Review of Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Book of Job: Translation, Introduction, and Notes

Bibliographical details:
Scheindlin, R. P. (1998). The Book of Job: Translation, Introduction, and Notes. New York: W. W. Norton.

Publisher’s information:
One of the most powerful and unsettling Bible stories, The Book of Job undermines the claim that our world is governed by justice and meaning. It does so through a poetry of unsurpassed beauty, captured in Raymond P. Scheindlin’s superb new translation.

Scheindlin’s Job is not a patient sufferer but a defiant man who eloquently demands an argument with God. Job’s words land like a fist, but he is left speechless by God’s reply from the storm – a commanding survey of creation and a challenge to man’s place in it. Job’s acceptance of God’s power comes with a dignity and a freshness that make it compelling even today. In Scheindlin’s vivid translation an ancient text speaks to us directly of timeless questions and passions.

‘[Scheindlin] has given us a beautiful new translation and a profound commentary.’ – Muriel Spark

‘Mellifluous and eloquent.’ – New York Times Book Review

Table of contents:
Acknowledgments … 7
Introduction … 9
The Book of Job … 53
Notes to the Book of Job … 159
Bibliography … 224
Index … 227

	Review
	This is not a full commentary on the book of Job. The subtitle describes the book’s purpose well, for it offers, first and foremost, a new translation of Job. In addition to that, we also find some fairly extensive introductory considerations and some textual notes.
	The Introduction begins with a discussion of the book’s theology and poetry. Scheindlin works from the assumption that an ancient tale of Job the Patient was in the 5th or 4th century BCE turned into the ‘literary and religious masterpiece’ (p. 10) we now find in the Bible. By casting Job as a non-Israelite, avoiding allusions to Israel’s history and institutions, and providing a setting in ‘a vague prehistoric age’, the book’s hero is deliberately drawn as ‘Everyman’.
	Scheindlin then proceeds to summarize the development of the plot, commenting especially on Yahweh’s surprising approval of Job in the epilogue. Against many a voice to the contrary, he affirms the unity of the poem and the narrative, arguing that both affirm that Yahweh is outside human calculations of justice … Yahweh is pleased with Job because, although he complained, he at least maintained the difficult truth that the author wants the reader to accept: that God’s management of the universe is arbitrary (p. 16). Scheindlin’s understanding of the book of Job is nicely summarized in his contention that it renders ‘meaningless the consolations of conventional piety, traditional wisdom, and theology. In their place it offers a poem’ (pp. 22-23). It is by means of its poetry that the book seeks to come to terms with and give full expression to our human suffering and thereby to offer consolation. Poetry, Scheindlin maintains, ‘is used to shift the ground from reason, where life must lose, to emotion, where it at least has a chance’ (p. 25). In addition, the poetry gives full expression to Job’s – and thus also our own – anger.
	The introduction also offers a discussion of poetic form, which looks at issues such as syntactic-semantic parallelism, the richness of Job’s vocabulary and its grammatical and syntactic anomalies. Scheindlin here argues against regarding the book’s difficulties as stemming primarily from problems of transmission, maintaining instead that its difficult language is an essential characteristic of the poem: ‘the author of Job may have decided that a difficult texture was the right one for his emotionally wrenching theme – a tortured language to describe life’s torment’ (p. 31).
	Next to be discussed is the shape of the book. Scheindlin here notes that the speeches do not always evince a clear progression of thought, even though there is an intensification of the friends’ accusations of Job just as Job’s replies also show some progression. It should be noted that Scheindlin resists the tendency to reassign parts of Job’s final speeches in the third cycle to Bildad or Zophar, arguing that the language, which echoes the views of his friends, is best understood as ironic.
	The meditation on wisdom in Job 28, which ‘provides a needed change in tone from the vehemence of Job’s speech in chapter 27 to a cool solemnity, a contrasting background for Job’s impassioned concluding soliloquies’ (p. 37), is understood as preparation for the divine speeches. At the same time, however, Scheindlin regards Job 28 as ‘too straightforward to match the subtlety of the book as a whole’, for it ‘derives from the certainty of wisdom literature, while the rest of the book is grounded in the ambiguity and conflict characteristic of real poetry’.
	As regards the Elihu speeches, Scheindlin praises both their poetry and the fact that they succeed in creating ‘a character who is a real personality’ (p. 38). He accepts that these speeches may have been a later addition, because they do not fit with the book’s dramatic structure, but he is nevertheless adamant that they make perfect sense as a complement to the book’s original parts. Scheindlin’s high opinion of the book’s poetry again shines through in his comment that Elihu is able, through the sheer magic of his verse, to evoke Yahweh and compel his appearance … by its placement, Elihu’s speech is a convincing metaphor for the power of poetry, and thus partakes of the very essence of the book (p. 40). In similar vein, God is said, in his speeches, which move from anger and aggression to a more contemplative mood, ‘to become more and more caught up in the contemplation of His own works, more and more engaged in His own poetic activity of describing them’ (p. 40). Poetry for Scheindlin is the message: ‘having heard Yahweh’s poem, Job acknowledges his submission’ (p. 41).
	Although Scheindlin is happy to accept that the book’s structural irregularities indicate a historical development that advanced in stages, he at the same time maintains its essential literary coherence.
	Finally, Scheindlin turns his attention to the interpretation and translation of the book of Job. He notes that modern philology has allowed us to make much progress in our understanding of the Hebrew text, and he offers helpful explanations of the process (e.g. recourse to cognates in other Semitic languages, emendation of corrupt passages) whereby commentators arrive at the meaning of difficult or obscure phrases. As regards emendations of the text, not only does Scheindlin profess to be ‘more tolerant of emendations of vowels and word divisions than of consonantal emendations’ (p. 45), he also cautions that emendations, which in any case have to be both simple and plausible, should only be a final resort.
	Scheindlin’s Translation of Job, which is at the heart of this volume, manages for the most part to make sense of the flow of thought without having to resort to a rearrangement of verses. The aim of the translation is to ‘produce a poem in English that reflects the poetic values specific to biblical Hebrew and the original Book of Job’ (p. 46).
	Scheindlin stresses that what to us may appear to be bizarre images and expressions, may not only have been perfectly intelligible to the original readers, but may in fact have been ‘brilliant inventions’ by the author. Thus, emendations of the text that are undertaken due to a failure on the part of the modern interpreter to appreciate the text because of their limited cultural knowledge risk eliminating precisely what is distinctive about the book of Job.
	Scheindlin’s own translation uses indentation to indicate the relationship between parallel lines, and it follows the Hebrew original closely in those cases where he believes the author’s rhetoric to have been intended to produce a particular effect. The philosophy underlying his translation is well summarized by Scheindlin himself when he notes that the result does not have to sound exactly like English. Part of the pleasure of reading an ancient text lies in its exoticism. I have not gone out of my way to stress the book’s foreignness, but neither have I tried to disguise it. I have adopted a register of English somewhat higher than that of ordinary prose, since the Hebrew is decidedly not colloquial, even for biblical times (p. 47).> The translation is followed by approximately sixty pages of Notes, which alert readers to emendations of the text (where these have been unavoidable) and explain the ancient setting and background where such information is essential to a proper understanding. A further function of the notes is to help readers understand the argument and train of thought of the book of Job.
	The book concludes with a brief bibliography of medieval commentators, standard translations and modern studies and commentaries as well as quite a detailed and useful index.
	To sum up: Scheindlin’s volume offers a fresh translation of the book of Job by an expert in the field of Hebrew literature. It can be recommended to anyone looking for a translation that is readable while at the same time aiming to reproduce the poetic characteristics of the Hebrew original. The notes are useful aids to the understanding of the text, but due to their terseness they cannot, and are not intended to, replace a standard scholarly commentary. The introduction, in turn, provides some general orientation to the book of Job that stresses especially the richness and value of its poetry.

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