False Naivety in the Prologue to Job

Abstract

By naivety we understand an artless ingenuousness, an unsubtle sim-plicity. In the prologue to Job, language, style, plot and structure alike convey such an impression-at first sight, at any rate. The language is-by contrast with the rich metaphor-laden language of the dialogues-of a striking severity. Only in the Satan's speeches in I: IO and 2:4 is there even the coloration of lively colloquial speech ("put a hedge about him"; "skin for skin"). The style is as plain as anything in the Hebrew Bible; beside the two post-positive adjectives in 1: l and 2:3, "blameless " (tiim) and "upright " (yiiSiir), there are only two attributive adjectives ("great " [giidol] in l:l 9; "grievous " [ra c] in 2:7) in the whole piece, and repetition is the most conspicuous stylistic feature. The plot is naive as black and white is naive: Job must be the greatest of the sons of the East, none like him on earth, blameless and upright; he must lose all his possessions in one day, he must be afflicted from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet. His downfall must result from a divine conspiracy against him, of which he must have not the slightest suspicion. And to his fate he must respond with inscrutable oriental submissiveness. The structure of the prologue is its most noticeably naive feature: the division into five scenes, their alternating locale, the fourfold messenger scene, the two five-member dialogues-all evidence the utmost simplicity of construction. False naivety exploits the appearance of artlessness to convey a subtle message. 1 Subtle and complex as the argument of the book as a whole is, its naive prologue is no less subtle: it is not some primitive tale that does no more than set the scene for the substantive argument of the dialogues, but a well wrought narrative that plunges directly into issues of substance that reach as deep as the fraught dialogues themselves. False naivety is not, let it be noted, an act of bad faith; it is a beguilement I. McEvenue ( 1971) compared the style of Genesis I and of the Priestly work in general to that of children's stories on the ground of their formality and apparent artlessness. He might properly have said that their naivety was only "false".

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