Job Chapter 41

He Picks Up a Bus and He Throws it Back Down. Go Go Leviathan!

“The religious experience, however, is beyond granting man a hedonic status or spiritual complacency. To the contrary, the religious experience is fraught with pitfalls and continual challenge. G-d, if man finds Him, does not relieve the G-d seeker of his imperatives, but imposes new ones. Religion enriches life, gives it depth and multidimensional visions, but does not always grant man the comfort and complacency that nearly always spell superficiality and shallow-mindedness.

- Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, Sacred and Profane: Hazedek [1945]

Humans constantly attempt to impose order on a chaotic and confusing existence. In the absence of religious or political answers, people have joined cults, subscribed to fascism or embraced conspiracy theories. Even the stupidest easy explanation is more attractive than random happenstance.

For most of this book, three friends and one stranger insist that the world is fair and that everything happens for a reason. They talked about ultimate justice. They tried to convince Job that he deserved his misfortune. Elihu showed up and bored everyone. Job tore their arguments apart and cried for a broken world where good things happen to bad people and vice versa.

Many interpretations reflect the discomfort of the friends. Readers may be fine with fictional depictions of atrocities and familiar with history, but the Book of Job is from the Bible. It should comfort people; not disturb them like a Terrifier movie. Scholars want easy Bible book where everything works out. Many focus only on the first and last chapters alone. Job suffered. Yada yada. G-d rewarded Job with a new family. Some even claim that Job never lost anything. He only heard false reports. In the end, he learns better. His children were alive. He never lost his fortune. This reflects Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens take where Crowley turned Job’s children into lizards.

One feels like the people pushing such readings have never had to struggle beyond that difficult high school Chemistry class. They had relatively wealthy and well-adjusted parents who loved them in a healthy way. They still believe that you cure autism, alcoholism or depression with good vibes and orders to “snap out of it.” For these people, the Book of Job makes no sense. At least not yet.

Eventually everyone encounters moments when they cannot overcome tragedy with pithy phrases. Whether we are dealing with the 4^th grade bully, divorce or cancer, we need more than “G-d closes a door and opens a window” or whatever well-meaning bullshit people say. Maybe G-d sees an order to the universe, but for mortals, the universe is not fair. There’s no ultimate justice. Communism will not create a perfect utopia where everyone is equal and no one suffers unjustly.

Accepting the world as unjust and imperfect is painful, but ultimately more worthwhile than living in a fantasy. This is a theme in many movies including Godzilla Minus One. Godzilla Minus One begins in WWII with Japan losing but still holding onto the glorious honor beliefs that include a suicide cult. A kamikaze pilot’s life is inadvertently saved by Godzilla destroying the air base where he stopped for repairs. He returns to post-war Japan as a miserable failure. Neighbors blame him for not dying. Slowly, he rebuilds. He creates a makeshift family with a homeless woman and an abandoned child. He obtains employment cleaning up mines. Godzilla keeps rampaging. In the end, he flies a plane full of explosives into Godzilla’s mouth. Only he doesn’t die because his mechanic has installed an ejection seat with a parachute and ordered him to live. Godzilla helps him reject imperial values and embrace a life beyond one that believed in death before dishonor.

Whether he’s a monster or a hero, audiences have loved Godzilla since the 1950s. Godzilla movies can be serious war movies, silly big monster fights or depictions of disaster relief. Beyond Godzilla, readers and viewers have thrilled to big monster stories for centuries. Dragons can burn down King’s Landing or join the Monkey King on a pilgrimage. Gilgamesh fights Humbnda and heavenly bulls. Big monsters are chaos personified and people love them. Natural disasters and terrorist attacks are sad. Godzilla stepping on your house and knocking down buildings is amazing.

Which brings us to the Leviathan. In isolation, this chapter is hilarious. G-d describes the Leviathan with so much enthusiasm that he might as well be an 8 year old talking about his favorite kaiju. The Leviathan has big sharp teeth, impenetrable skin, lightning sneezes. The Leviathan breathes fire, laughs at spears and makes the sea churn white in its wake. The Leviathan treats iron like straw and bronze like rotten wood. The chapter ends with “from on high, he is the king of the proud,” but it might as well end with “Dude, it’s soooo fucking cool.”

In context, the Leviathan is a refutation of Job and his friends. They want a world that they can understand, a world that is fair and makes sense. G-d has been talking about wild animals, then the hippopotamus and finally the Leviathan in order to let them know that the world only makes sense to G-d. G-d can trap the Leviathan and control the hippopotamus. G-d knows where the goats drop their babies and why the donkey just does whatever it wants.

Job is not G-d. Job doesn’t know how things work and he will never know. Yet, he can still appreciate the glorious chaos of the Leviathan. In other words, the Leviathan tells us that the world doesn’t make sense nad it doesn’t have to make sense. The chaos is beautiful. Yes, it’s also painful and unfair, but a complete fair universe has no ability to surprise and astound us.

We have crazy weirdness all around us. Maybe the Leviathan is not real but we have giants squids and freaky spiders. The world is bizarre. Love it if you can.

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Here’s a link to a Sefaria site about the Leviathan in Jewish lore.

Job 40 ———————————— Job 42