Divine-Human Dialogue and Resolution in the Book of Job

Abstract

Does the book of Job resolve? If so, how? These are the questions which this study seeks to address, recognising the interpretive challenge of discerning coherence and closure in a book rife with competing perspectives and distinct literary segments. Setting Jeannine Brown’s communication model for hermeneutics in conversation with postmodern scholarship on Job, this study proposes a reading of Job which takes the final form of the text to be coherent and the implied author purposeful in conveying meaning that is complex yet bounded. I argue that literary resolution is evident from the text of the divine whirlwind speeches (38:1–42:6) and Epilogue (42:7–17) read in context. Divine-human dialogue has the capacity to define and redirect the central issues of the book and to furnish resolution that is principally and fittingly relational. Finally, this study attends to how the whole of Job has been crafted to draw the reader into the communicative act, as the reader becomes invested through the filling of ‘knowledge gaps’ and is primed to be confronted, alongside Job, with a crisis of decision when God’s long-awaited voice comes rushing from the whirlwind.