“What does Job Want? Desire, Fear, Anxiety, and God in and Beyond Job 23”

Abstract

Job expresses several distinct desires in the poetic portions of the book of Job. Many interpreters have analyzed how Job uses legal language to express a desire to contend with God in court, and Job 23 is often cited as exemplary of this wish. However, in ch. 23 and elsewhere, Job rejects this imaginary courtroom scene as an impossibility because he experiences God’s presence as debilitating to his constitution as a subject. Job subsequently expresses a different resolve that is rooted in his actual experiences, which he describes in ways that correspond to certain psychoanalytic accounts of anxiety. In ch. 23, Job resolves to speak his way into the divine darkness that envelopes and effaces him, and this reorientation to Job’s experience and desire permits a fresh understanding of what makes Job’s perspective different from and problematic for traditional wisdom, which the three friends articulate and represent. The friends counsel Job to assume a pious posture of fear, which is unavailable to him because of his experience of anxiety. The desire that Job ultimately expresses in ch. 23 finds an intriguing echo in Job’s final words in 42:2–5, and this casts new light on the events narrated in the book’s prose introduction and conclusion, which in turn permits a new perspective on the book of Job as a whole.