If we compare the legendary figure with the later Job, especially in the great summation that concludes the central dialogue, we can recognize that even his virtue lacks a certain generosity and wholeheartedness. That is why the bet doesn’t prove much. Job is too terrorized, from within his squalor, to do anything but bless the Lord: for all he knows, there might be an even more horrible consequence in store. The real test will come later, in the poem, when he feels free to speak with all of himself, to say anything.

There is a further irony about tam v’-yashar. When Job is handed over to the good graces of the Accuser, he is turned into the opposite of what the words mean in their most physical sense. He becomes not-whole: broken in body and heart. He becomes not-upright: pulled down into the dust by the gravity of his anguish.

The author moves us to heaven after the prologue’s first scene, and we may be tempted to admire his boldness. But heaven, it turns out, is only the court of some ancient King of Kings, complete with annual meetings of the royal council and a Satan (or Accusing Angel). As below, so above. Jung, in his Answer to Job, makes the point that, psychologically, the Accuser is the embodiment of “the Lord’s” doubt. In a more naive version of the legend, the god in his divine myopia would himself doubt the disinterestedness of his obedient human and would decide to administer the test on his own. Here, though the Accuser ostensibly plays the role of the villain, it is “the Lord” who provokes him. “Did you notice my servant Job?” How can the Accuser not take up the challenge? After all, that’s his job.

As Jung also points out, this god is morally much inferior to the prologue’s hero. We would have to be insensitive or prejudiced not to be nauseated by the very awareness of “the Lord’s” second statement to the Accuser: “He is holding on to his wholeness, even after you made me torment him for no reason,” and by the calm cruelty of “All right: he is in your power. Just don’t kill him.”

Nevertheless, if we want to be serious about the poem, we mustn’t take the legend too seriously. There is a profound shift when the verse dialogue begins; the change in language is a change in reality. Compared to Job’s laments (not to mention the Voice from the Whirlwind), the world of the prologue is two-dimensional, and its divinities are very small potatoes. It is like a puppet show. The author first brings out the patient Job, his untrusting god, and the chief spy/prosecutor, and has the figurines enact the ancient story in the puppet theater of his prose. Then, behind them, the larger curtain rises, and flesh-and-blood actors begin to voice their passions on a life-sized stage. Finally, the vast, unnamable God appears. How could the author have returned to the reality of the prologue for an answer to the hero of the poem? That would have meant “the Lord” descending from the sky to say, Well, you see, Job, it all happened because I made this bet…

No, the god of the prologue is left behind as utterly as the never-again-intentioned Accuser, swallowed in the depths of human suffering into which the poem plunges us next.