Posts
Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: MacMillan, 1980) 143.
Seltzer discusses various viewpoints on God’s whirlwind speech in the Book of Job. The final one that he presents is that of Matitiahu Tsevat. I’ll call it the “existential view”: life makes no sense, but you do what you can to get by and love others.
In the friends’ insistence that Job’s suffering meant he had sinned, and in Job’s demanding a specific reason why he, in his innocence, should suffer, both sides had presumed the reality of reward and punishment in the cosmos. Perhaps, however, the voice from the whirlwind is asserting that there is no such law of retribution and that nature is neutral to man’s moral action. The sun rises on the righteous and sinner alike (28:13, 15). Rain falls on the desert, whereas it could have been directed only to the cultivated land where it is needed by men (38:26-27). Wild animals do not observe the tenets of human morality (38:15-16). Accordingly, God’s speech can be construed to imply that material prosperity and misfortune do not constitute divine recompense or chastisement. Tsevat proposed that only the concept of a cosmic order that does not operate according to a built-in principle of moral retribution makes possible the selfless piety that was the first issue posed by the book of Job. “It would be a grave error to interpret [the book's] denial of divine retribution as constituting a legitimate excuse for man from his obligations to establish justice on earth. Justice is not woven into the stuff of the universe nor is God occupied with its administration, but it is an ideal to be realized by society.” The author of Job may be denying one fundamental assumption of the narrative and prophetic books of the Bible, but his denial is consistent with another, even more fundamental assumption: that it is up to man to carry out God’s commandments and that his primary task must be done in society and actualized in the course of history. A principle of reward and punishment would, in fact, be a form of coercion, leaving no special realm in which man could exercise his moral freedom by doing the good from purely disinterested motives.
