Meanwhile, Back at Job’s Ranch: Dual Storylines in the Book of Job

In the prologue of the book of Job (chs. 1–2), two related storylines happen simultaneously in a way that is unique in the Tanakh. In one storyline, God jousts with the Adversary about Job’s righteousness until agreeing to test it (1:6–12; 2:1–7). Meanwhile, back at Job’s ranch, a parallel storyline (1:1–5, 13–22; 2:8–13) takes place in which Job makes sacrifices to protect his children. In this storyline, all of his children — and livestock — are dead by the end of the day. The second story is given more detail and narrative space, especially when Job and his friends begin to debate the underlying reasons and appropriate responses to Job’s suffering (chs. 3–37).

In contrast to Job’s prologue, some stories in the Tanakh present heavy interaction between God and humans.¹ Heroes like Abraham and Moses famously argue back-and-forth with God (Gen. 18; Ex. 32). Prophets like Elijah and Elisha perform miracles (I Kgs. 17; II Kgs. 4). God sends Daniel an angel to shut the mouths of lions (Dan. 6). In these “Divine-Interaction” stories, God’s movement in the world is part of human storylines. In other stories, God’s hand moves behind the scenes, such as when Ruth chances into Boaz’s field as luck would have it (Ruth 2:3), or when Esther brings salvation to the Jews against all odds with no mention of God. In these “Divine-Silent” stories, divine interaction is not part of human storylines. Divine-Silent stories appeal to readers who may not see grand miracles and divine appearances in their daily lives; these narratives offer assurance that God nevertheless plays an active role in human history.²

The prologue of Job takes a different approach. It tells a Divine-Silent story in which God is overtly absent. But unlike these stories, it jumps to the divine realm where a parallel story is taking place on the same timeline. Divine-Silent narratives, like Ruth, Esther, and Ezra-Nehemiah, rarely include behind-the-scenes dealings in heaven. Stories about the heavenly realm are almost always relegated to Divine-Interaction stories. Even then, the heavenly scenes are usually described in first-person accounts by an in-story character (I Kgs. 22; Zech. 3; Dan. 7–12). By contrast, the narrator of Job’s prologue simply, and rather nonchalantly, switches between the two storylines as if it were as simple as switching between historiographical narratives of David and Saul. Even more distinctive is the impenetrable divide between the human and divine realms. Perhaps the closest they come to merging is when the Adversary silently inflicts inflammation on Job (2:7). Sara Japhet points out that this is a stark contrast from Divine-Interaction narratives like the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). She says: “God speaks of Job, but not to him… As for Job — he too does not talk to God but about God.”³ The detachment between the two realms is an important characteristic of the prologue, and it stands in contrast to the epilogue, which takes place after the realms collide and depicts a world in which God speaks directly to Job and his friends.

The parallel storylines build tension, highlight themes and character traits (most noticeably the power and knowledge disparity between God and Job), and show two sides of a character: in one storyline God actively deliberates with the Adversary, and in the other, God silently watches Job suffer. Tension mounts when these separate narratives begin to veer toward each other. In this article, I will argue that parallel storylines in the book of Job careen toward a collision that serves an important literary function.⁴ This collision questions the simplicity of Divine-Interaction stories, in which humans receive direct revelation from God, and it also questions the simplicity of Divine-Silent stories that portray humans who exhibit unquestioning trust that God is silently at work in human affairs.

Parallel Storytelling in Film

Film director Alfred Hitchcock is quoted as saying, “The name of making movies is, ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch.’”⁵ Hitchcock frequently ran simultaneous parallel storylines in his films to create tension. Alternating between storylines can allow a filmmaker to build dramatic tension by saving a climax for when the storylines meet, such as the storylines of Jefferson Smith and the political machine of Jim Taylor in Frank Capra’s 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.⁶ Sometimes parallel storylines highlight certain themes or character traits, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather II.⁷ They might also show two sides of a single character, as in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.⁸ In Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train, two unrelated storylines are given equal weight. Little is revealed of either, until the two storylines meet. In this case, parallel storytelling highlights contrasting or similar features of two characters and raises the stakes for their encounter.⁹ Hitchcock’s parallel storylines often involve characters who have not yet met, but their stories begin to careen toward each other into a collision.

In his 1954 film Rear Window, Hitchcock creates numerous storylines, but very little is revealed of any of them, except one.¹⁰ Viewers are introduced to L. B. Jeffries (portrayed by Jimmy Stewart), whose injury has confined him to a wheelchair in his apartment. He is a creative and adventurous photographer whose imagination easily runs away with him. Bored and immobile, he entertains himself by watching his neighbors through their windows. He has very little acquaintance with them and uses his imagination to supplement what little information he can gain about their stories. Multiple storylines begin to unfold from his limited viewpoint, but one plotline slowly begins to veer toward his own story when he suspects a murder has taken place. Media commentator Matthew Trask says, in many of Hitchcock’s films — Rear Window, The Birds, Psycho are just a few examples — the act of looking, and by extension the cinematic form, is used as much to hide information from the viewer as it is to deliver information in order to create a sense of unease and tension both on and off screen. In Rear Window we encounter a visual parallelism created through the use of the window frames that allow us to see two stories coinciding at the same time; the window frame essentially acts as a screen itself allowing us to see part of the story while hiding the full picture from us.¹¹

Throughout the film, Jeffries cranes his neck, peers through binoculars, and struggles to gather information about what is just outside of his purview. His imagination takes over at these edges, and he debates with his friends about whether he actually has evidence of wrongdoing, or whether his imagination is running away with him.

Job’s Rear Window

One might use a similar description for the protagonist of the book of Job, who is transfixed on learning more about the divine storyline. Like Jeffries and his friends, Job and his friends attempt to solve the mysterious death of Job’s children with the small glimpses they have from their rear window. They are given no special revelation about the divine storyline and look for clues in nature, tradition, and experience.¹² Job is convinced that God has committed a crime without leaving a clue behind. Like Jeffries’ friends, Job’s friends argue that the conclusions he draws from his limited purview are the result of an overreaching imagination. Like Jeffries, Job thinks his friends are unwilling to consider evidence because it will lead to frightening, unexpected conclusions about what is unseen.

Job complains numerous times that too much of the divine storyline happens off-screen, so to speak. In 9:3, he complains that such a powerful God would never answer to legal charges. He goes on to describe God’s unsearchable power over creation: the mountains do not even know when God moves them (9:5), God performs deeds that cannot be fathomed (9:10). Job’s own life is affected without his ability to see what God is doing: [God] passes me by — I am oblivious; [God] goes by me, but I do not notice (9:11). In 12:13–25, Job speaks of God’s monopoly on wisdom, which leaves world leaders with their pants falling down (v. 18) and stumbling in the dark like drunks (v. 25). In 23:3, he wishes he knew how to reach [God], How to get to the heavenly dwelling-place. Job wants more direct access to this divine storyline that is hidden from creation. Beginning in 7:12, Job addresses God directly, then slowly begins challenging the Almighty to appear in a direct face-to-face debate. In 9:32–10:2, Job culminates his poem about God’s unsearchable power by bemoaning his inability to meet the deity in court, where he might feel protected enough to speak his mind and demand a list of accusations. In 13:20–24, he again longs for a genuine, back-and-forth dialogue with God. In 23:3–7, he depicts himself finding God’s dwelling-place and refuting God’s accusations head-on. In 31:35–37, he yearns for God to reply to his legal challenges and reveal the list of accusations. Like the protagonist of Rear Window, Job wonders if his accusations will ever lead to a confrontation with the accused.

The entire prologue of Job unfolds like a story in which the human world has little contact with the heavenly realm.¹³ Even the slightest hint of revelation is painfully absent in Job’s storyline. It hardly seems a coincidence that Job loses all his children and property through a series of successive calamities, but Job receives no revelation from God to explain his suffering. There is no divine appearance, angelic being, or prophet that arrives to explain what seems to be gratuitous divine wrath. In Divine-Interaction texts, revelation often accompanies suffering. In the aftermath of the Israelite defeat at the hands of Ai, God explains to Joshua that it is the result of sin in the camp (Josh 7:10–15). While David’s intercession cannot prevent the looming death of his child, God has the courtesy to send Nathan to explain that it was because of David’s sin (II Sam 12). Malakim, “messengers,” give Lot advanced warning to save him of his city’s impending doom (Gen 19). A similar “messenger” hears Ishmael’s cry and rescues Hagar and her child before the suffering is too dire (Gen 21). The only malakim, “messengers,” that Job sees are those who deliver the news after destruction has hit. There is no indication that these messengers are from God, and they do not bring a ray of hope or even a simple explanation.

A Confrontational Demand for Justice

The silence is difficult for Job, who soon demands an audience with God. Job’s demands go far beyond typical Divine-Silent stories. Job wants to break out of the genre and jump into a Divine-Interaction story. But his aggressiveness even pushes the boundaries of Divine-Interaction stories. Carol Newsom points out that Job’s aspiration of an audience with God does not resonate like a contrite prayer to a compassionate deity, but a confrontational demand for justice from a legal opponent (Job 9:32–33). Such a legal context requires that power disparity be set aside.¹⁴ Job complains that God is not someone like me whom I can answer, That we can go to law together (9:32). He wants to ascend to the divine dwelling-place to debate the Almighty’s accusations (23:3–4). Job twice uses the Hebrew term hodieni (“Make known to me,” 10:2; 13:23) to request God’s list of accusations for which Job is supposedly being punished.¹⁵ Outside the book of Job, this term is used exclusively to seek revelation from God (Ex. 33:13; Ps. 25:4; 39:5; 143:8). The most famous of these is Moses’ request to see the deity (Ex. 33:12–23). Despite confronting God about intended punishments against the people, Moses’ encounter with the divine is far less confrontational than Job’s. Still, God states that only a partial vision is possible because no human can see the divine face and live (Ex. 33:20). This ominous prohibition seems to hang over most of Job’s attempts to face the Almighty, and many readers from history have made connections between Job’s quest to see God and Moses’ theophany.¹⁶ Each time Job asks God to “make known to me,” he also asks for something to mitigate his terror of the deity. In Job 9:33 and 13:21, he says he needs God’s “frightening terror” to be turned away so he can present his case in earnest. He wants to face God on equal footing so he can refute God’s legal accusations.

While Job frequently speaks of direct revelation from God, Job’s three friends are convinced they are in a Divine-Silent story throughout most of the book. In this genre, and even in many Divine-Interaction stories, one does not simply walk into God’s presence. George Savran points out that Job’s adamant desire for direct revelation is particularly unusual within wisdom literature, where the divine is usually perceived through creation, and it makes his friends uncomfortable. The trio of friends never speak to God in the second person, and they never speak of “seeing” God as a goal or even a possibility. Eliphaz pushes the typical wisdom trope that God is revealed through obedience to the natural law in chapter 5. Eliphaz leaves out any mention of receiving a response from God when he tells Job that God might listen to his prayers (22:27).¹⁷ He does claim to have seen a vision in his sleep (4:12–16), but Savran argues that the narrator undermines Eliphaz’s experience with several ambiguities: Eliphaz describes the difficulty in making out much of the vision, including both what is seen and heard — A word came to me in stealth; my ear caught whisper of it (v. 12) — and emphasizes that its appearance was difficult to recognize (v. 16), with no clarity as to who brought this message.¹⁸ In contrast, the friends are dismissive of Job’s demands for direct revelation, who complains that he has become a laughingstock to his friends because of his hope that he can speak back and forth with God (12:4).¹⁹

The Collision of Genres

Despite the deity’s silence throughout most of the book of Job, the epilogue (42:7–17) is staunchly in the Divine-Interaction genre. God speaks openly and forthrightly to the human characters, and it makes all the difference. In the prologue, Job has no assurances when he makes sacrifices to save his children (1:5). He can only hope to preempt divine wrath in the chance that they sin. When his children die, he assumes it is some kind of punishment (9:17; 10:7), but without revelation, it is mere guesswork. The kinds of guarantees and explanations that are missing in the prologue are exactly the kinds of information that God freely reveals to humans in the epilogue. God tells the friends explicitly that punishment is coming for their sin (42:7). God even lays out instructions for salvation — instructions that involve sacrifice, much like Job’s failed method of saving his children (42:7–8; c.f. 1:5).²⁰ If the prologue had been a Divine-Interaction story — where Job and God can argue and negotiate — Job might have saved his children. The radical conversion from the Divine-Silent genre to Divine-Interaction would feel completely out of place if it were not so integral to the story. By calling for a direct encounter with the divine throughout the dialogues, Job exhibits self-awareness about the limits of Divine-Silent stories, and by extension, real life. Job manages to leap into another genre and experience a Divine-Interaction story.

This change in genre is a necessary result of the collision of the two storylines. Woody Allen offers some analogies to Job’s situation in the two storylines of his 1985 film, The Purple Rose of Cairo.²¹ One of the film’s storylines takes place in “the real world,” and the other is a film within the film. The division between the real world and the film world is impenetrable. They are two different genres. One realm is even in color while the other is in black and white. Suddenly, a film character named Tom Baxter (portrayed by Jeff Daniels) decides he no longer wants to be in the film, and he leaps into the storyline of the real world. Unfortunately, he finds out that the real world is not more satisfying than life in the movies.

The stark contrast between the prologue and epilogue in the book of Job only makes sense in light of the narrative progression between them. As the plot develops, the heavenly realm merges with the human realm.²² Early on, Job and his friends raise the possibility of ascertaining limited revelation as both Eliphaz and Job claim to have seen visions in sleep (4:12–17; 7:14). Still, as Edward Greenstein and Savran have both argued, the three friends are hesitant when it comes to revelation; they base their arguments primarily on tradition and observation.²³ Job, on the other hand, seeks direct dialogue with the deity, even if he has little hope of achieving it (10:1–2; 13:22–23). Eventually, Job’s final challenge demands that God provide a list of accusations of Job’s supposed sin, so he can wear it like a regal wreath (31:35–36). Soon, the fourth friend, Elihu, speaks of a repentant sufferer who enters the divine presence with shouts of joy, implying Job might get his wish if he takes a more submissive route (33:26).²⁴ All of this builds up to the spectacular collision of genres when the Almighty storms into the human storyline and speaks with Job. This is the only change in situation that Job overtly acknowledges at the end of the book: I had heard You with my ears, but now I see you with my eyes (42:5).

God’s appearance in the human storyline is foreshadowed as early as the prologue, where the privileged reader is given two glimpses into the divine storyline (1:6–12; 2:1–7). They are small windows, and readers might feel as if they are craning their necks in hopes of seeing a bit more into that realm. Hitchcock’s wisdom as a storyteller offers insight into the narrative payoff that these windows provide. He says:

“Let’s take a very simple, childish example. Four people are sitting around a table, talking about baseball. Five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly a bomb goes off, blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene. Tell the audience there is a bomb under the table and it will go off in five minutes. Well, the emotion of the audience is very different. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital because the audience is saying: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball, there’s a bomb under there.’ You’ve got the audience working. You can’t expect the audience to go into any kind of emotion without giving them some information.”²⁵

Just as information about a bomb can raise the stakes for a conversation about baseball, the information about God’s challenge to the Adversary raises the stakes for Job’s conversation with his friends, and it does so in two specific ways. First, Job and his friends assume they are in a Divine-Silent story, but this assumption was undermined when God and the divine council made an appearance in the prologue. Meanwhile, Job’s quest for divine dialogue is less jarring than it would be in a book like Esther. Second, Job and his friends assume that his suffering is punishment, but the heavenly scenes inform the reader otherwise. Throughout the dialogues, Job’s desire to speak with God face to face is rooted in his yearning to prove his innocence. He wants to receive God’s list of accusations and refute it (10:2, 7; 13:22–23; 31:35–37). Job assumes that proving his innocence will somehow reveal the divine error that put him in this position. Such an argument is enough to best his friends in debate, who simply presume his guilt, such as when Eliphaz scoffs at the idea of an innocent person perishing (4:7), or when Zophar mocks Job’s “prattling” claims of innocence (11:4). But because of the glimpses into the divine storyline, the reader knows that Job’s argument will not get him very far in a debate with God. God already knows of Job’s innocence. When this information is revealed to the reader and hidden from Job, Job’s ignorance becomes vital to the story. The more Job tries to prove his innocence, the further he is from solving the crime.

When God appears, the deity’s revelation emphasizes that much of the divine realm is hidden from Job (chs. 38–41). God’s revelation is about how limited God’s revelation is. And yet, this revelation is a victory for Job. He had expected to remain within the boundaries of a Divine-Silent story. Instead, he jumped into another genre and spoke with God. Job quickly realizes that he may never receive satisfactory answers to all his questions, even in a genre where he enjoys open communication with the divine. The center of the book states that wisdom is hidden from the eyes of all the living (28:21), and even from Death (28:22). Only God understands the way to it (28:23). God will always possess a monopoly on wisdom and knowledge, and humans will always have lingering questions.

The book of Job teaches that there are times when both Divine-Silent stories and Divine-Interaction stories can be unsatisfying. While Esther and Ruth imply that a silent God is still at work in the world, Job’s Divine-Silent story highlights the pain of God’s silence. Humans often long for the comfort that comes from reading about negotiations with an interactive God, like those of Abraham and Moses. When Job crosses over into a Divine-Interaction story, he finds that even these negotiations have their shortcomings. When a window opens up to the divine storyline, much still remains outside of humanity’s purview. Divine revelation in the book of Job is just as much about what is hidden as what is revealed.