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Cooper Smith, "Allusive and Elusive: Allusion and the Elihu Speeches of Job 32-37" (Brill, 2022)
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C
Within the Book of Job, Elihu is one of the most diversely evaluated characters. For example, are Elihu's speeches so insignificant he's absolutely ignored afterward, or do they actually form an introduction to the speeches of the Lord? What are we to make of Elihu? Find out as we speak with Cooper Smith about his recent monograph Elusive and Elusive Allusion and the Elihu speeches of Job 32:37 Smith helpfully approaches the speeches of Elihu by discerning their allusions to previous sections in the Book of Job. You're listening to New Books in Biblical Studies, a channel of the New Books Network, and I'm your host, Michael Morales. Cooper smith received his PhD in 2019 at Wheaton College and is adjunct instructor at Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, Illinois and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. Cooper, thank you for joining us in New Books and Biblical Studies.
- [02:33]
D
Michael, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here today.
- [02:36]
C
So Cooper, tell us about yourself and how you got interested in the Book of Job.
- [02:41]
D
I try to keep my feet firmly planted in two worlds. I serve full time as a pastor on staff at A local church, and I also adjunct for a few institutions, teaching different Old Testament classes. I will wake up early and do research on biblical studies and present at conferences and submit journal articles. My current interests focus especially on the wisdom literature and inner biblical interpretation, focused especially on biblical illusions. And my interest in the Book of Job started off like I imagine many people who find the book. I turned to it during a personal time of intense suffering and loss. I went to it as a kind of resource for how to make sense of my suffering and how to make it through suffering. And much of my early interest in the book focused on that main narrative. A pious man with a good life who loses everything, but he remains faithful to God who later restores him. And that kind of story was helpful in two ways for me. I think it provided a model of someone who clung to his faith during suffering, and it provided hope that suffering doesn't have to last forever. And it was only later that, in graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, that the book resurfaced in a new way. I was taking an advanced course on the Book of Job, where we spent the entire semester working through the Hebrew of key sections of the book and its overall interpretation. And this class invited me to look at the book as a whole. And I began to appreciate the depth and the nuance of the book beyond the simple story of faithful man, suffers, stays faithful, and is restored. And I became fascinated by the ups and downs in this book and the variety of ways to understand its message. And it was also during this class that I really became interested in the figure of Elihu. He's sometimes called the fourth friend in the Book of Job, even though the book never uses the word friend to describe him. He's the one that comes on unexpectedly in job 32 and disappears just as unexpectedly in job 37. And this character captured my mind and became the basis for my doctoral studies at Wheaton College, which was the basis for the book Elusive and Elusive.
- [04:54]
C
Would you orient our audience to the Book of Job? What are its main themes?
- [04:59]
D
Yes. So the Book of Jobs is a beautiful book because of its many layers. On the one hand, we shouldn't be surprised that there's many multiple themes, because the book is 42 chapters long, after all. But on the other hand, the narrative itself can be reduced to its particulars rather quickly. A rich man who has a complete life suffers profound loss. And it's in this loss that he struggles with his well meaning friends who who accuse him of sin. And this man also wrestles with God through prayer. And protest. And ultimately he meets God in a personal one to one conversation that leads to a kind of resolution for the sufferer who is ultimately restored at the end. And as for themes for the book, I really think that there are four key questions that the book is addressing. Number one, I think the question that the book is addressing is how should righteous followers of God suffer? In other words, what does it mean to suffer? Well, I think this is a book that has a lot to say to sufferers. How do we look at Job, who is a faithful, righteous man of integrity, and how do we understand his response as an act of faith? How are we supposed to imitate his response as an act of faith? I think that the opening two chapters of the book go out of their way to raise the issue of Job's righteousness, that he doesn't just do righteous things, he is a righteous person. The narrator says it repeatedly. Yahweh says it repeatedly. Job is perfect and blameless. He fears God and he turns away from evil. That's who he is. And so what he does is an instance of how a perfect, blameless, God fearing man acts and reacts. And so the book of Job then becomes a resource for sufferers in how the righteous should suffer and what it means to be a righteous person who suffers. So that's question one. I think question two is, is God worthy of disinterested righteousness? That term, disinterested righteousness, is something that I came across during my time at ted's in seminary, during the class on Job. That really opened my eyes to the beauty of this book. And the professor of that class, Dr. Dennis McGarry, argued that this is the key question that the book is asking. Is God worthy of disinterested righteousness? That when Job loses everything, will he still cling to God simply because God is worthy? When Job loses even his idea of who God is, will he continue to cling to God faithfully? Which of course is the challenge to us. Is God worthy of worship even when there's no observable, tangible reason to cling to him? I think that's the second theme and the third question. The third theme of the book, I would argue, is how does God relate to the suffering of the innocent? This is the problem of suffering or the problem of evil. Whatever we want to know, what is God's relationship towards those who suffer? What is God's relationship towards causing Job suffering or towards causing suffering in the world? I think Job is a great resource to come to with that particular question in mind. How Does God relate to the suffering of the innocent? Does God cause Job's suffering? Does God permit Job's suffering? Is God powerless with regard to Job's suffering? And what is the reasons that God allows Job suffering? How are we supposed to understand this particular book? And I, I found the, the treatment by Eleanor Stump on the book of Job in her masterful work Wandering in Darkness. Just a. A great, great resource. So the book does truly answer the question, does God relate or has resources to answer the question, how does God relate to the suffering of the innocent? And then the final theme that I would argue is an ethical theme. How should we engage the suffering of others? What is your response to someone else who is suffering? Of course we have the. The bulk of the book is taken up by the dialogue cycles between Job and his three friends. And I think that this book has a lot to teach us about how we not only should engage our own suffering, meaning how should we be like Job? What are the lessons we can learn from Job, but also how do we engage others who are suffering when we find ourselves like the friends and engaging with someone whom we genuinely care about, they are genuine friends. When we engage with someone we genuinely care about who is suffering deeply, what are we supposed to do? What are we not supposed to do? What does it mean to be faithful in those moments? So I think there are other themes for sure. For example, God's role in creation. But I think these are the four key themes in the book. How should the righteous followers of God suffer? Is God worthy of disinterested righteousness? How does God relate to the suffering of the innocent? And then how should we engage the suffering of others? It really is a fascinating book that has such profound resources for these deep questions that everyone finds themselves asking at some point or another in life. And that's what's so helpful about Job. It's not one of those books that you, when you come to it and you ask powerful, hard questions that you are able to dodge it those questions by saying something like, well, when we really look at the book, it's not asking or it's not answering the questions that we think it is. Book really does seek to provide powerful answers toward these types of questions. It doesn't mean that it resolves every detail perfectly, but it is genuinely asking these questions and providing powerful resources for us to think through as, as we engage in this real world that has suffering and has the friends who suffer.
- [11:32]
C
Cooper, thank you. That was really helpful. Now, Elihu is quite an elusive character. He shows up out of Nowhere. And then after his speeches disappears. Some scholars take him as an arrogant young speaker who contributes nothing, while others as the one human speaker who offers true wisdom. Talk to us about Elihu and your own research into his speeches.
- [11:55]
D
You've touched on precisely what I find so fascinating about Elihu. Just how divergent and forceful are his various champions and detractors? Some of my favorite quotes about Elihu show this divergent, powerful language that's used to describe this elusive character. One scholar referred to Elihu as the most offensive figure the author could imagine. Others have called him a buffoon who is unworthy of our response. Why is it that Elihu goes silently untreated in the rest of the book? Because he's obviously a buffoon who we don't even need to respond to. On the extreme other hand, other scholars have referred to Elihu as the witness of God and the author's special mouthpiece. John Calvin is one of the most famous champions of Elihu in all of interpretive history. And he referred to Elihu as a good seed in the middle of darkness, so that where their friends are just providing dark counsel over and over and over again, and even Job errors over and over again. According to Calvin, Elihu alone is the human figure who gets it right. He is the bright light. He is the good seed in the middle of darkness. And I just find this divergence of opinion about this character fascinating. It's not that that some scholars find him right and some scholars find him wrong. It's that some find him so obviously right that they use this heightened language of how right Elihu is, and others find him so obviously wrong that he's a buffoon, he's offensive, he's completely unworthy of a response. And the reason, of course, for these divergent opinions is that there is no explicit evaluation of Elihu in the book. He shows up unexpectedly, and he leaves unexpectedly at the end of the book, when God is talking directly to Job, he only is talking to Job. And then he refers and says, you have not spoken to me what is right, as my servant Job has. So when he's talking to the friends, he'll talk to Eliphaz, and he will explicitly, God explicitly states Eliphaz and your two friends leaving Elihu out. So Elihu is not mentioned, he's not evaluated at the end of the book. And so at the end of the day, it's up to readers to identify whether Elihu is right or wrong and where he's right or wrong, and ultimately what interpretive history has shown us is that it's quite difficult to evaluate Elihu based solely on the merits of his speech. So what I've done in my research is offer a systematic identification and interpretation of the illusions within the Elihu speeches. So how Elihu alludes back to the previous chapters of Job. So it's very common in the book of Job during the dialogue cycles for Job and the three friends to refer back to earlier parts of the speeches, to allude to earlier parts of the speeches, so that if we're going to understand what Job is saying, we not only have to understand the words in his speech, we have to understand the way that his words allude back to. To the friends speeches earlier in the book. Well, and what. What we see is that Elihu is also engaging in the same kind of process. He too, is intentionally, often intentionally, alluding back to earlier parts of the book, to those dialogue cycles, and when we see those illusions and when we recognize those illusions and when we understand what they're doing. But my question was, how do those illusions function? And do they help us evaluate this character of Elihu and whether or not he's right or wrong? Ultimately, there has been no systematic study of illusions in Elihu before. And so I want to argue that within the world of the narrative, we are intended to recognize this network of illusions that Elihu engages in and to understand how they contribute to his argument and also how they attribute. Contribute to his characterization. So that's really kind of my twofold interest is to identify those illusions in order to see how they contribute to his argument, perhaps in a way that can help settle whether Elihu is right or wrong. And then second, to identify how the illusions as a whole function as a clue for interpreting Elihu's function within the book. So how elusiveness within these chapters pays interpretive benefits. And ultimately, here's what I found is that many. That there are many allusions in the elihu speeches. There's 23 likely allusions to earlier parts of the book. And many of these have been recognized in piecemeal form by various interpreters, but they're not systematically recognized. Several of them have gone largely unnoticed in the history of interpretation. And so collecting them all together and identifying these illusions, arguing for some that are new. And what we see is that some of these illusions do reflect positively on Elihu's character and, and show that, for example, he is trying to agree with Job, that the friends have not done a good job in answering Job's questions, that Job has not had a mediator, which is exactly what Job asked for earlier in the book. So some of those reflect quite positively on Elihu's character, and some reflect quite negatively on Elihu's character. So in Elihu's first speech, he unintentionally likens himself to Eliphaz. To a speech by Eliphaz where Elihu says, the wind in my belly constrains me. The wind in my belly constrains me. Which is an allusion back to an earlier speech, when Eliphaz says, should a wise man answer with windy knowledge or fill his belly with the east wind? So the attentive reader will recognize that what has happened here is that Elihu, due to the author's shaping, has unintentionally referred back to Eliphaz's speech. So that the author, the narrator, is likening Elihu to the. To the fool from Eliphaz's speech. So this, obviously, it makes the reader pause for a moment and go, oh, what's happening here? But of course, even this is not a universal condemnation, because as a reader, we know that Eliphaz is wrong. We know that when Eliphaz condemns Job, he's mistaken. So perhaps he's also mistaken in his condemnation of Elihu. So some of these allusions reflect possibly on Elihu, some are negative, and many are undefined or complicated, complicated instances of what it is that, that, and how they relate to Job. So to give just one example of a complicated feature of some of these illusions is in Job 33, 12, 13, Elihu is alluding back to Job's speech in chapter 9. In Job 9, Job asks rhetorically, how can a man be righteous? Or Tzedek, how can a man be righteous before God? If this he desires to contend with him, he would not answer him one time in a thousand. So if a man desired to contend with God, God would not respond to this man even once out of a thousand attempts. And elihu says in 33, 12, 13, alluding back to this speech by Job, he says, you are not right, Tzedek. In this you are not right. I will answer you. Because God is greater than man. Why do you contend with him that all his words he will not answer? And when you turn this up side by side, you see the repetition of language that is too, too much, there's too great of a quantity for it to be accidental. And so what? So Job is implying that there can be no one who is perfectly set up before God. No one can be perfectly righteous. And Elihu, in a sense in agreement with Job, says, in this, you are not Set up. You're right. You are not righteous. But Elihu is taking and in a sense exploiting some of the propositional value of Job's statements, which forces us as readers to kind of drive a wedge between us and Job. So far, look, readers have. Are fully identifying with Job. We. We recognize that he's righteous, we recognize that he's faithful. And so we're in full agreement with Job when his friends come and condemn him. We're on Job's side. But what some of Elihu's illusions do is challenge that identification. They say it forces us to look at the propositional logic of Job's claims and to evaluate and to examine is Job logically right? And it prepares us as readers to hear those Yahweh speeches and to admit that it's at least possible that Job is mistaken in some of his claims and in some of his facts. And so, ultimately, I think that these allusions do several different things. One of them is that it reviews the argument of the book by forcing cohesion, by having so many links back to earlier parts of the book, it creates these ties that unite the book together, forcing a kind of cohesion among the books. So that when we read these Elihu speeches, in a sense, we're getting a summary of the entire logic of the book and the dialogue cycles. Number two, it loosens the reader's sympathy from being with Job. Illusions sort of conscript the reader into making the point for the author. That's the way illusions work. So that through these illusions, when Elihu critiques Job, the reader fills in the logic of Elihu's speech. And as a result, it loosens our sympathies with Job. Which is. Which is a powerful point that opens up interpretive possibilities for those Yahweh speeches. And number three, I think that it creates logical distance between the reader and Job, forcing us to look at those logical propositions of Job. And then finally, it forces a subtle and nuanced evaluation of Elihu. If we're going to say the Elihu is right or we're going to say the Elihu is wrong, we've got to wrestle with these illusions and how they contribute to his argument, but also to his characterization. So by analyzing the allusions throughout Elihu's speeches, it reveals a deeper understanding of Elihu's argument, but also his characterization and role in the book.
- [23:43]
C
What would you say is the function or the role of Elihu within the book of Job?
- [23:49]
D
So this really is the payoff question. What is this unit doing the Elihu section is widely considered to be a later edition, in part because it doesn't seem to have a clearly discernible function within the book. But I think there are many different kinds of roles that he serves in the book. So I think there's three roles in general and three roles that are highlighted by the allusions. So I just want to go through those real quickly. Number one, the three roles in general is that Elihuit obviously serves an important dramatic role in the structure of the book. He increases the narrative tension by postponing a resolution after Job's speech in 29 through 31. We are expecting a climactic confrontation between God and Job, but instead, by getting Elihu, we have he serves this dramatic function of postponing the climax. Second, I think Elihu serves a really important theological role by preserving God's independence when Job demands, in essence, a meeting with God in his final speech in 29 through 31, if all of a sudden God were to show up immediately, it's as if God is at Job's beck and call. But instead, by having this long interruption of the Elihu speeches, God's independence is preserved. Third, I think that Elhus serves a preparatory role at the end of his speeches. We get the descriptions of a whirlwind, a coming storm. We get the rhetorical form of the questions that are so common in God's the opening speech, the Yahweh speech. So it prepares the reader for the coming Yahweh speeches in both itself, form and content, the form by the questions and the content with the whirlwind. But then there are three roles that we see highlighted by these illusions that I've studied in this particular work. One is this. What I've already referred to is the summative role Elihu. These allusions, they summarize the situation by alluding to key claims, alluding to key parts of Job's argument, alluding to key parts of the friend's argument. These allusions summarize the state of the book. Additionally, the Elihu speeches these illusions serve, and Elihu himself serves a rhetorical role all of a sudden. It's only in chapter 32 through 37 that the book explicitly forces the reader to think maybe the friends are wrong and Job is wrong. Based solely on the dialogue cycles, it seems as if it's an either or. It seems as if it's either the friends are wrong or Job is wrong. And because of the prologue, we know that the friends are wrong. But Elihu raises this additional possibility that perhaps both are mistaken if it forces us to look at Job through logical eyes and to begin to consider the ways that he could be corrected or is at least correctable. And then finally, the last role I see for Elihu is, is this pedagogical role that ultimately what happens for us as readers is that when we read the book of Job, at the end of it, we know that Job is commended and the friends are condemned, the three friends. But we're left asking the question, what about Elihu? What do we do with Elihu? And I think that's exactly the point. The way that Elihu functions in the book as we have it is he's kind of like a pop quiz at the end of the book. It's only after reading the book and after coming up with a consistent, coherent, plausible understanding of the whole message that we go back to those Elihu speeches and ask the question, well, okay, if this is the message of the book, is Elihu right or wrong? How is he right or wrong? Where is he right or wrong? And so the book of Job has this built in homework assignment, this built in quiz, and it's the Elihu speeches. And what I argue is that that is the function of those chapters. And because it functions that way so well, it's as if this was intended from the very beginning that, yes, in the logical narrative and the way that we read the book through the first time, Elihu serves these important functions. But in the final form of the book, when we're forced to go back and evaluate whether Elihu is right or wrong, that's really where we begin to apply the message of the book to this true to life interlocutor. And so I argue that ultimately the function of the Elihu unit is not in getting Elihu right, but in trying to get Elihu right. So that in the trying is when you are applying the message of the book. So I ultimately often don't like to say whether I think Elihu is right or wrong. I have my answers and my reasons why. But I think it's up to each of us as readers to go through with the message of the book in mind and to construct our own reasons for why we think Elihu is right or wrong. And what we see in the history of interpretation is that this section has functioned as a case study for interpreters. They the strong rhetoric in which Elihu is commended and condemned in stark terms shows that these interpreters have a conception of the message of the whole book, and they go back and apply it to Elihu, and they come to these divergent opinions, which I argue shows that the Elihu section is not poorly designed, but expertly designed because it as a case study, as a quiz, it's designed to elicit multiple responses. If he was obviously right or obviously wrong, he wouldn't be much of a quiz. It's because he's difficult to evaluate that that's the point. And that's what allows us to apply the message of the book to the Elihu speeches in a way that inculcates that message deeper inside our own hearts and minds. And so I think, yeah, I love the Elihu section and unit in part because it does not contribute to the logic of the book, but it very much contributes to the formative potential and the way that the book works on us as readers.
- [30:22]
C
Cooper, again, thank you for joining us. It's been terrific having you on new books and biblical studies.
- [30:29]
D
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real, real joy. I absolutely love the Book of Job and it's, it's been a pleasure to be on the podcast today.
- [30:37]
C
Friends, thank you for listening to New Books and Biblical Studies, a channel of the New Books Network. Until next time.
- [30:44]
D
Goodbye.
- [30:59]
B
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- [31:02]
D
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- [31:26]
C
Excludes Massachusetts.