Obama and Job

Essay
Obama and the Book of Job
By JON MEACHAM
Unfortunately for the powerful, the plight of the biblical Job is a story with perennial resonance. A man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to offer, happy and blessed, finds himself — unjustly, from his perspective — bereft. Protected and apparently invincible one day, he is buffeted as God turns his back on his former beloved, producing rage, confusion and self-pity. In the history of the American presidency, reversal happens time and time again: Lyndon Johnson declining to run four years after his landslide victory in 1964, George H. W. Bush losing re-election after winning the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterms, and now Barack Obama.


The connection between the trials of Job and the president’s midterm rebuke came to mind as I read what I think is the political book of the season: THE WISDOM BOOKS: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (Norton, $35), a new translation and commentary by Robert Alter. A master translator of Hebrew poetry, Alter previously rendered the Pentateuch and the Psalms into affecting contemporary English, and has now turned his attention to what he calls the most mysterious books in the Hebrew Bible.

The Wisdom books have a “distinctive identity” in the context of the narrative of Scripture; there is, Alter writes, “little . . . that is specifically Israelite.” Wisdom literature concerns itself with questions both existential and moral: What is the nature of life, and how are we to conduct ourselves as we go about living? These books are linked to a broader, more universalist tradition in the ancient Near East.

Job and Ecclesiastes are especially atypical, for they are philosophically bleak, asking unanswerable questions. In these books God is great, but he is not necessarily good. Why do the innocent suffer and die? Why are some rich, and others poor? Why are some hearts full, and others perpetually broken? The replies are hardly the stuff of Sunday school lessons. As Job says at one point:


Man born of woman, scant of days and sated with trouble,
like a blossom he comes forth and withers, and flees like a shadow — he will not stay.

The texts make for illuminating reading in a season of widespread economic pain and political upheaval. They should assuage the gloom of the defeated and temper the joy of the victors. “All is mere breath,” says the narrator of Ecclesiastes, adding, “That which was is that which will be, and that which was done is that which will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

Outside politics, President Obama thinks of himself less as a professor or community organizer and more as a writer — a man who observes reality, interprets it internally, and then recasts it on the page in his own voice and through his own eyes. And he is a reader of serious books.

Given that, he might find Alter’s new book congenial. John Boehner is not exactly a case of boils, but the president may feel differently at the moment, and thus the story of Job could be of some use to him.

Like Obama, Job was once the highly favored one:


Would that I were as in moons of yore, as the days when God watched over me,
when he shined his lamp over my head. . . .

But the Lord withdraws his protection, inflicting pain and death and misery on Job, who cries:


Terror rolls over me, pursues my path like the wind. . . .
At night my limbs are pierced, and my sinews know no rest.
With great power he seizes my garment, grabs hold of me at the collar.
He hurls me into the muck, and I become like dust and ashes.

God is having none of it. He will not be questioned by a mortal, even a mortal whom he once loved and who has honored him. Fairly snarling, the Lord taunts Job from a whirlwind: “Where were you when I founded earth? / Tell, if you know understanding.”

Four brilliant, contemptuous chapters of the poetry of power follow this sneering query — or, more precisely, the poetry of God’s power and man’s powerlessness. They are humbling verses, exhausting even. The reader feels berated and beaten, the victim of a mighty torrent from a boastful, cold, imperious God. (This is how Dick Cheney’s vision of unfettered executive power might sound if rendered in ancient Hebrew verse: The Unilateralist in the Whirlwind.)

Job finally surrenders — he has no other choice — and humbles himself, recanting his challenge and repenting in “dust and ashes.” With that, God tries to make amends with gifts of livestock and new children, and there is a telling line in this bittersweet ending. “And all his male and female kinfolk and all who had known him before came and broke bread with him in his house and grieved with him and comforted him for all the harm that the Lord had brought on him.”

Commiseration and communion, however fleeting, are thus given their place in the human enterprise, a reminder that life on this side of the grave is ultimately redeemable (and endurable) only through alliance and affection.

The ethos of resignation that pervades Alter’s translation is hardly cheering. Ecclesiastes (Alter uses the Hebrew title Qohelet, from the root q-h-l, which means “to assemble,” as in the assembling of an audience to hear a philosophical discourse) in particular is all too eloquent and convincing on the question of the provisional nature of life, advising its readers to take comfort in the pleasures of the senses: “There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and sate himself with good things through his toil.” We associate such views more with pagan writers than with biblical ones. Alter is unsparing in interpreting verses in all their matter-of-factness about the limits of the human condition.

The Wisdom books force readers to face uncomfortable truths. “There is no remembrance of the first things nor of the last things that will be,” says Ecclesiastes. In a footnote, Alter observes: “This is a radical and deeply disturbing idea for the Hebrew imagination, which, on the evidence of many earlier texts, sets such great store in leaving a remembrance, and envisages the wiping out of remembrance as an ultimate curse.”

And yet, and yet. All is not lost, which should give the president some hope amid the shadows, and should keep the Republicans from thinking that their own course will now be unimpeded. “And I saw that wisdom surpasses folly as light surpasses darkness,” says Ecclesiastes. “The wise man has eyes in his head, and the fool goes in darkness.” The world will never bend itself totally to our purposes, but Job’s example offers us some hope: endure in tribulation, and perhaps all may be well.


Jon Meacham, whose book “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is writing a biography of Thomas Jefferson. In January, he will become the executive editor at Random House.