The Book of Job: Biblical Horror, Biblical Wonder

I’ve written quite a few times now about the ancient Mediterranean origins of western horror. I've written about Lamashtu and Tiamat, the Furies and the Bacchae, Erichtho and Allecto. But there is another ancient Mediterranean origin story for western horror, which I haven't really gestured towards so much yet, but today is the day. That source is the Bible, and more specifically the Book of Job.

Before I launch into the text, let me say two things. One: I love the Book of Job with all my heart, so do not for a single second believe that by my associating it with horror I mean the text any disrespect of any kind. Two: I'm coming at this one from the vantage point of being an expert in medieval theology, religious culture, and Biblical exegesis. I have spent the last few years of my life reading the last thousand or so years of Christian commentaries on the Book of Job. (In fact, I’m writing a new book about Job, so stay tuned for that, though probably way down the line!) Point is, if I seem to be presenting to you a Job you do not recognize, bear with me.

For those who are not intimately familiar with it, the storyline of the Job is fairly simple. In the beginning, God is confronted by Satan. Yes, actually, directly by Satan himself. God and Satan appear to be hanging out and talking. God is busily praising the virtue, obedience, and devotion of his favorite servant, Job, down among the humans. Satan listens with interest, and then starts needling God, provoking him, casting doubt on Job, by suggesting that the reason for Job’s piety is that God has been very generous with Job. Would Job, Satan politely asks, be so pious and devout if God were to turn on him in some way? To the readers’s horror, God's response to Satan's provocation is to say, Go ahead and test him yourself, Satan.

Let me reprise that real quick, in case you missed something. In this tale, God authorizes Satan specifically to torment God’s favorite human, Job. If you can think of a basic premise scarier than that one, go write a screenplay about it. From an existential standpoint, I have to say I’m hard-pressed to think of a more frightening scenario than this.

But initially, God puts a qualification on how Satan can test Job. Satan must leave Job's body intact and unharmed. That, of course, still leaves Satan with a good bit of leeway within which to cause Job harm. And harm him he does. Job's children die when a ceiling on a building collapses. Many of his livestock die. Much of his wealth is ruined and lost. But his body remains healthy, and Job manages to work through his grief, lift his hands to the sky, and continue to praise God. God, of course, is pleased.

Satan, however, is not. Satan returns to God says, Well, what do you expect? You have not yet afflicted his body. So, in the second disquieting episode of the Book of Job, God capitulates to Satan’s pressure again. He now gives Satan full rein to torture Job in any way he sits sees fit, including by visiting horrible pain and disease upon his body. Satan goes to Job and covers his body with sores and wounds, so painful and wretched that Job is reduced to scraping his flesh off with the jagged edges of broken pottery, and sitting in a bed of ash.

Is this horror? You bet it is. I’ve said before that horror combines cognitive shut-down with the affect of fear, and that it ends with a hangover. Well, God’s decision certainly provokes cognitive confusion in us (and in Job himself, as we’ll see) and it certainly should provoke the affect of fear. Because, after all, if God is willing to license the torture of Job—whom he especially loves—why wouldn’t he license the torture of the rest of us? Horror hangover, celestial style.

At this point, Job is irate. He laments. He rages. He even questions God, asking why all these things are happening to him. But, crucially, he never for a single second doubts God. His faith never wavers. He never renounces God, despite direct pressure from his wife to do so. He never even casts aspersions on God's right to do as he pleases, nor on his justice. All he does is ask questions. Lots of them. Why is this happening to me? And he bemoans and renounces his own existence, saying he wishes that he had never been born, that the light had never shone on his eyes, that his mother had killed him in his infancy, and various other lamentations about the pointlessness and agony of his own existence. But again, never once does he doubt or renounce the Lord. This is critical.

In addition to all the extraordinary hardship Job has been made to suffer on the basis of Satan's having goaded God, he also, apparently, has to suffer the indignity of having three really shitty friends.

Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar all show up, ostensibly to comfort Job. Or at least to keep him company. But what they have actually come to do is convince him that, given the severity of ordeals he is going through, Job must have done something horrible, in order to bring God's wrath upon his head. The three friends, that is, can neither stomach nor fathom the idea that God might arbitrarily exercise severe judgment on someone without that person’s having done something to deserve it. We, of course, know better, because we saw the God v Satan interaction.

And interestingly, so does Job, even though he didn’t see the God v Satan interaction. So Job fights back against his three garbage friends, insisting upon his own innocence all the while, and pointing out that what has happened to him really does feel unfair and arbitrary. He keeps insisting—over their protests that he must be guilty of something—that in fact it is God who owes Job an explanation for his conduct. Job keeps saying that he wants to put God on the witness stand, to ask Him some questions about why He is behaving this way. We have to be careful here, because this starts to look like Job is behaving in an upstartish manner. But in fact, the most fascinating thing about the book of Job is that it actively encourages a form of devotion in which questioning the Almighty can form a part of the practice of faith.

Let me repeat that: part of what Job is about is the idea that faith entails a right to question divine authority. Not to renounce it, not to deny it, but to question it.

In fact, when God ultimately does appear to justify himself to Job, which he does later in the story, he punishes the three friends, and restores to Job all of his prior wealth, multiplied and increased in every way. God, in effect, rewards Job for having had enough faith in God to feel free to question him.

This section of the Bible is almost invariably interpreted –at least in the Christian tradition, with which I am most familiar—as a parable about patience. The notion you see in almost the entire Christian exegetical tradition on Job, running from, say, five hundred years after the death of Jesus all the way through the modern day, is that Job gets rewarded because he suffered God's trials patiently. Job is a paragon of patience. Patience is a virtue. Therefore Job is virtuous. Therefore god rewards him.

The trouble is, if you actually read the story, that is not what happens. Job is not patient. He is impatient. He is questioning. He is cranky. He is impertinent. What he is not ever is doubtful or renouncing. So this is a biblical story that has been interpreted as an allegory of patience, but that actually manifests the idea that people have the right to question power. There’s a reason this is my most beloved, most favorite part of the Bible. (I’ll also note that, if you like poetry, which I hope you do, because poetry is horror’s most adjacent art form, both being centrally concerned with the triggering of emotion, you should go read Job immediately. It is, second only maybe to the Song of Songs, the most beautiful passage in the Bible. Like, it’s gorgeous. The poetry is unstoppable.)

But there is another very important dynamic at work in this narrative, and not contending with it really deflates the emotional, theological, spiritual, and philosophical value of the Book of Job. Before God reveals himself to Job and his friends, the four old men are first joined by a young man named Elihu. Elihu expresses his extreme disappointment in the older men whose conversation he has apparently been listening in on. He calls the old men fools, and says that if they were paying attention, and looking around at the created world, they would everywhere see evidence of God's infinite might, wisdom, and glory. Elihu talks about the gorgeousness of the earth, the miraculousness of the heavens, the beauty of human life at every scale. He talks about wonder. That is, Elihu’s core argument is that questioning God may be fine, but the underlying attempt to try to understand the nature and purpose of divine justice is a fool's errand, because the world around us offers pervasive proof of God’s truth and highlights the beauty of the divine plan. The created world around us is a miracle, and it demonstrates divine providence. And if you truly believe in Providence, with all your heart and soul, you do not need to understand the inner workings of divine justice, because you should carry your comfort and sense of purpose with you all the time. Elihu’s passage is magnificent; I almost invariably tear up when I teach it.

As soon as Elihu is done talking, God shows up, apparently clad in some kind of whirlwind. God is pretty awe-inspiring. When He starts talking, it turns out that He takes exactly the same position that Elihu had taken. He wags His finger a little bit at Job, not for having had the effrontery to ask questions, but for assuming that there was an easy answer to the question about the nature of divine justice in the first place. He much more sternly punishes Job's friends for daring to assume that they understood God’s plan.

But the largest rhetorical move that God makes in this scene is to ask Job and his friends a series of questions. The questions run like this: Were you there when I separated the ocean from the land? Is it you who makes the rain freeze into snow as it falls to the earth? Is it you who makes sure that plants grow, animals thrive, and people have have to eat? Is it you who holds up the heavens and prevents them from crashing down onto the earth and smashing it flat? Obviously, the answer to all of these questions is a resounding no. No one has all of these powers. No one has all of this knowledge. No one except God.

God wants Job and his friends to know exactly what Elihu had wanted them to know: he wants them to know that they should be taking comfort in the wonder of the created world. Nature, the heavens, the land, the sea, humanity itself, all of these things are epiphenomena, or manifestations, of God's supervening divine plan. Rather than seeking after modes of knowledge that exceed human understanding, we should simply look at the world around us, and open ourselves up to the kind of wondering marvel that Elihu seems so capable of. The ultimate lesson of Job is that people should practice wonder as part of their worship. Deliberately, consciously, purposively, and steadily. It is the experience of wonder within the self that is our best and surest way of being connected to God, and to His divine plan.

So that’s actually pretty awesome, as a place to wind up.

Going back to the beginning of this story, however, we have to contend with the fact that, whenever God wants to, He can also inflict horror. That is, the divine plan is not uniformly pleasant, positive, or beautiful. Sometimes, it is capricious, cold, and crushing. Providence encompasses horror every bit as much as it encompasses wonder. That is part of the mystery. That is part of what it is to have faith, accepting that wonder-horror dialectic as true, and accepting that the presence of horror does not in any way minimize or take away from the wonderful truths of God's creation.

I wrote an article 10 years ago, for a journal of medieval literature and culture. In this article, I argued that horror, traditionally a genre thought to post-date the industrial revolution, actually was alive and well in the Middle Ages. This is a claim I have doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on, as you have all seen on this Substack: the idea that horror originates in the 18^th century is dumb as rocks.

What to me was and still is particularly interesting about medieval horror narratives, is that it almost always operates in lockstep with its twin, wonder narratives. This, of course, is what I've just described in Job, and no accident: Job was one of the most important theological resources for subsequent explorations of the nature of horror all the way through the Reformation. The reason that horror and wonder go so well together is surprisingly simple: horror is a state of cognitive shutdown combined with the emotional state of fear, where wonder is a state of cognitive shutdown coupled with the emotional state of joy. Horror, then, is the antithesis of the miraculous. What the Biblical tradition offers, in the Book of Job, is a theological and philosophical answer to the experience of horror that we all know is a constitutive part of the experience of being human. And that answer is wonder. Your cognitive capacities are still shut down, but the affect you feel in contemplating a wondrous miracle is one of joy and happiness rather than one of fear and terror.

In the post Jobean tradition, that dialectic of horror and wonder is pervasively visible. I mean, literally, it comes up all over the place. The most recent American film to capitalize on this horror/wonder dialectic is Heretic. Go rewatch the very ending of that film, and you’ll immediately see what I mean.

But what I want to land on in this post is that, when you feel overwhelmed by horror, it’s important to go out and reconnect somewhere, somehow with whatever it is that brings you a sense of wonder. That is Job’s ultimate lesson. Not patience, but the eager exploration of the world as a place of wonder.