Job Never Repented with Dr. Edward Greenstein

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today our special guest is Professor Ed Greenstein. Professor Greenstein, thank you so much for joining the Dig In Podcast today.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Ova: We're going to be talking about Job. Most people think they know the book of Job: a righteous man suffers, endures patiently, repents and gets everything back. But you've spent decades inside this Hebrew text. How much of that story actually survives?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: A good deal of the story survives: the suffering, and the encounters or confrontations with Job's friends, his companions, who are sympathetic at first, but when they see that Job keeps insisting on his innocence they become harsher in their criticism, in fact quite harsh. There's an unexpected appearance of the deity toward the end, which you wouldn't expect at the beginning unless you know the book of Job, and that's one of the highlights of the book for most people. Nevertheless, in my studies I find that Job is much more aggressive, you might say, in dealing with the deity, because he wants to know why he's suffering. We, the audience, know why he's suffering. God is testing the depth of his devotion, and he's doing it through the agency of the satan, who is one of the angels, one of God's agents who does God's bidding. But it's made very clear at the beginning of the book, and especially at the end, that the deity is responsible for bringing these afflictions on Job, in order for God to find out how much Job loves him and is faithful to him. How far can God go in making Job miserable before Job becomes bitter about God?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Job doesn't curse God, which is what the satan predicts Job will do. What Job does is complain about being alive at all, because he thinks nobody should have to go through a life of suffering. That's his opening speech in chapter three. But then, as I say, he gets aggressive, because he wants to know why he's suffering, and the way to find out is to mount a lawsuit against God. Some scholars have appreciated this lawsuit, but many have taken it as a metaphor. I don't see it as a metaphor at all. Job goes through all of these steps in order to sue God, and in the end God is compelled to respond to the lawsuit. I think that's at least one of the major reasons the deity appears at the end of the book. There are several phrases in the book that have not been properly understood in most translations. They're taken in a more general way, but I take them as statements in which Job is actually mounting a legal suit against God.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: The reason is very simple. In the ancient world, whether in the Pentateuch and the Torah or in rabbinic literature, if you don't have evidence, the way you get your opponent, the defendant in your case, to appear and expose the charges or whatever ill feelings there are, is to sue them and swear that you didn't do anything wrong that would warrant the suffering or affliction you believe you're undergoing. Let me remind everybody: we know, because we read the first two chapters, that Job is not being afflicted as a punishment. But Job doesn't know that, and his friends don't know that. And at the end of the book nobody tells Job and his friends. This is what we call dramatic irony, where the audience knows something the characters on stage, so to speak, don't. So when Job takes an oath that he didn't do any of the things that might warrant such afflictions from God, God has to appear to answer those charges. Again, where there's no actual evidence, the way to get your opponent to fess up, or spill the beans, is to force him through an oath. You swear, I am innocent, so if you think I'm guilty of anything, you have to state those charges and back them up. That's what's going on throughout the book of Job. It's one of the things that offends Job's friends, because they think it's unseemly to sue God.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: But Job doesn't see any alternative. Because he is an extremely pious and righteous person, what he wants most is to know: if God has found fault with him, what is that fault? Maybe he can correct it, but he can't correct a fault he's not aware of. So that's part of the dynamic in the book. There are two parallel plots in the book of Job. One is the argument between Job and his companions over whether God is just. Would God do something unjust? Job says, as far as I can see, what God is doing to me is unjust. The companions stick to the traditional view that God will only do what is just. The other plot is the conflict between God and Job. Job sees God as singling him out for affliction for having done something wrong. He can't see what it is, and he desperately wants to know. And if I may say, and this may come up again, one of the things most prominent in the book of Job is Job's commitment to truth. He has to know what the truth is, whether it hurts him or not.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Some people think that Job, by attesting to his innocence all the time, is immodest, that it's hubris for a person to think he hasn't done anything seriously wrong. But the narrator and God both tell us at the beginning of the story that he is so righteous he hasn't done anything wrong. Job doesn't find anything serious that he himself has done wrong. Maybe, he says, some foibles of my youth. But he can't see any basis for God afflicting him. So what other people call Job's hubris or arrogance is actually his truthfulness. He's committed to telling the truth. If I don't find any terrible sin or crime in myself, I can't say that I do. It would be dishonest.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I want to go to something you briefly mentioned, because it's the question I get most about Job. Before we get to how you've translated and studied it, the opening scene with the satan and God always fascinates people. What is being depicted with God and the satan negotiating? Why would God allow the satan to attack Job like this? From your studies and the background, who is the satan here? Who is this accuser, and why is this even taking place?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: It's a very good question. Many ask it, and I've answered it many times, at least to myself, and I've written about it. The satan appears only in Second Temple literature, that is, after the Babylonian exile in the early sixth century before the Common Era. Only after that, in the Persian period, does the satan appear, in the book of Zechariah. And the role of the satan is very simple. In the same way the emperor has a whole staff of spies traveling throughout the land to find out if anyone is disloyal and to trip up anyone who should be punished for any reason, that's the role of the satan. God is like the king, and God invites all of God's agents, the so-called angels, or messengers of God, as they're called in biblical Hebrew. They're divine messengers, agents of God, you can say. Among the agents, the satan shows up, and the satan is the only one of God's agents or angels who is actually named.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: And God knows exactly what God is doing. But God, you see, doesn't know everything. I know we like to think God knows everything, but there are many places in the Bible where God doesn't. For example, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18, when Abraham says maybe there are some righteous people in the city, God goes down to see whether there are. You could say that's just God humoring Abraham. But we also have the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. The question is whether Abraham will go through with offering up his only remaining son, Isaac. Does God know the answer? It would be extremely cruel to make Abraham go through all that if God were sure of the result. But God is not sure. So God doesn't necessarily know everything. In some texts God knows everything, and in some stories God doesn't. In some stories God is all-righteous and good, and in some God has a mean streak and does destructive things. Let's put it this way: God is no less complex a personality than human beings. If anything, God is more complex.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In any case, the way I understand it, God singles out the satan because he wants to know how deeply Job is devoted, and says, look at my servant Job. He's perfect in every way. There's nobody like him on earth. Those kinds of claims challenge the satan. The satan says, let me go check it out, maybe I can trip Job up. Maybe the reason Job is so pious and righteous is that you've given him all these blessings. Take away his blessings and he will curse you to your face. That's what happens. In the second round the same kind of thing happens, but the satan, who has in a sense been wrong about Job up to now, says, wait a minute. Taking things away from Job is one thing, but what if you afflict him in his own person? Then he'll curse you. So God says, okay, he's in your hands. You can afflict him with very bad boils, but you have to leave him alive.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Now let me go back to the story itself. In the first part, where Job's herds are stolen or destroyed, his servants killed and his children killed, in none of those places does it say explicitly that the satan did it. And in the second round, when God confronts the satan a second time, he says, you have incited me, you've kind of cajoled me, to afflict Job. So God is taking responsibility for the afflicting himself. Then in chapter two, when it says Job was afflicted with this terrible skin inflammation, like the boils among the plagues on the Egyptians in the Exodus story, there's an ambiguity. It says, he afflicted Job, but if you look at the grammar, it's unclear whether it's God or the satan. There's a play there. So if you want to claim it was the satan and not the deity who afflicted Job, and I don't think it was, you have to deal with that ambiguity. And I, who think it was God, also have to deal with it.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: What isn't ambiguous is the epilogue, chapter 42, verses 7 to 17, the end of the story, where Job receives double everything he had before, except the three daughters. He still has three daughters, but now they're the most beautiful and so on. We could talk about why that is. But in the course of that narrative it says specifically that it was God who brought the ra'ah, the catastrophe, on Job. So I think a fair reading of the story places the onus on the deity, even though the deity used the satan, you might say, to rile him up, give him ideas, stimulate him to think about afflicting Job, for the sake of finding out how deeply devoted Job is.

Johnny Ova: A lot of interesting tidbits there, Professor Greenstein. I want to go to the translation side. You've said the book of Job dazzles like Shakespeare, with vocabulary and wordplay unmatched anywhere in the Bible. What makes this book so notoriously difficult to translate?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: What makes it difficult is that the author, like Shakespeare, had a tremendous vocabulary and also a very close knowledge of all the Hebrew literature that came before him, so there are allusions to that literature all over the place. Sometimes translators pick up these allusions, and sometimes not. In addition, like Shakespeare, he very often made up words. Shakespeare is said to have invented something like 2,000 words. I don't know that the author of Job invented that many, but of course we don't have all the vocabulary of biblical Hebrew. We have at most maybe a third of it. There are about 7,500 different Hebrew words in the Hebrew Bible. I would assume an ancient Israelite farmer knew about 15,000 words, and a very educated person who learned vocabulary from literary texts would know maybe 30,000. There are, I think, something like 150,000 words in Shakespeare.

Johnny Ova: Wow, it's that little? I didn't know it was that small. A third. Wow.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In any case, the author would make up words. Sometimes they're not totally new words but new forms of words, and many of them are not found elsewhere. That doesn't necessarily make them hard to translate. It's the context that makes it easy or difficult. If the context is pretty clear, you know what the word should mean, and you look for a way to explain how the word comes to mean that. But in addition, the author of Job was a polymath. He knew many languages. The language spoken in the land of Judah in the Persian period was Aramaic, not Hebrew. I believe the author of Job was writing a somewhat stilted classical biblical Hebrew for an audience whose spoken language was Aramaic. He also knew some Babylonian, some of what we know today as Arabic, and some Phoenician, a Canaanite language spoken to the north and west of ancient Israel. I can give you examples, though if the audience doesn't know Hebrew it might be a little difficult.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Before I give examples, one more point. Even though he's writing, I believe, in the Persian period, which by the way is what most scholars writing on Job today believe, and assuming his audience knows Aramaic, the author wants to set the story in an ancient Hebrew period, the period of the patriarchs and matriarchs, and he makes a number of literary allusions to that. One very simple example: in chapter one, when the author refers to Job's many servants, he uses the term avuddah, a collective term meaning lots of servants. Servantry is how I translate it. It's found only here and in the story of Isaac in Genesis 26. In Genesis 26 you'll also find a number of other details about Isaac's wealth that are echoed in the description of Job's wealth in Job chapter one. There are a number of things about the Hebrew the author uses to make it sound a little archaic. He uses some ancient spellings without some of the vowel letters. He uses archaic and highly poetic forms. Instead of al, the preposition meaning on, he says alei, a fancier archaic form. There's also the preposition le, meaning to, and on the analogy of al and alei, he makes up a preposition elei. But there's no such preposition anywhere else in biblical Hebrew. He makes it up because he wants it to sound like it belongs to an early period.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Another thing he does is set the story in the Transjordan. Job is not an Israelite. He's from the land of Uz, which is located in Kedem. Kedem means east. It means in front of you. If you're in the land of Israel facing the sunrise, what's in front of you is the east, the Transjordan. In the Transjordan you had Aramaic-speaking people. You had Ammonites, who spoke a kind of Canaanite that sounds a little Aramaic. You had Moabite, east of the Dead Sea, and we know from a couple of Moabite inscriptions, especially a very big one from Mesha, king of Moab, in the mid-ninth century BCE, that Moabite is very much like Hebrew but has certain features like Aramaic. To make a long story short, the speakers in the book of Job are supposed to be easterners in the Transjordan. So the author peppers the text with Aramaic terms. He takes some Hebrew words and gives them an Aramaic inflection, and he takes some Aramaic words and Hebraizes them. That's very hard to convey in translation. You almost can't do it. Sometimes I have footnotes that point such things out, but you can't really capture the whole thing. At one point I toyed with putting all the Aramaisms in italics or something like that, but that would be a real nuisance to the reader.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: And I have to say, every translation is not only an interpretation, but it's also a simplification of the original text. It's always easier to read a difficult text in translation than in the original. So a lot of my work has been trying to find ways to capture the funny Hebrew you find in the book of Job, and also to pin down as accurately as possible what these phrases were meant to mean. I'm sorry to say a lot of this has been missed by many of my predecessors, and I would say all the conventional translations have missed more than they should have. Partly that's because they had certain expectations to fulfill, and those are different from what I think we actually have in Job. I started in graduate school in a course with a professor who was a genius and taught us the book of Job for a year, Professor H. L. Ginsberg. He had lots of insights into Job, most of which never got published. He never took the trouble to put his work into print. So I was stimulated by that. A bit later in life I had the opportunity to teach Job at the graduate level, and I got really interested. In the 1990s I began devoting most of my research time to Job, and that's still the case today. I'm still learning things, though not so much changing my translation. There are only a couple of things I would change since I first published it in 2019. But many things took me a long time to track down. I'm not a genius like my teacher, but I had patience, I thought I was on the right track, and I had very good training from a number of my teachers in Semitic philology, figuring out what ancient Semitic texts mean. Sometimes I traced things through other places in the Bible that people hadn't bothered looking at in connection with Job, and so I figured a few things out.

Johnny Ova: That's amazing. Before we get to more of your conclusions, help us trust the method. When you propose that a verse has been mistranslated for centuries, what does the actual detective work look like? How does it pop out?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: There are a few things. First, you have to have what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feel for the language, a sense that something is off here. Part of it is that after working with the text a long time, you get used to the ways the author of Job expresses himself. You get a feel for the style. In addition, you put one thing together with another, which not everybody did. For example, there's a word that means spittle, and in one place some people translate it correctly and in another place not. But let me give you a beautiful example of another thing about the author of Job, which is that the poet thinks out of the box, and this really throws people off. I could get into technical things, but I'd rather deal with something clearer on the surface.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In chapter three, in his first speech, Job curses the night on which he was conceived and the day on which he was born, but he mentions them in reverse order. He does that because he's turning everything topsy-turvy. For him night is good, darkness is good, and daylight is bad, because that's life. You get out into the world and it's bad. For Job, death is a good thing. He praises it and describes in kind of romantic terms how the people lying beneath the earth finally have some quiet, but life is full of affliction. Now look at verse 10 of chapter 3. Here's how it's translated in the New Revised Standard Version, which is one of the better modern translations. He wants to curse the night because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb and hide trouble from my eyes. There's no reference to a mother in that verse at all.

Johnny Ova: Really?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: There's no word for mother there. Not at all. It's a mistake, and I'll tell you what the mistake is. That's why I translate: for it would not lock the doors of my womb, and hide life's travails from my eyes. The poet is extremely careful and specific about his language. When you're in the womb, you don't know there's a mother out there.

Johnny Ova: That's true. You're in the womb. You don't know.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Right. He's imagining himself in the womb, the womb in which he gestated. In addition, if you look at all of chapter three together, you find something I'm not sure anybody pointed out before me: Job makes a specific effort not to mention anyone. He wants to eliminate the day he was born, so he wants to eliminate the scene as much as possible. In chapter 3, verse 3, he calls himself a man, and many translations get that wrong. The New Revised Standard Version has "a man-child is conceived." There's no man-child there. It says a man. He says man because he doesn't want to relate any more than necessary to the fact that he was once a child born from the womb. Compare this chapter to Jeremiah 20, verses 14 to 18, I think, which many people do, and that's good. There Jeremiah says the day I was born was a cursed day. He doesn't lay a curse on it, but he mentions his father, his mother, and the man who told his father, congratulations, you've had a boy. In Job 3 he doesn't mention his mother. He mentions disembodied breasts. He doesn't mention his father. He mentions disembodied knees that received him, that took him on the knee and said, I accept you as my legitimate son. And he doesn't mention the messenger who told the father, you have a boy. Instead he curses the night, which, in my translation, "announced a man's been conceived." He personifies the night instead of mentioning a human messenger the way Jeremiah does. He wants to eliminate as much as possible any human players from his birth. So he calls it my womb.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: If you don't understand that it's Job's womb, you can't understand what's going on in chapter 19. The author is consistent and makes connections between one place and another, but you miss those connections if you aren't sensitive to them, and if you miss one part of the connection, you miss the whole thing. In chapter 19 Job relates his sorrow that because of his affliction, people see him as stigmatized, as if God doesn't like this guy. So people withdraw from him, and he mentions his friends and his family. Here's chapter 19, verse 17, in the New Revised Standard Version, which, as I say, is really not the worst translation you could find: my breath is repulsive to my wife. I agree with that. I am loathsome to my own family. Now, family there is bnei vitni, the children of my womb. Some other translations have my children. The problem with that is that Job's children were all killed in the prologue. So you either have to say there's complete incoherence between the story that frames the book and the dialogues at its core, and I'm not one of those people.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: I think this whole work was put together by a genius poet at some point. There are some chapters, the Elihu chapters, the fourth, belated friend in chapters 32 to 37, that I think were added later, and the second half of chapter 24 I think was added later. But for the most part it's a literary unity. So when he says the sons of my womb, who does he mean? Not his children, the sons of his belly or bowels. He means those who gestated in the same womb he gestated in. Who else gestated there? His siblings, his brothers and sisters. And by the way, his brothers and sisters come to celebrate his restoration in the epilogue. That's an example of the author of Job expressing himself in an odd, even surreal way. But trying to eliminate after the fact the day of your birth and the night of your conception is also very surreal. It's not beyond this poet. The poet is imagining what Job might imagine, and he's using it as a key to another reference in chapter 19, verse 17. It's not the only example in the book, but I think it's one of the most dramatic.

Johnny Ova: Let's talk about the man himself. The phrase "the patience of Job" is in our cultural bloodstream. Is Job patient?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: The phrase "the patience of Job" is from the epistle of James, chapter 5, I think, from the Christian scriptures, the New Testament. It's not used in the Hebrew Bible at all. In fact Job is extremely unsettled, and I would say not patient. But the reason Job is sometimes called patient is that there's a dramatic literary transition between the frame tale at the beginning, which is told in prose, and that's important to understand, regular classical biblical prose like Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Kings, with some signs it was written in the Persian period that I don't need to go into now. There he is patient. He accepts everything God does to him, even when his wife says he should curse God and die. Not because she's a bad person, but because she sees his suffering, and the only relief for it is for him to die. And how is he going to die? Suicide doesn't come up. So the way to die is to curse God and die, because according to biblical law and lore those who curse God die.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: At the end of the frame tale in chapter two, verse nine, his wife says to him, you are still holding fast to your wholesomeness. Bless, which means curse, Elohim and die. He says to her, you speak the speech of unseemly women. Shall we accept the good from God and not accept the bad? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. Then his friends come and sit with him seven days and seven nights, all in silence. They don't know what to say. But all this time you have to imagine that Job has been brooding. Imagine you were Job. You've just lost all your possessions and all your family except your wife. All your children have been killed. And you believe God is responsible, because God is the one who blesses and God is the one who afflicts, but you don't see why you should have been afflicted. So you begin thinking. Now the dramatic turn occurs, and the dialogues turn into high-level, highfalutin poetry.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: After the narrator introduces Job at the beginning of chapter three, after that Job opened his mouth and cursed his day of birth, Job spoke up and said: let the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced a man's been conceived. Even if you don't know Hebrew, you can hear the cadences and the repetition of sound: Yovad yom ivvaled bo, vehalaylah amar horah gaver. There's a repetition of sound in the first line of the couplet and in the second line. It's beautifully done. Now, what I did in my translation is, from a word-for-word point of view, you could say cheating, because I made a repetition in the English that you don't have in the Hebrew. In the Hebrew you have two lines of equal length in the couplet, and it's important that there be two lines, because his whole curse is divided into two parts: the day on which he was born and the night on which he was conceived, out of order. So the line that opens the speech is also in two parts, one about the day and one about the night.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In the Revised Standard Version it's translated: let the day perish wherein I was born. That doesn't hit very hard the way the Hebrew does. And the night which said, a man-child is conceived. They divide it into three lines, and I think that misses the poetry. That's why I repeated the word day, to get two lines of more or less balanced length: let the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced a man's been conceived. Notice I also try to replicate as much as I can the repetition of sound: day, disappear, the day I was born; night announced, man's been conceived. A translator can't do everything. You have to make choices. It's been compared to carrying a boat across a stream. You can only put so much in the boat before it sinks, so you have to choose what you want to carry across and what you'll have to leave behind. That's what translation means, carrying across from the source text to the target text.

Johnny Ova: I've got a question about his friends. Job's friends show up to comfort him and end up prosecuting him. What are they actually arguing, and why does the poet let them talk for so long?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: The poet lets them talk a long time, but if you count the verses and the length of the speeches, he gives more space to Job. He's writing a poem, and he wants a back and forth, but there's also development. There are three cycles of dialogue between Job and his companions. After Job's initial cursing of the day and night, and of his life, you could say, the oldest friend, Eliphaz, speaks, and Job responds. Then Bildad speaks and Job responds, then Zophar speaks and Job responds. That goes on, except that in the third cycle there isn't a speech by Zophar. Some people think it's in chapter 27. I explain it differently. And maybe something was left out of the book. In ancient times, I don't know how many copies of Job there were, and it's possible that in transmission, the same way some words got corrupted and some letters were dropped or added, some sections were omitted by accident. But let's assume we have what we have, and fortunately we have plenty.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In the first round, his friends don't see him as a bad guy. Eliphaz gives him explanations for why he suffers, two explanations that are not "Job, you have sinned." One is that everybody suffers a little. That's life. Job's answer is, yes, but look how much I'm suffering. This is not normal. The other is that after God afflicts someone, God repairs. God heals. I'm sorry, I just got a pop-up on my screen. You'll edit it out.

Johnny Ova: No, it's all right.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: He says God heals after God afflicts, and he tells Job, at the end of chapter five, don't worry, you will eventually be saved from all troubles by God, your estate will be restored, and you'll have many children again. Bildad isn't quite as full of flourish, but he says, look, the house of the wicked collapses, but if you, Job, turn to God, God will accept you and restore you, and you'll have an estate and children again. What he says is that Job's children died because they must have sinned. In other words, it's not on Job. Then Zophar, the third companion, thinks Job must have sinned, and he says something in chapter 11, verse 6, which is another place where I believe almost all the other translations get it wrong and I get it right. The New Revised Standard Version has, at the end of 11:6: know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves. I don't think that's the meaning, and in this case I want you to know I haven't changed a single letter or altered the regular meanings of the words. I translate: you should know Eloah is making you forget your sin. That's what it means. Yashsheh there is the hiphil, the causative, of nashah, which means to forget. It's regular, grammatical biblical Hebrew.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: So what he's saying is, okay, Job, I believe you when you say you can't find any fault in yourself, but you must have sinned if you're being punished by God. Of course he assumes Job is being punished by God. So does Job, which is why he wants to know what he's done wrong. As Job continues into round two, he says, look, I understand. If I were in your shoes I would speak the way you're speaking. But you have to listen to me. My argument is not with you. My argument is with the deity. So I am challenging God to appear in court and answer my charges against him. He says, I will summon God and God can appear, or let God summon me and I will appear and answer. By the third round the companions are irritated with Job because they see he's extremely stubborn. He continues his lawsuit against the deity, challenging God's justice. I wouldn't say they lose it, but they explain to Job that there is in fact divine justice. The way they exemplify God's justice, though, is not by showing how good people are rewarded but by showing how bad people are punished. In each of the companions' speeches they give illustrations of how the wicked are punished in the end. And Job denies that outright. He says the wicked get away with it. Just as you have it in the book of Proverbs that the light of the wicked goes out, Job says the light of the wicked does not go out.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I've got a few more questions for you, Professor Greenberg, before we close this out. I'm sorry?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Greenstein, not Greenberg.

Johnny Ova: My lord. Professor Greenstein, my apologies. I want to get to the moment where everything hinges, Job 42:6. Every Bible on the shelf says some version of "I repent in dust and ashes." Every version. Walk us through the Hebrew word by word. What did Job actually say there?

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Okay, this I can do. This is something I have well prepared, because people ask me about it all the time. It's what my translation is most famous for, you might say, though I have to say it's not what I consider my biggest insight. I have some very small insights I think were more original and important. In any case, I am not the first person to suggest that what Job says in chapter 42, verse 6, is: therefore I am disgusted, or I am fed up, and I take pity on, I have compassion on, dust and ashes, which is a figure of speech for abject humanity. I'll take you through it word by word. The first word is ma'as. People think it must be a transitive verb meaning to reject, and they think it means either I reject myself, or I reject my words. To reject oneself, ma'as nafshi, does occur elsewhere, even in the book of Job: I reject myself, I hate myself. That's possible. But for me to reject my words is a phrase that doesn't occur anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Now I'll go to the end of the verse. Afar va'efer means dust and ashes. It's used in two other places in the Bible: when Abraham describes himself as only dust and ashes as he argues with God in Genesis 18 about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Job 30, when Job says God has thrown me down to the ground so that I seem like dust and ashes. These are figures of speech for abject humanity, for being of the lowest status. Those are the only three places the phrase occurs. In the other two, dust and ashes is a figure of speech, and I assume it is here as well. Now back to the second verb, nihamti. Nihamti can mean three different things. It can mean I repent, which is what most people think it means: I'm sorry, I regret, I recant. It can mean I've changed my mind. Or it can mean I take pity. It's followed by the preposition al, which means on, or sometimes within, but mostly on. And people think it means, as the RSV has it, I repent in dust and ashes.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Now, nobody, as far as I know, ever checked this before, but I did, because I try to be as thorough as I can. There is no place in biblical Hebrew where you can perform an act, like repenting or anything else, in dust and ashes. You need an extra verb: lying in dust and ashes, sitting in dust and ashes, standing in dust and ashes, being in dust and ashes. There are 20 cases. So to me, repenting in dust and ashes is possible, you might say, but extremely unlikely in biblical Hebrew, because you don't just do something in dust and ashes. Aside from the fact that I think dust and ashes shouldn't be taken literally. In the two other places it occurs, it's a figure of speech, and I think that's what it is here too. Therefore I think we're compelled to understand nihamti not as regret or repent but as take pity, which is found in Psalm 90 and some other places. I take pity on dust and ashes.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: In that case, what does em'as mean? It can be an intransitive verb, as it is in chapter 7, verse 16. Look at various translations of 7:16, where the same verb, ma'asti, in a different form but the same intransitive verb, appears. The New RSV translates it, I loathe my life. But it doesn't say I loathe my life. It just says ma'asti. The New Jewish Publication Society translation has something like, I am fed up or disgusted. There is no object there. I am fed up. And that's what it means here as well. There was a scholar named John B. Curtis, toward the end of the 1970s, who put us on the right track for what this means, but very few people followed him. None of the conventional translations did, and very few commentators. But I follow him here. And I want you to know I'm translating each term the way it's used elsewhere in the Bible, without supplementing it with phrases in parentheses, and without assuming you can say I repent in or on dust and ashes, which I don't believe is good biblical Hebrew. Of course you can say there's bad biblical Hebrew here, but that's not my first inclination. That's why I translate it the way I do.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: And of course it's extremely meaningful. I'm not the first to suggest that this is in line with Job's earlier behavior. We talked about Job the patient and Job the impatient, Job who is unsettled. Job was committed to truth and hadn't heard in the God speeches an explanation of his suffering. Why should he repent? Why should he suddenly recant just because God appeared? God appeared without explaining what Job wanted explained. I could go further and say God even goes so far as to disconnect rewards and punishments from what people do in that lengthy speech. But regardless, there are people who have expected Job to be defiant even at the end. Elie Wiesel, for example, said in a couple of his essays, really, I'm surprised at you, Job, that you suddenly recant. Well, I don't think he recants at all. What people have trouble with is that right after this, God says to Job's friends, you did not speak correctly about me the way my servant Job did. I don't think it means correctly. I think it means you didn't speak truthfully about me. Job spoke what he believed to be true. The friends, confronted with Job's situation, didn't speak the truth, which is that there's a real problem here. We have a righteous man suffering terribly. Instead they just go over the pat conventional theology that God must be punishing Job for a good reason. We know from the beginning of the book that God is not afflicting Job or punishing him for a good reason. Just the opposite. For no reason, as it says at the beginning of the book. For nothing.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: That's why I don't have a problem with Job saying, I am fed up, I take pity on humanity, and God commending Job's speech. I believe that is the radical thing the poet is doing in this book: holding up the virtue of truthfulness at least on a par with, if not higher than, any other value. That's why, to me, Job is a hero. He's a hero, paragon of truthfulness.

Johnny Ova: Wow. Professor Greenstein, this has been great. Last question, because we're up against it with time. I have to ask about the double portion, everything being restored to Job at the end. Please explain that to me and our audience.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: There are two ways of looking at it. One is that we know from the laws in the Torah, in Exodus 22, that if you steal from someone, an animal for example, you have to pay double. So let's assume God knows that God has done something outside the system of justice, and now God does justice to Job by giving him back double. That's one way of looking at it. The other way, which I think is probably more common, is that Job has suffered so much that it's a kind of consolation prize. Job has shown faithfulness to God all along, and even though he has said harsh things about God, I don't believe he leveled a curse against God. I don't think he crossed that line. He came up to it, but I don't think he crossed it. So it makes sense that he would be compensated for all his suffering. And by the way, these two explanations, like most things in complex literary texts, don't have to be one or the other. One of Greenstein's rules of interpretation is: if it can be A and it also can be B, it's not A or B, it's A plus B.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. Professor Greenstein, thank you so much for your time today. This has been so amazing. I learned so much from this conversation, and I know our audience is going to love it. Thank you for being so gracious with your time.

Dr. Edward Greenstein: Thank you very much. It's nice to meet you, Johnny Ova, and I wish you and all those who are listening peace, well-being and good health.