This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Pettys, V. F. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Let there be Darkness: Continuity and Discontinuity in the ‘Curse’ of Job 3

Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, P.O. Box 298130, Forth Worth, TX 76129, USA

This rhetorical and intertextual study of Job 3.1-31 finds in Job’s ‘curse’ a response to catastrophic suffering that is paradigmatic for both the linguistic construction of meaning and the reading of biblical texts. Job’s crisis exposes a fissure between human experience that does not conform to traditional understandings of a divinely ordered world and language constitutive of tradition. The resulting loss of coherence calls for a radical reordering of reality. Job recasts the schema of the Priestly creation account and convokes 16 jussives against the agencies of his birth—a pattern repeated in his Oath of Innocence—to conjure a world of reversals. Creation is dismantled even as its rhetoric provides the context for new meaning. A return to [UNKNOWN][UNKNOWN][UNKNOWN] (40.4) signals that the rift between experience and language may have begun to heal.

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Vol. 26, No. 4, 89-104 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/030908920202600406


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?