Divine-Human Dialogue and Resolution in the Book of Job
type: CreativeWork
description: Does the book of Job resolve? If so, how? These are the questions which this study seeks to address, recognising the interpretive challenge of discerning coherence and closure in a book rife with competing perspectives and distinct literary segments. Setting Jeannine Brown’s communication model for hermeneutics in conversation with postmodern scholarship on Job, this study proposes a reading of Job which takes the final form of the text to be coherent and the implied author purposeful in conveying meaning that is complex yet bounded. I argue that literary resolution is evident from the text of the divine whirlwind speeches (38:1–42:6) and Epilogue (42:7–17) read in context. Divine-human dialogue has the capacity to define and redirect the central issues of the book and to furnish resolution that is principally and fittingly relational. Finally, this study attends to how the whole of Job has been crafted to draw the reader into the communicative act, as the reader becomes invested through the filling of ‘knowledge gaps’ and is primed to be confronted, alongside Job, with a crisis of decision when God’s long-awaited voice comes rushing from the whirlwind.
abstract: Does the book of Job resolve? If so, how? These are the questions which this study seeks to address, recognising the interpretive challenge of discerning coherence and closure in a book rife with competing perspectives and distinct literary segments. Setting Jeannine Brown’s communication model for hermeneutics in conversation with postmodern scholarship on Job, this study proposes a reading of Job which takes the final form of the text to be coherent and the implied author purposeful in conveying meaning that is complex yet bounded. I argue that literary resolution is evident from the text of the divine whirlwind speeches (38:1–42:6) and Epilogue (42:7–17) read in context. Divine-human dialogue has the capacity to define and redirect the central issues of the book and to furnish resolution that is principally and fittingly relational. Finally, this study attends to how the whole of Job has been crafted to draw the reader into the communicative act, as the reader becomes invested through the filling of ‘knowledge gaps’ and is primed to be confronted, alongside Job, with a crisis of decision when God’s long-awaited voice comes rushing from the whirlwind.
author: Wiener, Ellie
language: eng
keywords: Book of Job, Postmodern hermeneutics, Literary resolution, Dialogue, Creator-creature distinction
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/21831102-f8b1-4797-82f6-9d783000da98/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-04-29
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:06Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.120725