Behemoth, the Leviathan, the parade of animals, and the

inanimate natural forces at play in God’s speech are reflections of God’s divine image. When

God entreats Job to “deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory

and beauty” (40:10) he reveals his panentheistic nature – the majesty, excellency, glory and

beauty here refer to the created universe which God inhabits, and with which God clothes

Himself. One remembers God’s speech in Jeremiah: “Can any hide himself in secret places that I

shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (23:24); one remembers that

the phrase “And behold, it was very good” in Genesis (1:31) applies to the whole of creation –

not only a certain kind of advanced primate.

The world described in Job is, in Stephen Mitchell’s words “our world, when we perceive

it clearly, without eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” (Mitchell, xxi). The

world, seen from this divine perspective, is utterly sublime. God’s speech is attitudinal not

8 Here Wolfers relies heavily on Psalms 73:22, which he translates as “I have been a behemoth with thee.” On Wolfers’ view, this line supports a view of Behemoth as being part of man’s bestial nature. However both this translation and the “saddled thee with” translations seem to me tenuous. My view will avoid Humpty-Dumpty linguistics almost entirely.9 Without delving to deeply into theological matters, pan-en-theism is the view that God is a cosmic animating force interpenetrating the universe. Contrast with classical Spinozan pantheism which holds that God is identical with the totality of things in existence.

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argumentative, and the attitude which radiates through the prose is one of profound animalistic

joy in His creation – a reveling in the entire natural continuum from “the sweet influences of the

Pleiades” to the greatest beasts of land and sea, in all its absurdity and grandeur (Job, 38:31).

Here the fearless Leviathan is God’s plaything in the manner suggested in Psalms: “So this is the

great and wide sea…there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein” (104:25-26).

This view makes sense of the distinction between the two speeches from the whirlwind in

the following way: The first speech attempts to impress upon Job the vastness and inscrutability

of creation (to the human mind), in all its absurdity and vibrancy and wild grandeur. Following

the first speech, Job attritely submits “Behold I am vile; what shall I answer thee?” (40:4). But

Job’s groveling radically misinterprets God, who aims not at Job’s submission, but at revoking

the anthropocentrism of Genesis. God’s second speech clarifies God’s repudiatory intent – the

force of it is: No, this is what I mean. Behold the Behemoth and the Leviathan – man is not the

pinnacle of creation. Vanity, vanity: All of what you think you know is vanity.

The view I have articulated here also helps explain a mysterious feature which obtains on

the Tanakh ordering of the Old Testament. On this ordering, the last time God speaks is in his

speech from the whirlwind. As Jack Miles points out, “Within the book of Job itself, God’s

climactic and overwhelming reply seems to silence Job. But reading from the end of the Book of

Job onward, we see that it is Job who has somehow silenced God” (Miles, 11). If God’s speech is

truly a repudiation of the special and covenantal relationship with man articulated in Genesis,

then God’s silence in the Ketuvim makes sense: God has talked the talk, now he is walking the

walk. In Job, God releases himself from having to explain himself to man at all. Another

advantage of my model of God’s speeches in Job is that it explains the way that God seems

intimately involved with his creation. An account of God as panentheistic jibes well with a God

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who is the father of the rain (38:28) and a sender of lightnings (38:35), who hunts prey for the

lion and the raven (38:39-41). God delights in the idiosyncrasies of his created fauna – the

terrible glory of the horse’s nostrils, his neck clothed with thunder – and seems to flicker

between the perspectives of each of the animals in the list as though inhabiting them. “Doth the

hawk fly by thy wisdom” asks God (39:27). “Doth the eagle mount up at thy command?”

(39:27). The God portrayed in Job is not a disinterested unmoved mover or first cause, but a

consciousness thrumming through every layer of his creation with unbridled joie de vivre.

Nonetheless, my thesis has a hurdle to clear in the form of the challenge that God’s

second speech may instead be a comment on the futility of Job’s rebelliousness. On this account,

God’s phrase, “Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be righteous?” suggests that Job’s

complaints may be taken as an act of rebellion against the will of God (Job 40:8). Justification

for this view rests primarily on an interpretation of the Leviathan as a rebellious serpent, from

whom Job must learn the lesson that God is all-powerful. Much has been written on the

Leviathan in God’s second speech from the whirlwind primarily because the great serpent

appears in nearly every contemporary religious text in the region. In these texts, a god creates the

world by defeating a great chaos-serpent in a “cosmogonic battle.”10 In Babylonian mythology

the god Marduk defeats the chaos serpent Tiamat, and in Canaanite myth the god Baal defeats

the sea-monster Yamm in the act of creation, for instance. The word Leviathan is itself probably

derived from the word lotan, which is a seven headed dragon that appears in Ugaritic myth. In

these accounts the conquering god entraps or pens the rebelling chaos-monster, but does not

utterly vanquish it. This mythological heritage shows up in the book of Job when Job desperately

wonders “Am I the sea or the Dragon, that You have set a watch over me?” (7:12).11 But is this

10 See Mary Wakeman, “The Biblical Earth Monster in the Cosmogonic Combat Myth,” pp.313-32011 Translation from the Jewish Study Bible. KJV translation is “Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?,” but succumbs to the same problem as Genesis 1:21 (“the great sea monsters”).

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mythological tradition firmly enough ensconced in the Hebrew bible to legitimate the futility-of-

rebellion thesis?

The word Leviathan (liwyātān) shows up in the Bible only six times; twice in Job (3:8;

40:25), twice in Psalms (74:14; 104:26) and twice in the Isaiah (27:1). In Job 3:8 (“May those

who cast spells upon the day damn it, those prepared to disable Leviathan”)12 the sense is highly

unclear, and in Psalm 104 the sense is that Leviathan was created as God’s plaything.13 But in

Psalm 74 the description of Leviathan fits the Leviathan-as-chaos-monster theory: “Thou didst

divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest

the heads of Leviathan in pieces” (74:13-14). Something very similar to this line appears in

Isaiah, though in the context of a prophecy about the apocalypse: “In that day the Lord with his

sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that

crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (27:1).14 These mythic parallels

and others15 prompt Henry Rowold to suggest that “Yahweh is placing in juxtaposition two

creatures each of whom has raised himself up against God” – that is, Job and the Leviathan

(Rowold, 107). If this is so, then perhaps God’s speech is not intended as a renunciation of

Genesis but rather as a comment on the futility of Job’s rage and sorrow at his misfortune.

Unfortunately, this view doesn’t entirely bear out. It is true, mythological influences were

clearly at play when the Joban author set quill to paper. The evidence here is uncontroversial. In

the speech from the whirlwind God asks – referring to the Leviathan – “Will he make a covenant

with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?” This language is highly suggestive of a

12 Jewish Study Bible translation – the KJV translation “Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning” is even more indecipherable. 13 As discussed earlier, Psalm 104 seems to be evidence for my thesis.14 Two notes: 1) An alternate translation here is “Leviathan the Elusive Serpent – Leviathan the Twisting Serpent” (Jewish Study Bible). 2) This line doesn’t necessarily imply there are two separate Leviathans, but rather may be more plausibly interpreted as an emphasis-convention in ancient Hebrew writing.15 See e.g. Job 26:12-13, Isaiah 51:9, and Psalms 89:10.

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cosmogonic combat myth wherein God subjugates the chaos-serpent Leviathan in the creative

act. No stretch of the imagination is required to think that the Leviathan is different than animals

of the garden (of Eden) variety. But while the analogy to the Leviathan’s rebellion may suggest a

lesson to Job, such a lesson is clearly peripheral to God’s speech from the whirlwind taken as a

whole. Even when our object of inquiry is restricted to God’s second speech, the futility-of-

rebellion camp can only explain half of the discourse – the Behemoth is quite clearly a created

being under God’s purview. John Gammie explains,

Three features in the opening verse suggest that the creature about to be described is an animal of the natural world: (i) the semantic force of the initial words of the verse, hinneh-na (“Behold!”) suggests that the creature could be seen; (ii) he is one whom “I made with you,” i.e., with Job; Job is mortal, therefore it is less strained to take it that Behemoth is also mortal; (iii) “he eats grass like cattle”; comparison is made to another animal of the world of nature; grass is, of course, a widely acknowledged symbol of mortality (cf. Isa 40:6-8). (Gammie, 219-220)

Some scholars have attempted to read the Behemoth as a mythical being in light of a brief

reference to a “Bull of Heaven” in Sumero-Akkadian religious texts.16 However such

interpretations require fighting an uphill battle against a total lack of textual evidence in the

Hebrew Bible, and the compelling countervailing evidence in Job. Consequently, most scholars

have tended to identify the Behemoth with the Hippopotamus in virtue of the lines describing its

marshy home (Job, 40:21-23). In any case there is no biblical evidence that the Behemoth ever

engaged in rebellion against his creator – which is crucial to a defense of the view that the

function of God’s second speech is to teach Job that rebellion is futile. In light of the restricted

value of this thesis, one has to think that the rebellion-thesis is at best hopelessly marginal. As

Mitchell describes the second speech from the whirlwind: “What is all this foolish chatter about

good and evil, the Voice says, about battles between a hero-god and some cosmic opponent?

Don’t you understand that there is no one else in here?” (Mitchell, xxiv). A final consideration is

16 See Marvin Pope, “The Anchor Bible: Job.” pp.270

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that if the second speech aims to teach Job a lesson on the futility of rebelling against the

Almighty, it is a staggeringly redundant invective – no point has been more forcefully and

repeatedly made in divine speech in the prior books of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, I tend to think

that obedience to the will of an all-powerful, vengeful God is the primary takeaway from Jewish

theology. This is what is meant when people use the phrase “the God of the old testament.”

It seems then that repudiation-of-Genesis thesis wins out. God’s speech from the

whirlwind is primarily a direct rejection of the anthropocentric logic manifest in the first creation

account in Genesis. But where does this leave us? The purpose of God’s speech from the

whirlwind seems to be to level the normative playing field, undermining the ethical hierarchy

(dominion, man in God’s image, man made last) articulated in Genesis 1. Job’s convictions of

the injustice of his claims are swept away by the power of God’s speech, as are the concepts of

justice, good and bad. This flattening of value is captured in the following thought experiment of

Wittgenstein’s:

Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and…wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world…this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. (Wittgenstein, 6)

This is the world left to a person like Melville who takes the lesson of Job to heart. Here

the rigid moral law of the Torah is thoroughly deflated. Yet though it is little consolation, this is

a world where God’s pure joy in his creation occasionally bursts through the seams – a world

where a panentheistic creator revels in every aspect of his creation, human beings included. If

this recognition is theodical, it permanently brackets rather than explains the problem of evil.

God’s speech from the whirlwind is therefore deeply unsatisfactory from an ethical standpoint.

In the face of it, one can do little but follow the wisdom of Qoholeth: “There is nothing better for

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a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his

labor” (Ecclesiastes, 2:24).

Citations:

“The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 3: Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job.” Abingdon Press, New York. 1954.

Gammie, John. “Behemoth and Leviathan: On the Didactic and Theological Significance of Job 40:15-41:26.” In Israelite Wisdom: Theological and Literary Essays in Honor of Samuel Terrien. Union Theological Seminary, New York. 1978.

Jewish Publication Society, “Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation” Ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford U.P., 2004.

Miles, Jack. “God: A Biography.” Alfred Knopf Publishers, New York. 1995.

Mitchell, Stephen. “The Book of Job.” North Point Press. Berkeley, California, 1979.

Morriston, Wesley. “God’s Answer to Job.” Religious Studies, Vol. 32.3, 1996.

Pope, Marvin. “The Anchor Bible: Job.” Doubleday & Company Inc., New York. 1965.

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Rowold, Henry. “Leviathan and Job in Job 41:2-3.” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 105.1, 1986.

Turner, Denys. “The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism.” Cambridge U.P., 1995.

Wakeman, Mary. “The Biblical Earth Monster in the Cosmogonic Combat Myth” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 88.3, 1969.

Wilson, JV Kinnier. “A Return to the Problems of Behemoth and Leviathan.” Vetus Testamentum, Vol.21 Fasc.1, 1975.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Duke U.P. on behalf of Philosophical Review, Vol. 74.1, Jan. 1965.

Wolfers, David. “The Lord’s Second Speech in the Book of Job.” Vetus Testamentum Vol 40.4, 1990.

Young, William A. “Leviathan in the Book of Job and Moby-Dick” Soundings, Vol. 65.4, 1982.