Modern Theology 32:1 January 2016 DOI: 10.1111/moth.

12221
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

JOB AND THE PROBLEM OF PHYSICAL

PAIN: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL
READING

ESPEN DAHL

That the Book of Job is regarded as one of the principal texts in our inheritance
that grapples with the problem of evil is beyond discussion. In that book, we find
lengthy discussions about the cause, or lack of cause, of evil, the correspondence
of sin and punishment, the order of justice and, of course, the role of God with
respect to evil and suffering. It is therefore not without reason that a long tradi-
tion of theodicy has appealed to the Book of Job: it is the most explicit text on
God and evil in the Bible. But however open the book is to divergent interpreta-
tions, it is hardly convincing to read it as some kind of theodicy – at least if theo-
dicy is supposed to provide a reasonable vindication for the good and almighty
God in the face of unjust suffering. If there is theodicy at work, it is found among
Job’s friends – which is precisely the outlook that Job invariably rejects. Also
when God speaks from within the whirlwind, God hardly gives any reason for
Job’s suffering.
Accordingly, it seems more promising to read the book not as a rationalization of
evil and suffering, but perhaps rather as an immensely rich poetic articulation of
innocent suffering. But then there is of course the famous epilogue, where Job is
given everything back. Is this a lapse into rational, retributive logic, after all? In his
own ingenious way, Kierkegaard denies this in reading the Book of Job as a study of
spiritual repetition, to be carried out in each instance, for the person in absolute rela-
tion to the absolute: life is invested, lost and yet gained back in each moment.1 In
Kierkegaard’s case we are far removed from classical, rationalist theodicy, as he
turns the book into a spiritual allegory. Similarly diverging from the theodicy-
reception, Rene Girard has powerfully proposed a non-spiritual reading centering on
the scapegoat mechanism: the part of the ‘friends’ demands a scapegoat and projects

Espen Dahl
UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, Department of History and Religion, IHR 9037 Tromsø, NORWAY
Email: espen.dahl@uit.no
1
Søren Kierkegaard, Gjentagelsen, in Samlede Værker 5 (København: Gyldendal, 1962), 185–186. Cf.
Mooney’s reading of Kierkegaardian Job where the restoration is gained through the perception of a new
meaning. Edward F. Mooney, ‘Kierkegaard’s Job Discourse: Getting back the world’, International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion 34, no. 3 (December 1993): 151–169; 165.

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guilt onto it, whereas Job maintains the truth of his innocence – which, in the
epilogue, is supported by the ’God of the victims.’2
Whatever exegetical strengths and weaknesses such interpretations entail with
regard to the original text, they all implicitly assume that the teaching of the Book of
Job is to be found on the level of principle: as justification of evil in a grander meta-
physical scheme, as the spiritual teaching of repetitions, or as God’s rejection of soci-
ety’s urge for violent resolutions. What, I think, all of those readings too easily
overlook is the way the Book of Job insists on the concreteness of the evil undergone.
The real problem of Job, I will suggest, is nothing but the inescapable concreteness
of intense physical pain.3 What I will wager in the following pages is a philosophical,
or more precisely, a phenomenological reading of the Book of Job, according to
which I will take the text as an extended and literarily refined expression of physical
pain on a religious horizon.4 Given the density and polyphonic nature of the Book of
Job, it may however seem highly reductive to place pain at its center. It will therefore
not be sufficient to gather scattered textual evidence for Job’s purportedly physical
pain, but I will try to show how such an approach is able to shed light on major
themes and structures of the text as a whole.
I will start by locating what seems to me the most significant ways in which the
Book of Job addresses Job’s physical pain and its concrete bodily manifestations. The
fundamental metaphor of the striking arrow will guide the first phenomenological
account (1). These considerations place the nature of the strange and broken dialogue
between Job and his friends into relief (2). The acuteness of pain puts meaning – of
the world, of Law and community – within brackets. This has much to do with the
particular way in which pain seems resistant to meaning (3). The book also suggests
a particular temporality of pain, reflected in its desperation for the pain to end or
longing for its not having occurred (4). Finally I will address the question of how
God’s speech, the prologue and epilogue, can fit into the Jobian phenomenology of
pain, reading them as mythological accounts that somehow correspond to the inher-
ent temporality of lived pain (5).

Job’s Suffering and Phenomenology of Pain

In the prologue of the Book of Job, it is worth noting that Satan strikes twice. First
he deprived Job of all his possessions, even his children, but this time Satan is for-
bidden to stretch out his arm against Job. The ordeal is of no avail – Job tore his
robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshipped God, saying:
‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD

2
Rene Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1987), 145.
3
Pain is a complex phenomenon, ranging from acute and chronic, intense and dim, entailing all kinds
of overlaps between physical and psychical suffering. I will here restrict myself to pain understood as
acute and intense physical pain as the reference point of the phenomenological exploration. For a more
refined typology of pain and pain’s varied religious significance, see Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting
the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4
I am well aware that from the perspective of textual criticism, the Book of Job is regarded as a highly
composite, even very abrupt text. I will sidestep these problems and read it as a classical text handed
down to us. My point of departure is therefore the problems that face the reader of the Book of Job as it
stands, regardless of its complicated textual genesis.

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gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD’ (1:21).5 For all
the deprivation and sorrow it entailed, this ordeal did not alter Job’s relation to God.
It is, however, first when Satan is allowed to stretch out his arm against Job that
things really get started: ‘But stretch out your hand now’, Satan says, ‘and touch his
bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face’ (2:5). The metaphor of ‘arm’
here suggests not only power, but retains its physical sense of touching, that is,
touching Job in his bodily existence, manifested in Job’s aching sores from foot to
head (2:7, cf. 13:21, 30:21). Of course, the infliction of pain may be taken as just
another blow, a blow that makes the total amount of suffering too much for Job, to
which he consequently reacts with protest and despair. Accordingly, most readers
do not attach any particular significance to Job’s physical pain, assumedly taking it
not as the source of Job’s pain, but rather just one of the many ways in which Job is
suffering. But might it not be worth asking whether there is not, after all, something
with the very physicality of his pain that calls out Job’s response? Does not the sec-
ond stroke specifically suggest that it is the inflicted pain that forces a change in
Job’s responses to God?
His friends initially react in fear to Job’s disease, not due to its painfulness, but
because they see it, as Job himself would otherwise see it, as a stigma of impurity, one
form of punishment that attests to former sins (6:21). But in Job’s case, as the reader
knows, it does not add up, for Job is righteous and innocent (1:1, 9:15, 9:20). Job does,
however, at this phase share their presuppositions, only to find himself the exception –
and hence his growing feeling of utter isolation. As the exception can no longer appeal
to what is otherwise agreed upon, Job’s situation would lead us to assume that he
should remain silent. But as the text evolves, the fact is rather the opposite: it is the
friends who are initially silent: for seven days and seven nights they keep quiet, ‘for
they saw that his suffering was very great’ (2:13). It is in fact Job who breaks the silence:
‘After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth’ (3:1). It is as though he
must speak. Despite the difficulty of conveying his agony, he goes on expressing himself
– as if the nature of his suffering itself demands an expressive response, of despair,
complaint and protestation. These complaints and protestations are, I suggest, the
articulated cries arising from his pain.
In the poetic discourse of the Book of Job, the expressions of pain will come
through metaphorical speech. A minimal requirement of a metaphor is that it unite
at least two otherwise separable spheres or poles – in this case both Job’s concrete
physical pain and a reference to an otherwise well-known, common world.6 For Job,
the concrete origin of his pain seems to be tied to some kind of skin disease: loath-
some sores from top to toe, blisters that harden and break out again, and skin turn-
ing black (2:7; 7:5; 30:30). It is, however, beside the point to insist on the disease’s
physiological nature, for the text does not display interest in its etiology, but rather
in the nature of its experience and its possible articulations. The only point of hold-
ing on to the putative fact of his skin disease is to keep the reader aware of the
nature of both poles of the metaphors: even if the book will evoke storms, weapons,
strokes, stabbing, etc., these are to be taken as expressive of internal qualities of

5
All quotations are from the New Reversed Standard Version of the Bible.
6
For metaphors and pain, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 15–17.

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concrete pain. And as such, the metaphors can give way to a phenomenological
explication of his experience.
Let me draw attention to what seems to be a root metaphor, namely that of the
arrow. It is, for instance, evoked by his friend Zophar: ‘a bronze arrow will strike
[you] through’ (20:24), and by Job: ‘he set me up as his target; his archers surround
me’ (16:12, cf. 6:4, 7:20). The metaphor of the arrow is not only significant because it
is often invoked or alluded to, but also because it contains clues to a phenomenology
of pain. Being hit by an arrow captures the passivity in which the suffering Job finds
himself. Pain as such is aversive, it is not something that anyone would naturally
want; consequently, it is not something which is pursued or actively achieved, but
rather comes over Job and hits him. This passivity, furthermore, corresponds to the
feeling of being hit from outside, which does not necessarily designate a spatial exter-
nality or external cause, but something beyond the sufferer’s own will and control.
Pain’s ‘outsideness’ is a sign of the strange power that it executes over against Job.
And yet, the suffering of pain essentially belongs to the interiority, Job’s lived body.
While normal handlings and practices in the world tend to make the body transpar-
ent to oneself, pain makes it inescapably manifest: here and now, as mine, or better:
as me.7 The arrow does not only hit me from outside, touch me in my passivity, but
it also intrudes and invades me – it pierces though my borders and thrusts itself into
the living self. As Job says: ‘For the arrows of the Almighty are in me’ (6:4).
Despite its invasion, pain evades being assimilated into the interior in which it
essentially takes place, simply because it hurts. ‘The “quality” of evil’ in this physical
sense, Levinas writes, ‘is this very non-integratability.’8 There is no possible synthesis,
no way it might become an organic part of a well-defined interiority, because the
pain cannot be welcomed. Pain is at once most intimate, as part of Job’s embodi-
ment, and remains alien. As concrete, it asks for conceptualization, but as alien, it
evades any conceptions. It is as if the pain occupies this strange place between sense
and non-sense, one that can only be indirectly articulated and preserved by the
metaphor.
What adds despair to Job’s suffering is his inability to remove pain. Job laments:
‘In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me’ (6:13). Admit-
tedly, this can be read as Job being overpowered by the Almighty. But it can just as
easily be seen as an expression of despair already internal to his pain. What turns
intense pain into suffering is the fact that, once it takes place, there is no escape.
And this is one point at which it is decisive to insist on the significance of the physi-
cal nature of the evil that Job undergoes. For whereas moral evil implies the freedom
to consider it from a detached point of view, physical pain cannot afford the sufferer
the luxury of such detachment. Physical pain marks the ‘impossibility of detaching
oneself from the instant of its existence’, to quote Levinas once again. And a little
later: ‘In suffering there is an absence of all refuge. . . . The whole acuity is made up
of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating.’9 Pain must be gotten rid of – and

7
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 71.
8
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Postface: Transcendence and Evil’, in Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil,
trans. Michael Kigel (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 173. It is worth noting that
Levinas’ phenomenology of pain is written in response to Philippe Nemo’s book on Job.
9
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other: and additional essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press, 1987), 69.

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precisely this is what is impossible. Once hit by the arrow, pain will manifest itself
without any conceptual, moral or perspectival distance.

Broken Dialogue
The urgent expressions of pain witnessed in the Book of Job go all the way from
bodily contractions to sweat, lack of breath, and cries; but for the speaking animal
that Job is, it also enters into his words. The pressure of acute pain is often felt to be
impossible to convey by words – one feels common words do not reach the concrete
phenomenon in question: its hurting presence. With reference to the Book of Job,
Donn Welton is among the few that has been attentive to the book’s focus on bodily
pain and its isolating effect: ‘There is a splitting, special to disease and suffering,
which isolates the person and effects a reduction of their existence to their afflicted
flesh, even beyond their “bone” (Job 2:5). This is the state in which the soul becomes
lost in a body that threatens to devour it.’10 Thus, pain has this tendency to isolate
the sufferer from the speaking community, but it is also a state in which the desire
for community is at its most urgent. Hence, Job’s pain is expressed, and meant to be
heard – and one tormenting fact for Job is that he is not heard, at least not properly
understood. The problem of communicating pain is very vividly accounted for in the
Book of Job: in the lack of true communication between Job and his friends, but also
in the unrelenting willingness to go on articulating the experience.
Turning to the nature of the dialogue that makes up the major part of the Book of
Job, it is hardly the structure of pain as such that occupies its central place, but
rather, as it seems, the questionable appropriateness of Job’s suffering with regard to
God and His Law. And yet, it is possible to discern underlying structures of the
strange dialogue between Job and his friends if one keeps the nature of Job’s pain in
mind. Granted that Job’s problem is that of physical pain, it might seem improbable
for him to engage in a highly elaborate conversation about matters of justice. But
pain generally, and Job’s pain especially, seems to demand expression; therefore Job
breaks the silence of his friends. Of course, these expressions emerge in the text as
elaborate poetry, but nonetheless a poetry that reflects the acuity of pain. More pre-
cisely, pain thrusts one question to the fore: ‘Why have you made me your target?’
(7:20), that is to say: ‘Why me?’ Such questions belong inextricably to the phenom-
enon of pain itself; not, however, as if turning pain into a hermeneutic riddle to be
solved, or its physiological cause to be disclosed, but rather as a particular expres-
sion of the opaque quality of the phenomenon and the way its singles out the
sufferer.
Even if the phenomenon of pain has no clear sense, it still calls for some
articulation – if nothing else, to ask questions: ‘To attempt to understand the
nature of pain, to seek to find its meaning’, as David Bakan aptly puts it, ‘is already
to respond to the imperative of pain itself. . . . [Its] demand for interpretation is
most naked, manifested in the sufferer asking, “Why?”’11 Now, the grammar of
Job’s ‘why?’ might, however, be of a specific kind: it does seek understanding,

10
Donn Welton, ‘Biblical Bodies,’ in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Malden
MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1998), 246.
11
David Bakan, Disease, Pain, Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1968), 57–58.

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although Job knows that ordinary explanations cannot really satisfy him – especially
the kind of explanations provided by his friends: ‘If you would only keep silent’,
Job replies to his friends, ‘that would be your wisdom!’ (13:5) Still, the search for
meaning keeps welling up from the aversive character of pain itself. Hence Job will
stubbornly continue to articulate his state throughout the dialogue.
Unlike Socratic dialogues, in which mutual correction and deeper understanding
is to be achieved, no such development can be traced in the dialogues within the
Book of Job. The parties seem unable to get across to each other: not, I suppose,
because they are initially reluctant to, and not because they are strangers to one
another – they are, after all, friends. Nor is it the case that one party knows some-
thing that the other does not. As Job puts it: ‘What you know, I also know; I am not
inferior to you.’ And: ‘Who does not know such things as these?’, admitting that
both Job and his friends perfectly agree that his suffering turns on the question of
God and justice (13:2. 12:3). But why does Job not surrender and accept his friends’
explanations and reproaches? On the surface of it, it is a matter of Job defending his
innocence. But as Job knows that he will be considered guilty and the friends
broaden the scope of sin to the human condition as such (9:28, 4:17), defending his
innocence becomes a hopeless project. There must consequently be another reason
why any agreement, or at least a mutual exchange of opinions, is blocked.
The first clue is given at the beginning of the friends’ reproach, pointing out that
Job himself has patiently guided others in their suffering: ‘But now’, Eliphaz says, ‘it
has come to you, and you are impatient; it touches you, and you are dismayed’ (4:5).
The friends accuse him of the inconsistency that, as Kant has made clear, is typical
of how individuals respond to the Law: Job makes himself an exception. Strange as
it seems, Job will later turn the same argument against his friends, this time making
it the reason for their failure to understand him: ‘I also could talk as you do, if you
were in my place; I could join words against you, and shake my head at you’ (16:4).
It is not so much that their words or considerations are unintelligible to him, but
that those words do not achieve what Job wants them to achieve: Words do not
reach into his pain, and certainly have no power to lift it: ‘If I speak, my pain is not
assuaged, and if I forbear, how much of it leaves me’ (16:6)? The exceptional charac-
ter of pain initiates a search for community, and what makes it salient is that there
are limits to what can be shared.
The framework that the Book of Job takes for granted is one in which retributive
justice is beyond question: the just will in the end be rewarded, and the unjust will
be punished. It is obvious that Job’s protest and lamentation is desperate because it
clings to the legal framework: ‘How many are my iniquities and my sins? Make me
know my transgression and my sin’ (13:23), or, with clear reference to a trial: ‘Here
is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me! O that I had the indictment written by
my adversary’ (31:35). But at the same time, Job’s exceptional suffering has led him
to realize the breakdown of any just moral order – there are cases that do not fit into
the wheel of justice: ‘he destroys both the blameless and the wicked’ (9:22). However,
according to the phenomenology of pain, there might be another reason why the
justness of the Law appears to be inadequate.
Pain can be hard to convey by common, seemingly trivial words and thus become
unsharable. But acute pain also alters access to a common world. Pain singles the
sufferer out and removes him or her from the orbit of his or her being-in-the-world.
As being and world recede from one another in proportion to the acuity of pain, the
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normal frames of reference that buttress common understanding also fade. Within
the Old Testament world, this means that even the Law will no longer provide a suf-
ficient, common ground. The notion of the Law means far more than regulation of
social and religious conduct; it knits Creator and creation together and thus also
shapes what is conceived of as a social world. Hence, as Job’s physical pain itself
will estrange him from the world, it will by the same token also estrange him from
the Law. But since there is, within the religious framework at work in the Book of
Job, nothing for Job to appeal to except the Law, Job is entrenched in an impossible
discourse.
The speech of justice, according to which wicked are punished and good are
rewarded, is still an order of the world where the exceptional has no place. Thus,
it is not that Job does not know the Law, God or the world to which his friends
appeal; it is just that they no longer apply to the situation in which pain
has brought him. The bodily presence of acute pain puts the world, normal
community and communication – and therefore also the Law – in brackets. When
God finally deems Job’s speech right, and the friends’ wrong, it is precisely not
by reference to the Law (42:7), for the Law hardly plays any role in God’s speech
at all. Taken as a whole, the Book of Job questions the adequacy of the Law and
the moral cosmos it outlines when it comes to human suffering.12 In particular,
the experience of pain appears to remove the sufferer from the order of the Laws
– the excess of Job’s pain attests to a certain lawlessness.
The friends cannot be charged with sidelining the question of God and suffering,
but they will invariably discuss it in terms of speech about God, in juridical, philo-
sophical or theological terms. There are references to the unbreakable wheel of jus-
tice, at times to the truth and wisdom preserved by the ancient fathers (8:8, 15:18), or
more theologically, the fallible human condition over against the sacred nature of
God (3:17, 15:15-16, chap. 25), which all are matters of theoretical consideration. But
Job, having been struck by the arrow, has no room for theoretical discourses about
God; neither does he have time for it, since the pain nails Job to the inescapable
intensity of the present (to which I will return below). Being in a state of pain, Job
will only respond, not by entering into a discussion about the appropriateness of
that state, but either by confessing how things are with him, or directly appealing
the externality from which pain at least seems to refer. Hence, at central points, Job
changes the discourse; from speaking about God, he turns his speech directly to
God.13 ‘Only grant two things to me, then I will not hide myself from your face:
withdraw your hand far from me, and do not let dread of you terrify me. Then call,
and I will answer or let me speak, and you reply to me’ (13:20-22). The externality
which pain implies is not a worldly object to be conceived, but arrives as a You from
beyond the world and its conceptions. Whereas the friends invite responses to their
charges from Job, Job cannot engage in that dialogue: the phenomenology of pain
does not allow for disengaged reason.

12
It thus also puts the Old Testament genre of Wisdom into jeopardy. See Andre LaCocque, ‘Job and
Religion At Its Best’, Biblical Interpretation 4, no. 2 (1996): 131–153; 134.
13
Cf. David B. Burrell, Deconstructing Theodicy: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering
(Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008), 17, 109.

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52 Espen Dahl

The Sense and Non-sense of Pain

As a dialogue presupposes that the communication makes sense, there is a further
impediment for the dialogue to succeed; for there is certainly a dense materiality in
embodied pain that does not easily transfer into communicable sense. If there is any
sense to pain, it must be possible to translate it into semantically meaningful utteran-
ces, but also find a place within a further scheme of meaning, be it theological, jurid-
ical, or metaphysical. Some, such as Christian Gr€ uny, have suggested that pain
resists meaning in both these ways, arguing that pain is the most elementary mani-
festation of the meaningless.14 Though there is something to it, the problem with
such a view is that pain also seems to manifest the most elementary form of sense: it
elicits the very distinction between evil and good. According to Philippe Nemo, pain
is not only meaningful, it is the very excess and transcendence of signification.15 Per-
haps the best way to do justice to the attractiveness of both those views is to regard
pain as withdrawing from meaning, neither because it sinks into dumb materiality,
nor because its significance is transcendent, but because of its incomprehensible
proximity, its mute presence. Pain is closer to us than we usually are to ourselves; it
marks the inescapable incarnation of a vulnerable human creature from this side of
any construction of meaning.16 Yet, it does not prevent Job from searching for justice
and meaning; it rather puts it within bounds. While keeping the search for compre-
hension firmly tied to the point from which it arises – pain – this point itself evades
and withdraws from comprehension. The material presence of its manifestation sim-
ply collapses the spaces and distance that normal reference and signification presup-
pose. This inconceivable proximity of pain is, I believe, the underlying reason why
pain at once gives rise to and blocks the success of the dialogue of the Book of Job.
Such a view of the meaning and resistance to meaning in pain, its sense and non-
sense, is a precarious one. On the part of the sufferer, he or she might be led to cut
off all ties to others and the world and to lock him- or herself into a private, nonsen-
sical world. It is not hard to see Job attracted to such a position in his growing impa-
tience with his friends’ accounts (13:4-5, 16:2-6), and in his disillusion confronted
with the lack of cosmic moral order (9:16-22, 13:18-21, chap. 24). On the part of the
bystanders, the precarious sense/non-sense of pain may easily lead them to lose
touch with pain’s resistance to meaning and ascribe to it a meaning that neglects the
phenomenon itself. In the Book of Job this comes to expression as the friends repeat-
edly, from different angles, offer systematic accounts from which Job’s suffering
ostensibly add up. Appealing time and again to the unbreakable wheel of justice, the
wisdom of the ancient fathers, or the fallible human condition – all such appeals sub-
sume Job’s instance to an overarching logic. Whether initially intended to be comfort-
ing or not, they systematically refuse to attend to Job’s singular, inescapably concrete
experience of pain, and confront him instead with general outlooks. When Job says:
‘Have windy words no limit? Or what provokes you that you keep on talking?’
(16:3), he is referring to the friends’ detached and general accounts. It is precisely the

14
uny, Zerst€orte Erfahrung: Eine Ph€anomenologie des Schmerzes (W€
Christian Gr€ urzburg: K€
onigshausen &
Neumann, 2004), 40.
15
Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 146.
16
Cf. Michel Henry, ‘Phenomenology of Life’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanity 8, no. 2 (2003):
97–110; 103.

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detachment and generality that signifies their failing ability to comfort Job in pain as
their words become existentially empty.
The friend’s strategy not only fails to deliver comfort, it might even be dangerous.
From a decided modernist point of view, Adorno has emphasized how universal
explanations of evil have lost their credibility after Auschwitz: universal logic has
displayed itself as unable to prevent evil – it has even turned out to be an efficient
instrument of it. According to Adorno’s perspective, modern rationality has become
closed in on its own immanence, absorbing into its own what could otherwise
oppose it and correct it. Since rationality seeks understanding as well as rational con-
trol, what it cannot tolerate is exceptions to its reign: the remainders of brute nature,
or what Adorno calls “the addendum” (das Hinzutretende). Such an addendum pre-
cisely resists conceptual power. Facing the dark side of modern rationality, however,
the awareness of the addendum is exactly what must be preserved for the sake of
morality – and also for Adorno, ‘the dark stratum’ of physical pain here proves
decisive:

If to say to you that the true basis of morality is to be found in bodily feeling, in
identification with unbearable pain, I am showing you from a different side
something which I earlier tried to indicate in a far more abstract form. It is that
morality, that which can be called moral, i.e. the demand for right living, lives
on in openly materialist motifs. The metaphysical principle of the injunction that
“Thou shalt not inflict pain” . . . can find its justification only in the recourse to
material reality, to corporeal, physical reality, and not to its opposite pole, the
pure idea.17

For my purpose, it matters less that Adorno here speaks of the new injunction,
which is a matter of morality, and not specifically about suffering evil. What I, how-
ever, want from Adorno’s considerations is simply his attention to the way in which
the physical manifestation of pain resists, or should resist, abstraction. Its materiality
is, however, not reduced to mute insignificance: for Adorno, it gives rise to a new
moral imperative; for the sufferer, it puts the search for the meaning of the non-
sense of pain on a new track.
The upshot for The Book of Job is that in avoiding acknowledging the acuity of
physical pain, the friends participate in an abstract ideology that, following Adorno,
all too easily legitimates evil and silences all protests. To abstract evil from the par-
ticular case is to explain it away; it suppresses the fact that suffering pain is always
concrete. This is, perhaps, also what Job must gradually learn: that there is some-
thing unique to the revelation of pain; that despite its resistance to explanations and
justifications, it points to some kind of significance of physical suffering. In its ines-
capable materiality, Job’s pain shows him, in a negative way, that the concrete expe-
rience does not point toward an allegorical meaning, rational or moral reconciliation,
but in fact destroys any illusions. Its significance insists on the inescapable fact of
Job’s embodied life, and thus makes absolutely salient, in Philip Goodchild’s words,

17
Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 116–117. For an overview of the significance of
addendum in Adorno’s philosophy, see Mathijs Peters, ‘“The Zone of the Carcass and the Knacker” – On
Adorno’s Concern with the Suffering Body’, European Journal of Philosophy 21 (2013): 1–21.

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‘what matters in matter’.18 If this is so, then any interpretation of the Book of Job
that takes Job’s pain seriously into account must read the book, not as any kind of
theodicy or spiritual allegory, but read it as a critique of any such attempts. For the
book constantly leads the reader’s attention back from abstraction and towards the
inescapable concretion of the suffering of evil – as pain, inescapably piercing into
Job’s flesh. Despite the concrete nature of pain, however, there might still be a
‘beyond’ of pain, implied in its phenomenological temporality.

The Beginning and the End of Pain

The question that Job’s pain raises is not, as Leibniz and later Heidegger will have it:
‘Why is there something and not nothing?’ Pain overthrows both the distance and
the neutrality of the metaphysical question. Job’s primary question is rather the far
more biblical: ‘Why is there evil rather than good?’19 Even after the rationality of jus-
tice according to the Law is given up, the question is not silenced, but intensifies
and made more intimate. In Job’s case, the question ‘Why me?’ of the evil suffered is
at once deeply personal and value laden.
Together with this ‘Why me?’ there is also another Biblical question that resonates:
‘How long?’20 concerning revolt in face of the temporality of pain. It is as if the
arrow not only fixes a place, the lived body, but also a time: the present now. From
the pressure put on the now, the experience of pain refers back to its coming into
being that has already happened and that should not have come to pass; but since it
has come to pass, it also entails that it should immediately come to an end. This
makes temporality into the antidote of the internal temporal experience of joy, which
craves that it should go on forever, without beginning or end, perhaps as an eternal
recurrence.21 In the everyday experience of time, past and future spill over into each
other through the present, where the present takes up the possibilities of its past in
order to project it into the future. But in pain, this flow is arrested by the aversive
hurting that nails one to the present, severed from an irretrievable past and an
unforeseeable future. The past and future do not, however, completely disappear but
return in a highly indirect manner. Given the aversive presence of pain, the sufferer
cannot help desperately yearning for a past in which pain was ‘not already’ there, or
alternatively, reach out for an impossible ‘not yet’ where pain is finally overcome.22
In the Book of Job, the temporality of pain is expressed through the figure of birth
and death. In both cases, the burden of the unbearable and inescapable pain is what
Job cannot but wish to undo. When Job breaks his silence, it is famously by cursing
the day of his birth. The theme of the entire chapter 3 is announced by the words:
‘Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, “A man-child is
conceived”’ (3:3). Job’s anguished cry is certainly motivated by pain, but it also
evokes an echo of the state of non-existence, the nothingness from which Job was
created. Perhaps for this reason it is internally related to the other temporal extreme,

18
Philip Goodchild, ‘The Logic of Sacrifice in the Book of Job: Philosophy and the Practice of Religion’,
Cultural Values 4, no. 2 (April 2000): 167–193; 188.
19
Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 104, 107.
20
Just as in Psalm 13, Job is concerned about the silence of God and the hiding of His face (13:22–24).
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 262.
22
Thomas Fuchs, ‘Die Zeitlichkeit des Leidens’, Phenomenologische Forchung 1 (2001): 59–77.

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from the nothingness of his non-birth to the nothingness of death, as Philippe Nemo
has suggested.23 As annulment of birth reaches for the ‘not already’ of Job’s present
pain, death will mean the end of pain, and in this sense, its ‘not yet’. Hence, Job’s
cursing of his birth leads to his longing for death: ‘Why is light given to one in mis-
ery, and life to the bitter in soul, who longs for death’, he laments. But this longing
is precisely denied. He continues, ‘but [death] does not come [for those who] dig for
it more than hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find
the grave’ (3:20-22). What opposes the wish is the same fact that blocks temporal
escape: pain. He longs for the complete passivity of death or for not being born, but
in suffering, life is only intensified in its relentless liveliness. And thus his speech of
birth and death ends: ‘I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble
comes’ (3:26).
Even if Job is not granted an exit from his troubled state, there is still another ‘not
yet’ that he glimpses at times, a ‘not yet’ that transgresses birth and death in the
vague figure of a stubborn hope. This hope is not directed to the future as it can be
anticipated within the orbit of present life, but points to a state beyond, contrary to
all experience: ‘For I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand
upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall
see God’ (19:25-26, cf. 16:19). I note that the seeing of God, far from being an intellec-
tual state, is conceived as seeing ‘in my flesh’, thus suggesting a state in which pain
is overcome and the body healed. Despite the insistence of such a radically different
future, Job’s ensuing monologue attests that such insistence can only be glimpsed in
short moments that thrust itself to the fore in the middle of an otherwise inescapable
painful present.

Beginning and End and Mythical Logic

Both the reference to a time before birth and the pale beams of hope that stubbornly
emanate from pain itself are highly relevant to the reception of the prologue, God’s
speech and, especially, the epilogue. For in those passages, the temporality of pain
evolves further, to the time of God that exceeds Job’s birth and death. These tempo-
ral dimensions are developed in grand, at times cosmic, perspectives that are
designed to reveal God’s relation to his creation and persistence of suffering. But do
not such perspectives totally neglect the concreteness of Job’s pain on which I have
insisted? Indeed, God’s speech reverses Job’s perspective, from the individual case
(pain) toward the general (the Law), and approaches it from the general (creation)
toward the individual (Job’s pain). This reversal provides no explanation to Job, but
rather an invitation to see how his individual pain ‘permeates the universe as a
whole . . ., [and to see that] the individual ordeal of the just also has cosmic
dimension’.24
If there is a time beyond pain and evil, and if we can trust this to be God’s time,
then its trustworthiness relies on the conception of a God that opposes evil. This
urgently raises the underlying question: What role does God have in Job’s suffering?
Part of what makes any interpretation of the Book of Job complex is that more than

23
Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 103.
24
Andre LaCocque, ‘The Deconstruction of Job’s Fundamentalism’, Journal of Biblical Literature 126,
no. 1 (Spring 2007): 83–97; 88.

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one conception of God is operative in the book as a whole. In my opinion, it is cru-

cial to see that different accounts of God follow a trajectory that implies develop-
ment. Moreover, this development is put in motion by the book’s relentless way of
confronting the conception of God with the concreteness of suffering. There is no
doubt that Job gradually comes to see something that his friends are prevented from
seeing, namely that the evil of pain does not add up to the scheme of retributive jus-
tice they advocate, and so eventually outstrips their theology. But, as noted above,
even when unable to reconcile his pain with divine justice, even when his preconcep-
tion of God fails, Job goes on to beg God for his judgment (‘let me be weighed in a
just balance, and let God know my integrity’ [31:6, cf. 13:18, 13:22-24]). But when
God in chapter 38 finally reveals himself, the book’s conception of God undergoes
yet another change. The entire legal framework that is taken for granted up to that
point drops out. Job pleads for God’s response – and his plea is granted: God finally
responds by traversing the juridical and theological horizon outlined in the previous
dialogues.
This otherness of God to the established discourse does not, however, mean that
evil and goodness are denied or even diminished, so that God finally reveals himself
as a nature demon indifferent to human suffering, as Dorothea S€ olle will have it.25
Nor is the otherness of God made absolute and in that sense an abstract alterity. For
Job, God retains the personal characteristic of a You. Finally, Job’s God is certainly
not a metaphysical omnipotent God free of limitations, if this is taken in its absolute
sense. Such omnipotence is in any case beyond the scope of the biblical inheritance
and marks theology’s later lapse into onto-theology. Despite God’s personal alterity,
he reveals himself as highly active, highly powerful. Decisively, however, God’s
power is never absolute, but can only win out against his enemies. Indeed, the con-
cept of power conceptually presupposes the existence of opposing forces that the
power can fight or bend – else it will be devoid of content.26 There is certainly power
and might in God’s self-revelation in the Book of Job, but it is important to note that
God’s monologue breaks away from the grammar of the dialogue, and instead
appeals to grand visions and mythical figures. And wisely so – for there is no pre-
tended realism in myths – they rather reveal in the same measure as they conceal, in
order to preserve the mystery of God and of evil. Mythical accounts call for interpre-
tation, not rational explanation.27
A principal way in which the myth portrays God significantly parallels the tempo-
ral structure of pain: it unfolds a double temporal horizon that goes beyond both the
individual and the social world. It appeals to a prior state: ‘Where were you when I
laid the foundation of the earth?’ (38:4), whereupon the ensuing monologue depicts
a time in which God holds sway over the sublime creation. But the book will also
appeal to a future beyond the present state, most importantly, beyond its implication
of pain and evil which is articulated in the final epilogue. Between those temporal
horizons, the mythical figures of Behemoth and Leviathan appear, both symbols of

25
Dorothea S€olle, Leiden: Annehmen und Wiederstehen (Freiburg: Herder, 2013), 134.
26
Hans Jonas, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice’, The Journal of Religion 67 (1987): 8.
27
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967),
350–351. To take mythical language as worthy of interpretation is an option closed to Girard, for whom
all myths are disguised lies about violence. Consequently, Girard here finds nothing but the God of the
persecutors; Job: The Enemy of his People, 142.

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chaotic and threatening forces that come to play a central role in God’s speech. Argu-
ably, one point is to make plain that creation harbors negative forces that do not
stem from God’s will, but defy it, as evil. But the emphasis is placed on God’s assur-
ance that he dare pierce Behemoth’s nose with a snare and draw out Leviathan with
a fish-hook (40:24, 41:1). There is no doubt that God has power to create, but con-
tinuing creation also means to restrain the chaotic forces and hold their potential
destruction in check, and thus preserve order (cf. ‘who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?’ [38:8]). But God’s struggle will have to continue
against those forces towards the end.28
After God’s speech, Job retracts his words: ‘Therefore I have uttered what I did
not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know’ (42:3). But what
words exactly does Job rescind? It is arguably not only the withdrawal of juridical
ideology – which anyway never was adequate to his pain – but primarily of his iden-
tification of God as the agent behind the arrow that hit him. Early on Job rhetorically
asks: ‘if it is not he, who then is it?’ (9:24), assuming that it cannot be any other than
God who stands behind his pain. It is precisely this fundamental misidentification,
referring to God instead of the negative forces (Satan, Rahab, Behemoth, Leviathan),
that calls for Job’s repentance, and which is reoriented. The essential point of God’s
mythical speech is that God is not to be identified with evil; indeed, God actively
opposes it, and will finally overcome it. Job gets the message right as he confesses: ‘I
know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted’
(42:2), not referring to the actual state of the creation, but to God’s ultimate purpose:
creation’s final perfection.
If God’s revelation does in fact respond to Job’s pain, it is because its mythical
grand perspectives respond to the questions and longings entailed in the temporal
structure of Job’s pain: there is a ‘not yet’, one that goes beyond Job’s wish for noth-
ingness, and this ‘not yet’ is made trustworthy by an ‘already’, one that is prior to
pain, even prior to Job’s birth. God was not only present at the beginning, but is also
the creator of the foundation of the earth. Thus, God is not depicted as a detached
metaphysical principle beyond time, but as the becoming God, a God who is the
source of the world, always remaining in a relationship with the evolving world
even while at the same time pointing beyond it, to its foundation as well as its
redemption.
The troubling question of the fable-like prologue of the book still remains. On the
surface, it does not seem to confirm that God is unfailingly against evil and pain.
God is rather depicted as giving in to Satan’s evil tests. Why? Perhaps this is not the
question to which the prologue is trying to respond, for it only portrays a state that
the readers had already experienced, namely that God’s creatures – even the most
just – are tested by pain and suffering. If we thus grant that the myth is an imagina-
tive projection, one that projects some narrative accounts of fundamental present
experiences of reality, then it must, given my reading, somehow respond to Job’s
pain. Starting out from pain, the question is rather: Where does its evil come from?
The prologue does not, and cannot, give an explanation of that question. Neverthe-
less, it suggests something important about the place of evil in creation. Admittedly,
the prologue is ambiguous in speaking of the one whose ‘arm’ is actually stretched

28
LaCocque, ‘The Deconstruction of Job’s Fundamentalism’, 85–88.

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out against Job: Satan tempts God to do so (1:11, 2:5), whereas God forbids and later
allows Satan to do so (1:12, entailed in 2:6). This ambiguity invites the reader to
share in Job’s fundamental misconception during the dialogue, which is precisely
what is undermined and reoriented in chapters 38-42.
But even if Job learns that he is hurt not by God but by Satan, Satan’s origin still
remains enigmatic. When the Lord asks Satan where he is coming from, he enigmati-
cally replies: ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down
on it’ (1:7). There is, in other words, this ambiguous presence: not really part of the
foundation of the God-willed creation and yet undeniably present in it. This is the
place, or rather the non-place, of Satan – to and fro, up and down – that is, every-
where and nowhere, without orientation and purpose. In this sense, Satan shares
some of the essential traits with the serpent in the Garden of Eden: the serpent is
both within the garden and yet does not belong within its order. In both cases, there
are traits of chaotic forces without proper place and purpose, which further links
Satan and the serpent to the aquatic monsters of Rahab, Behemoth and Leviathan.
The presence without proper meaning underpins the book’s contention, namely that
the creation is God’s and yet God is not the author of evil. Thus, when the fable nar-
rates God’s acceptance of Satan’s tests, its point is precisely to acknowledge evil’s
undeniable presence, despite God. There is no explanation for why evil enters God’s
creation, and it does not make sense – and yet, evil is there. In refusing to subsume
this question to metaphysical or theological schemes, Satan’s non-place essentially
leads to Job’s rejection of any theological or juridical justification of pain’s cause and
purpose.
It is Satan – not God – that strikes Job, first by destroying all his possessions and
then his children, and secondly, by inflicting pain on him. If the latter marks the
phenomenological point of departure for the text, the destruction of Job’s worldly
possession suggests itself as a further mythological-poetic elaboration of it. For in his
unbearable pain, Job is engulfed in his suffering to the point where the world as
such loses its relevance to him. Read as an imaginative projection from the phenom-
enon of pain, the prologue neatly reflects how, not only the world and Job’s posses-
sions, but also the nearest social milieu becomes dead to him, culminating in the loss
of his children. He is singled out and utterly isolated by pain. Even so, as God
speaks from out of the whirlwind, he will point to a state prior to pain and evil,
even prior to Job’s birth – to the sublime fact that God laid the foundations of the
earth. If this was in the beginning ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31), then it refers to the time
of God as an ‘already’, as an Alpha that underpins the hope of an Omega where
God’s time will again be restored.
Turning to the epilogue, the mythical projection is altered from an unmemorable
past toward a future that is beyond worldly expectations. According to the epilogue,
Job is healed, restored, even receives twice as much as he had before (42:10) – a
happy ending, to be sure. But if this is simply a Hollywood solution to the problem
of Job, it is totally at variance with the rest of the book. It is crucially important,
therefore, not to place its mythical structure on the same level as the dialogue.
Indeed, by aligning the forward-pointing direction of God’s overcoming of evil, and
Job’s occasional hope for redemption, I believe that the epilogue is most appropri-
ately read as an eschatological sign. There is, in spite of pain and fractured human
understanding, one thing the book will not give up: there exists an ‘already’ prior to
pain, and therefore also a ‘not yet’ after pain. This promise, beyond Job’s death wish,
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is the religious response that springs up from the temporality of pain itself: the hope
held in reserve of a state beyond pain, where investments in the world and the per-
sons in it will return to Job.
For the time being, posited in the middle between the foundation of the world
and the state to come, between earthbound reason and hope, pain must be endured,
but we can have faith. The suffering Job is not fully in the world of the Law, but nei-
ther is he in another reality. Job is situated in the chaotic interval between a perceiva-
ble human world, and an eschatological promise beyond the scope of the human.29
Here – and only at this point – is the tradition of reading Job as the symbol of the
virtue of patience appropriate (cf. James 5:11): portraying Job in pain at once con-
fronted with a Law of the world that is no longer intelligible, and yet waiting for a
good beyond.

29
Goodchild, ‘The Logic of Sacrifice’, 172–173.

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