Greenstein 2019 – Page 3

Source: Greenstein 2019

Greenstein, Edward L. Job: A New Translation. New Haven: Yale UP, 2019.

From the publisher’s website:

The book of Job has often been called the greatest poem ever written. The book, in Edward Greenstein’s characterization, is “a Wunderkind, a genius emerging out of the confluence of two literary streams” which “dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled vocabulary and a penchant for linguistic innovation.” Despite the text’s literary prestige and cultural prominence, no English translation has come close to conveying the proper sense of the original. The book has consequently been misunderstood in innumerable details and in its main themes.

Edward Greenstein’s new translation of Job is the culmination of decades of intensive research and painstaking philological and literary analysis, offering a major reinterpretation of this canonical text. Through his beautifully rendered translation and insightful introduction and commentary, Greenstein presents a new perspective: Job, he shows, was defiant of God until the end. The book is more about speaking truth to power than the problem of unjust suffering.

Edward L. Greenstein is professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University and a prolific, world-renowned scholar in many areas of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies.

According to the Job translation by Greenstein (2019), Job 28:1-28 should be located following Job 37:24. He explains:

“In the preceding passage (37:14-24), Elihu describes the uncanny marvels of the created world in the upper realm, in the sky. In the present passage (chapter 28), Elihu continues to describe a world that is beyond human comprehension, now focusing on the lower realm, the earth and, more particularly, the subterranean, which includes both the netherworld—the domain of the dead—and the sea that was believed to lie beneath the land. The passage is structured by two questions that ask, Where can (divine) wisdom be found? The question turns out to be a riddle, for the answer is not about where, but when (see verses 25-27).

“Modern commentators tend to regard chapter 28, which does not comport with Job’s perspectives, as an independent poem that cannot be attributed to any of the known speakers. The assumption that the poem is autonomous is highly problematic. Biblical poems do not begin with the conjunction ki, ‘for, because,’ as this passage does. There is no antecedent to the pronoun ‘he’ in verse 3. But more important, the motif of esoteric wisdom lying beyond human reach typically includes both the above and the below (see for example Job 11:7-8; Deuteronomy 30:11-13; Jeremiah 31:36; as well the Babylonian hymn to the sun god Shamash). The conclusion of this passage (28:28) echoes the conclusion of the survey of the heavenly wonders in 37:24, and it is following that passage that this one belongs.”

According to the Job translation by Greenstein (2019), Job 4:12-21 should be located following Job 3:26. He explains:

“For many reasons the passage 4:12-21 should be read here, right after chapter 3, as the conclusion of Jobs opening speech. One may suppose that two pages of ancient papyrus or parchment containing the two equal halves of chapter 4 were accidentally interchanged in the course of the text’s transmission. In an oft-compared Babylonian composition about a pious sufferer (“I Shall Praise the Lord of Wisdom”) it is the complainant, not the would-be sage, who experiences a divine revelation. It is also Job the sufferer, not his companions, who receives a theophany near the end of the book. More important, in the ensuing chapters both Eliphaz and Job refer to Jobs claim to have enjoyed a revelation. Further, Eliphaz (in chapter 15) and Bildad (in chapter 25) cite the words of the revelation as Jobs, and Elihu, who engages only with the arguments of Job, quotes from it (33:15).”

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Source: Greenstein 2019

textual location of Job 28:1-28

textual location of Job 4:12-21

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