When we look at the world of the legendary Job with a probing, disinterestedly satanic eye, we notice that it is suffused with anxiety. Job is afraid of God, as well he might be. He avoids evil because he realizes the penalties. He is a perfect moral businessman: wealth, he knows, comes as a reward for playing by the rules, and goodness is like money in the bank. But, as he suspects, this world is thoroughly unstable. At any moment the currency can change, and the Lord, by handing Job over to the power of evil, can declare him bankrupt. No wonder his mind is so uneasy. He worries about making the slightest mistake; when he has his children come for their annual purification, it is not even because they may have committed any sins, but may have had blasphemous thoughts. The superego is riding high. And in fact, at the climax of his first speech in the poem, Job confesses that his “worst fears have happened; / [his] nightmares have come to life.” This is not a casual statement, added as a poetic flourish. Anxieties have a habit of projecting them- selves from psychological into physical reality. Job’s premonition turned out to be accurate; somewhere he knew that he was precariously balanced on his goodness, like a triangle on its apex, just waiting to be toppled over. There is even a perverse sense of relief, as if that heavy, responsible patriarch-world had been groaning toward deliverance. For any transformation to occur, Job has to be willing to let his hidden anxieties become manifest. He must enter the whirlwind of his own psychic chaos before he can hear the Voice.

As Maimonides was the first to point out, Job is a good man, not a wise one. The ascription of “perfect integrity,” which both the narrator and “the Lord” make, seems valid only in a limited sense. The Hebrew says tam v’-yashar, which literally means “whole (blameless) and upright.” Well, yes: Job has never committed even the most venial sin, in action or in thought. (For that very reason, his later agony and bewilderment are more terrible than Josef K.’s in The Trial.) In a broader sense, though, Job is not whole. He is as far from spiritual maturity as he is from rebellion. Rebelliousness — the passionate refusal to submit — is, in fact, one of the qualities we admire in the Job of the poem:

  Be quiet now — let me speak;
    whatever happens will happen.
  I will take my flesh in my teeth,
    hold my life in my hands.
  He [God] may kill me, but I won’t stop;
    I will speak the truth, to his face.