After his herds have been finished off by marauders and gushes of heavenly fire, and his children have been flattened by falling masonry, and he himself has been covered in running sores from head to toe—after all this happens to the blameless man, he cracks. He sits on an ash heap, seeping and scratching, and reviles the day he was born. “Let that day be darkness,” as the King James Version has it. “Let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”

Howls of despair are a biblical staple, but Job’s self-curse—the special physics of it, the suicidal pulse that he sends backwards, like a black rainbow, toward the hour of his own conception—is singular. Dispossessed of everything, he is choosing nothing. That first prickle of my existence, the point of light with my name on it? Turn around, All-Fathering One, and eclipse it. Delete.

Yale University Press

Edward L. Greenstein’s new translation of the Book of Job is a work of erudition with—as we shall see—a revolutionary twist. A professor emeritus of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, Greenstein is not going for the deep-time sonorities of the Authorized Version. His language is lumpy with scholarly fidelity to the text. But the shock of repudiation is undiminished. “Why couldn’t I die after leaving the womb—Just go out the loins and stop breathing?” his Job demands. “For what did knees have to receive me? For what were the breasts that I sucked?” And later: “Why have you made me your target?” This is where we moderns, we dopes marooned in the universe, love Job and find brotherhood with him. Because he’s been in us since the beginning, since the first germ of our separateness from everything else—a man confronting the mystery, as if there was a strand of our DNA in the shape of a question mark: Why?

Now some friends of Job appear and offer, one after another, the conventional pieties: God is great, Job must have done something wrong, how dare he question the ways of the Lord, etc. They’re hard to take, these friends—Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, droning away. Job rejects their arguments, and it’s here, as the debate goes windily back and forth, that a 21st-century reader reaches for his phone. The stark, existential lines of the drama have gotten spoiled; the Kafka-voltage has dropped.

But then: enter God. “Up speaks YHWH,” as Greenstein puts it, momentarily folksy—a voice “from the windstorm.” “Bind up your loins like a man,” God warns Job, before stamping on the effects pedal and delivering perhaps the most shattering speech ever recorded. Question after question, power chord after power chord: “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? … Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades, Or loosen the cords of Orion? … Do you give the horse its bravery?” No explanation; no answer for Job; no moral or theoretical content whatsoever. It’s the interrogation of consciousness by pure Being, by the Logos, by the unstopping, unmediated act of creation itself. Do not try this at home. “Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom, As it spreads its wings toward the south?” The human intellect shrinks before the onslaught. The language is incomparable. God, it turns out, is the greatest poet; no one can touch him.