Introduction

I

One of the milder paradoxes that shape this greatest Jewish work of art is that its hero is a Gentile. Its author may have been as well. We know nothing about him, nothing about his world; he is even more anonymous than Homer. With Homer, at least, we can picture a society of competing principalities, each with its warriors and court and ceremonial feasts where the bard recites his ancient songs to the accompaniment of the lyre, like blind Demodocus in the Odyssey. But there is not the slightest bit of evidence about the author of Job: not when or where he wrote, or for what kind of audience. When we try to imagine him, we are left with a blank, or with one of those patriarchal figures dressed in bright monochrome robes who suddenly appear, devout and straight-nosed, between the pages of illustrated Bibles.

Yet however foreign the poet originally was, his theme is the great Jewish one, the theme of the victim. “Someone must have slandered J., because one morning he was arrested, even though he had done nothing wrong.” That is what makes Job the central parable of our post-Holocaust age, and gives such urgency to its deep spiritual power.