Job as Apologetic: The Role of the Audience

A key to interpreting the Book of Job, following from the general methodology for the human sciences set out by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is to regard the field in which the text is embedded as the beliefs of its audience rather than its explicit content of story and characters. Bourdieu has shown the extent to which belief and practice involve elements of uncertainty and strategy, allowing inconsistencies to be interpreted as rhetorical effects. Several conclusions follow: the main focus of the Book is honour and wisdom; belief in divine transcendence may be produced as an effect of discontinuity and uncertainty in the narrative; piety may appear as an ideological effect of a pre-monetary economic order; and the principle of temporal retribution is shown to be reinforced by the text. At the same time, the Book is shown to furnish its own critique of conventional piety and to articulate an alternative piety grounded in critique itself. Religion is not purely ideological, for piety is portrayed as a critique of the ideological effects of the symbolic order.