The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations

by Newsom, Carol A

• ISBN13: 9780195396287
• ISBN10: 0195396286
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

From the simple and beautiful language of the prose tale, to the verbal fireworks of the dialogue between Job and his friends, to the haunting beauty of the poem on wisdom and the sublime poetics of the divine speeches, this book provides an intense encounter with the aesthetic resources of Hebrew verbal art. In this brilliant new study, Carol Newsom illuminates the relation between the aesthetic forms of the book and the claims made by its various characters. Her innovative approach makes possible a new understanding of the unity of the book of Job; she rejects the dismantling of the book by historical criticism and the flattening of the text that characterizes certain final form readings.

Author Biography

Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. She has written and edited several books, and is co-editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible .

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. xi
The Book of Job a Polyphonic Text	p. 3
The Impregnable Word: Genre and Moral Imagination in the Prose Tale	p. 32
Critical Curiosity: Genre and Moral Imagination in the Wisdom Dialogue	p. 72
"Consolations of God": The Moral Imagination of the Friends	p. 90
Broken in Pieces by Words/Breaking Words in Pieces: Job and the Limits of Language	p. 130
Dialogics and Allegory: The Wisdom Poem of Job 28	p. 169
A Working Rhetorical World: Job's Self-Witness in Chapters 29-31	p. 183
The Dissatisfied Reader: Elihu and the Historicity of the Moral Imagination	p. 200
The Voice from the Whirlwind: The Tragic Sublime and the Limits of Dialogue	p. 234
Conclusion	p. 259
Notes	p. 265
Bibliography	p. 287
Index	p. 299
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