Review in: Interpretation
2008 62: 78
Review door: Carol
A. NewsomGevonden op: http://int.sagepub.com/content/62/1/78.full.pdf+html
Job
by Samuel E. Balentine Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Smyth & Helwys,
Macon, Ga., 2006.
750 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-5731-2067-8.
OF THE MAKING OF COMMENTARIES there seems to be no end, and
one often wonders if the reduplication of effort on the part of so many senior
scholars is the best use of intellectual capital. But there can be no question
that Samuel Balentine's commentary on Job represents a major contribution, not
only to studies of the book of Job but also to the project of renovating the
biblical commentary as a locus for intellectually serious hermeneutical work.
The Smyth and
Helwys Bible Commentary Series sets out an ambitious agenda for its authors,
asking them to engage not only the standard range of historical-critical
methods but also aspects of the history of interpretation, including the
theological tradition, literature, visual arts, and popular culture. Above all,
the emphasis is hermeneutical. While such a comprehensive agenda is commendable
as a general goal, the book of Job lends itself exceptionally well to this
approach, and in Balentine the project finds an interpreter brilliantly equal
to the daunting task.
By
and large, Balentine situates his reading of Job within the range of
interpretive options that are representative of contemporary Joban scholarship.
One will not find here radical challenges or strikingly novel frameworks for
interpreting the book. And indeed, that is not really the task of commentary writing.
In this volume, however, are many new and creative exegetical insights and
juxtapositions with other biblical texts. Balentine takes a moderate approach
to the issue of the history of the composition of the book of Job (e.g., the
prose tale as probably the oldest part, the Elihu speeches in chs. 32-37 and
perhaps the wisdom poem in ch. 28 as later additions, the third cycle as a
difficult but intelligible part of the original design of the book). As he
notes, although each addition to the book may have been intended to address
perceived difficulties, each nevertheless ends up increasing the tensions.
Balentine lets exegetical judgment guide him in his decisions about how to read
these sections within the book as a whole. He lets Elihu remain as an "intruder,"
a later addition to the book, though he grants him a full and thoughtful
interpretation. But the rest of the book he reads as a tensive but intelligible
whole, however it may have historically come to be. Thus he decides to
interpret ch. 28 as Job's words (though clearly describing other interpretive
options). While I am still not
persuaded by this interpretive option, Balentine makes the strongest case yet
for what these words mean for understanding Job as a character and for the
developing issues of the book if they are spoken by Job himself. Similarly,
Balentine opts not to treat the transition from the poetry to the concluding
prose at 42:7-9 as a sharp fracture line in the book, but rather "as the
conclusion to the whole story" (p. 708). Balentine rejects the
notion that the prose tale represents simply a return to the status quo ante
and instead sees it as reflecting and effecting several transformations.
Thus it serves as a genuine conclusion, signaling a resolution of key issues.
Yet if these characters return to inhabit the world of the prose tale, none of
them—including God—is quite the same as he was in chs. 1-2.
Balentine's interpretation of the conclusion is
mediated through his understanding of what occurs in the divine speeches and
Job's response to them in 42:1-6. What happens there is the culmination of an
issue that Balentine sees as having run like a red thread through the
dialogues: an examination of the nature and meaning of human existence. Indeed,
it is one of the signal strengths of Balentine's commentary that he shows how
deeply dialogical the book really is. Although many perceive the friends, Job,
and God to be talking past one another, Balentine carefully demonstrates that
certain core issues are repeatedly addressed from a variety of different
perspectives. Moreover, he gives each one its due, exploring what needs to be
taken seriously, even in positions that may have little appeal for the
contemporary reader. The dialogue about the status, roles, and responsibilities
of humans in the cosmos emerges as the most central of these extended
conversations. Thus Balentine sees the animals in the divine speeches as
oblique but provocative moral exemplars and God's harsh address to Job in
40:6-14 as "challenging Job to live still more boldly into the role that
God has specially created for human beings... to participate in the governance
of the world with the pride and courage that derives from being charged with
responsibilities that are only a littler lower than God's" (p. 682), a legitimately
"proud" role that finds its surprising analogue in Job's fellow
creatures Behemoth and Leviathan. Thus Job's final, syntactically ambiguous
words in 42:6 are his acknowledgment of his transformed understanding of
humanity (i.e., "dust and ashes"). If Job is thus transformed,
Balentine suggests (though he does not develop the idea in full) that God, too,
is transformed through the encounter with Job, subtly acknowledging through the
double restoration of Job's possessions that humans have a right to call God to
account for injustice and responding to a prayer that Job prays not only for
his friends but also for God (pp. 715-17; see also p. 573).
Balentine's
reading of Job is immensely powerful, and this brief summary of some of its
major points does not adequately convey the exegetical richness of his
interpretation. Yet there is something that gives me pause. The book emerges
from Balentine's reading as disconcertingly "useful." Although he
acknowledges the sublimity of the divine speeches, the emphasis seems to be on
the speeches as providing lessons for Job to learn about himself. God
encourages Job's participation in their mutual task of just governance. But
does this interpretation blunt the edge of a wilder, more terrifying
encounter—one that may not be quite as amenable to theological ethics? Does it
fall prey to the temptation to "put Leviathan on a leash"? This is
the same critique, in fact, that I would make of my own earlier (pre-2003) work
on Job. The tension between addressing the legitimate needs of an interpretive
community and being able to bring to that community something more disturbing
than perhaps even the interpreter wishes to hear is one of the most difficult
aspects of Joban interpretation. I suspect that Balentine and I simply disagree
about the exegesis of the text, but the meta-issue is important in its own
right.
Thus far, I have been discussing
Balentine's commentary as though it were an ordinary commentary—but it is far
more than that. One of the features that distinguishes the Smyth and Helwys
commentaries is the use of extensive artwork and of sidebars. The sidebars may
provide additional critical information (e.g., analyses of the structure,
ancient Near Eastern context, discussion of textual problems) or the complementary
or divergent views of other scholars, but Balentine often uses them to include
poetry and excerpts from novels and literary essays that bear on the issue in
question. Sometimes Balentine comments on the excerpts. At other times he
simply lets them speak for themselves. It is as though Job were visited not
just by the three friends named in the text, but by a whole host of more
congenial friends he never knew he had—friends like Emily Dickinson,
Shakespeare, John Updike, Robert Frost, Mark Twain, and Längsten Hughes.
Balentine gestures the reader toward further conversations with these poets and
writers, drawing Job squarely into dialogue with a wide swath of the western
literary tradition, often in unexpected ways.
While the sidebars enormously
enrich the commentary, they do remain, as their physical location indicates,
somewhat marginal to the work of the commentary itself (some are not even in
the book but only on the accompanying CD). The sections entitled
"Connections," however, are more central, and here one recognizes
fully the extraordinary accomplishment of Balentine's commentary. In too many
commentaries, hermeneutical engagement is thin, slapdash, theologically trite,
and not much related to the preceding exegesis. Balentine's hermeneutical work
deftly teases out the deep issues of the text and draws out the implications of
what the biblical text is talking about for related explorations in philosophy,
ethics, theology, popular culture, and life itself. How refreshing to see a
biblical scholar engage Martha Nussbaum on the moral significance of the
emotions, Elaine Scarry on beauty and justice, or George Steiner on the perils
of reading Kafka, and on and on. Yet for all the intellectual breadth and
seriousness of these discussions, they are eminently accessible and deeply
evocative for the pastoral tasks of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care.
Balentine's commentary stands as a model for what commentary writing could and
should be. Even more, what he has accomplished has profound implications for
what theological education should be doing to equip the interpreters of
Scripture.
Carol
A. Newsom
EMORY
UNIVERSITY
ATLANTA,
GEORGIA
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