Chaoskampf, Complexity and the Twisting Snake in William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job
Blake's Job is widely seen as illustrating an apocalyptic transformation of the self, but there are hints too of an acceptance of the role of chaos not only in God's creation, but in his own.
Contents
Patient Job, militant Job
Entering the mind palace of theodicy
Some see heaven, some see hell
Blake’s vision of Job
1: Job and His Family (ϰ)
2: Satan Before the Throne of God
God and his allies on Mount Zaphon / Zion
Ancient of Days
3: Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan
Powered by wind
4: The Messengers Tell Job of His Misfortunes
5: Satan Going Forth From the Presence of the Lord and Job's Charity
6: Satan Smiting Job with Boils (ϰ)
7: Job's Comforters
Friendship energy
8: Job's Despair
A song of annihilation
Leviathan, the twisting snake
9: The Vision of Eliphaz
Nobodaddy’s remainder
The uses of suffering
10: Job Rebuked by his Friends
11: Job's Evil Dreams (ϰ)
12: The Wrath of Elihu
13: The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind
14: When the Morning Stars Sang Together
The Mount of Assembly
15: Behemoth and Leviathan
16: The Fall of Satan (ϰ)
17: The Vision of Christ
18: Job's Sacrifice / Job Praying for his Friends
From theodicy to solidarity
19: Every Man Also Gave Him a Piece of Money
20: Job and his Daughters
Art alignment
21: Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity (ϰ)
The symbol killeth
Polysemia against spoken power
Blake’s chaos
The Book of Job is the Song of Songs of scepticism, and in it terrifying serpents hiss their eternal question: Why?
Heinrich Heine
... behold the throne
Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful Deep
Milton
Last year, I interviewed Jason Wright, whose Blake's Job: Adventures in Becoming, uses Blake’s ideas about the biblical character of Job in his Illustrations to the Book of Job to describe the author’s experience leading psychotherapy workshops for recovering addicts. It is nice to see Blake put to such use, and I recommend the book. It has been warmly reviewed by other Blakeans.
As Wright has it, "we perpetually face a death, a death of a self, for a new sense of self to emerge in its place, born into and from the context, we inhabit."1 It is true that Blake’s Job cycle can help model that process of rebirth. Still, the essence of the Job myth concerns more than the cycle of death and rebirth which is the road of becoming.
This process of rebirth is no doubt part of what Blake is saying – it has clearly helped Wright enormously to focus on it in his therapeutic practice – but it is far from the whole story. If nothing else, such an interpretation skirts the core questions in Job about the meaning of suffering generally, and the nature of grace and providence.
Personal development and the overcoming of trauma involve coming to terms with suffering, but the existence of suffering on the scale of the Shoah, the Nakba, the Great Leap Forward, slavery in the Americas or the Soviet Gulag, demands a context broader than that of the wellbeing of the survivors, as important as that is. Whether or not the survivors ever come to terms with what happened to them, we must ask what God was thinking of in allowing it to happen.
The addict may have as a great resource the power of their mind to overcome its own clinging to death and choose life in the face of all the odds. The addict arguably even has a responsibility to themselves to overcome their suffering this way to live. Whatever circumstances led to their addiction, and however much others can support them, the addict can only really put their addiction behind them once they have accepted their own frailty and weakness.
We can’t say the same about the victims of the Holocaust, of colonialism and slavery, or of the Russian mass transports and the collectivisation of agriculture. Understanding suffering on such a scale requires more than therapy and personal transformation. It calls for politics; but before that it calls for wisdom and theology.
Wright sees Job through Blake’s eyes, but he understands Blake in turn through the mirror of Jung, through Jung’s followers (principally Hillman and Erdinger), and through esotericism generally.2 It seems to make sense to respond to the questions Jason’s book raised for me by turning this around and viewing Blake instead through the eyes of Job, which I try to do below.
Patient Job, militant Job
The figure of Job is widely recognised in the West, though most people are only dimly aware of his real story and its resonance. A quick poll of my friends, and visiting some randomly chosen websites, shows that Job is mostly remembered for having been hard done by – losing his wealth, his family, and his health – but also for sitting it out patiently until God does the right thing and restores his fortune. Job’s stoicism is summarised in the Gospel of James: “Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy” [James 5:11].3 This is the character that biblical scholars call the ‘patient Job’.4
Some remember Job’s long-winded and ineffectual friends – Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu (though none by name); some recall the image of Job sitting on a dungheap scraping at his sores and boils with a handy potsherd (“And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes.“ [Job 2:8]); some even know that the burial service today still quotes Job (“the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” [Job 17:14]) In short, people have mostly heard of the ‘patience of Job’ and can recall some of the more colourful details of his story.
Entering the mind palace of theodicy
How many modern readers recognise the original story of Job as among the world’s great works of literature and imagination, woven from the Job poet’s concrete lyricism, from folk wisdom, theological speculation and ancient Hebrew liturgy?
How many recognise that the story is saturated with echoes of Canaanite creation myths that embody its unconscious appeal?
How many readers of Blake realise that the story he is illustrating is radically at odds with the bulk of the Old Testament stylistically, morally, and especially in its view of a supreme deity with little interest in the doings of mankind – in sharp contrast to the covenantal Yahweh of the Books of Moses?5
How many see that the Book of Job’s innocent-sounding opening words (“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” [Job 1:1]) are a gatehouse to what is arguably the great mind-palace of Western moral, theological and existential speculation?
As a man profoundly in awe of the Bible, and as one of its most devoted students –someone for whom, as for so many English dissenters, the Bible was his ‘paper Pope’ – William Blake addressed Job’s story repeatedly, creating a body of paintings and engravings so appealing to the popular imagination that, as one Job scholar puts it, “Blake has come to own Job the way Michelangelo owns the creation of man and Leonardo the Last Supper.”6
Blake scholar, Bo Lindberg, argues that it should be possible to read Blake’s Illustrations without any context other than whatever knowledge an ‘educated’ contemporary would have brought to the task of looking at them, saying that if this were not the case the work would be an artistic failure: “the understanding of Blake's Job should not rely on background references: the plates should tell a story that can be read without the aid of any external system of reference such as the mythology of Blake’s writings, theological literature or traditional iconography. And this story must be a complete story, bearing a mind that a complete story is not necessarily the same thing as the complete story.” He is essentially right.7
The story we would extract in this way would be the first-order meaning of the work, as it was intended to be understood by Blake. It does not exclude the possibility of other meanings attached to the work, deliberate and unintentional / unconscious, by Blake or by others. We will therefore want to round out the impression formed by our ‘educated observer’ by also considering Blake’s myths and philosophy more generally, based on what we know of them from studying works other than the Job Illustrations and applying this to our interpretation. This allows us to tease out further layers of meaning and correspondences. Blake scholars have provided several such overlapping and competing accounts.8
To account for everything Blake built into his work, consciously and otherwise, means digging deep into the Bible, Job legend and commentary, and Blake’s mythology alike. The point is that the first level of such interpretation, the one Blake aimed at his basic readership, does not require such depth, although it perhaps does require some extra background information these days to account for the change in the general culture of ‘educated viewers’ between Blake’s time and ours. Arguably Blake’s viewers then came equipped with a greater understanding of Job’s story, but even then, eg., the texts added to the engraved images exist to prompt the viewer, whoever they may be and however much knowledge they may have of Job.
The Job tradition
Engaging fully with Blake’s images requires understanding the story of Job and its reception – a story of some complexity given the great depth of its history, the range of people who’ve commented on it, and the wide dissemination of the story in art and popular culture. Such an understanding is weak in many accounts of the Illustrations.9
Knowledge of ‘the man from Uz’ and how his story was recorded and disputed is necessary because it highlights Blake’s argument by showing us where Blake departed from tradition to speak for himself, and the many cases in which he did not. Missing this context blinds us to what is specific to Blake’s reading of Job versus what is common to tradition. Better acquaintance with Biblical and scholarly analysis of the Book of Job can also correct individual misreadings of both Blake and Job based, eg., on outdated translations and interpretations of the Bible text.
The Job tradition that sets the scene for Blake’s vision is considerably more complicated than the image of the meek and patient Job implies, which means that conflicting interpretations of Job’s story are as important to understanding Blake as the popular tale of Job’s suffering and redemption. We need to understand something of the entire field of interpretation, even if only in broad terms, to see what paths Blake himself took through this meta-story.
To clarify Blake’s take on the story of Job, and the story of Job as it exists independently of Blake, I talk here about the following topics:
An overview of the issues in interpreting the Book of Job, and how it has been interpreted historically. Some of this is introduced in the course of telling the story of Blake’s Job, while some is presented separately.
Some of the history of Blake’s Job project
An account of Blake’s version of the story image by image
How Blake’s work is distorted by treating it as a cypher for other traditions (Traditionalism, Neoplatonism, Jung)
I suggest a reading of one aspect of the story – the significance of the foregrounding by Blake of the mythical beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan – which suggests an insight on Blake’s part impacting not only his understanding of Job’s revelation but also his own ideas of truth and divine vision.
Some see heaven, some see hell
Blake referred to Job throughout his adult life, presumably because he thought his story significant. However, Blake’s understanding focused on Job’s personal transformation, which is not a major theme in the original telling. For Blake, Job’s story is that of a man who transcends his misery by changing how he sees God.
That Blake had original ideas about this transformation in Job is obvious as early as 1790, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he says:
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling… The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death. But in the Book of Job Milton’s Messiah is call'd Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties. It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire.10
William Blake
He’s saying that Milton’s Paradise Lost tells the story of the cosmic struggle between ‘reason’ and ‘energy’, but that Milton wrongly assigned the divine, angelic role to reason and the evil, demonic role to energy. Blake believed that the Book of Job showed those roles in their correct, reversed order: in the Book of Job, the demonic role is played by reason, and the divine role by ‘spirit’. Hence the Book of Job becomes for Blake a corrective to the deistic theology of his time.
Flipping Milton
This reversal is arguably the most vital part of Blake’s vision. Blake ‘flips’ Milton (to borrow Jeffrey Kripal’s coinage) (“this history has been adopted by both parties”), with the result that angels and demons, Satan and Yahweh, swap places and intermingle as the perspective shifts. This move has proved both scandalous to many, and yet very attractive to some modern readers.
More accurately, Blake thinks Milton has flipped Job, so Job is simply being put back in the right place by flipping Milton in turn. Blake sees the Book of Job as expressing the real state of affairs (divine spirit, demonic reason), thus emphasising the importance of Job’s story to Blake’s vision.
Plate five of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – which contains most of the text above about flipping Milton – shows a horse and its rider upended in mid-air (the rider’s upturned sword now becomes a crucifix), much as Blake thought Milton upended Job. Blake wants to upset Milton’s upending and put the story straight.
Note especially – a key to understanding Blake’s Illustrations as a whole – that this retelling involves the assertion that the Jehova of the Old Testament, the God of the Book of Job, when he manifests as reason and law, is “no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire”, ie., Satan. As we’ve noted, for Blake, Jehovah, among other things, is, or can be, Satan.
For Blake, the story of Job is the story of Albion. Both begin in peace, but in some sense divided against themselves. Both are tested by Satan, and both fall. But both rise again. Job sees God, casts off Satan, and is restored to life and prosperity, while Albion reintegrates and inaugurates the New Jerusalem.
The easiest way to approach our account of Blake’s Illustrations is by telling the original story, then relating Blake’s images to it while mentioning historical disputes over its interpretation along the way. I’ll begin with an outline of the Old Testament story.
Perfect and upright
The story of Job is contained in the prose prologue and epilogue of the biblical Book of Job (chapters one and two, and then the final chapter, forty-two). For a long time, the Book of Job was considered the oldest book in the Old Testament, written in Egypt before God gave the law to Moses. For that reason, Job was considered the last of the patriarchs.11 Origen “says that Moses… translated the book of Job from the Syriac, read it to the Israelites in Egypt, and said, “you shall be delivered as Job was.””12
In the prologue we learn that Job is a man of good character (“perfect and upright… one that feared God, and eschewed evil” [Job 1.1]. He is wealthy, a proud father, a generous employer, a good citizen and a friend to the needy: basically, he’s holding a full house in terms of conventional piety and ambition. In biblical terms, he’s a winner.
Job is not an Israelite. The name ‘Job’ or its cognates has been found in archaeological inscriptions across the region around Canaan, dating from around 2000 BCE onwards.13
Job lived in ‘the land of Uz’, thought by scholars to be trans-Jordanian, either to the north or south, possibly in the south-east of the region of Edom. Nevertheless, he worships Yahweh (as the people of Edom were said to have done, before the Israelites), albeit that he calls him by an impressive array of names, including El, Eloah, Elohim, Shaddai, Adonai (‘Lord’), Yahweh, Kabir (‘Mighty’), Asah and Paal (‘Maker’).14 His era is that of the patriarchs, in the mid-second millennium BCE.15 Job also appears in Islamic traditions, including in the Quran itself, as Ayyub (Ayūb), with a similar reputation. The haziness concerning Job’s exact time and place suggests an author who’d like us to think of Job as having lived “a long time ago, in a place far away.”16
Sabean and Chaldean raiders seize Job’s flocks and massacre his servants
Plotting with the Sons of God
Having introduced Job, the story gets underway when Yahweh is holding court in heaven one day with his retinue, the ‘Sons of God’ (bene ha Elohim), among whom is his enforcer and cosmic chief of police, Satan (‘ha Satan’: ‘the Adversary’, ‘the Accuser’.)17 Satan and Yahweh get to discussing Job, “Hast thou considered my servant Job?”18 Yahweh praises him as an especially righteous and devout follower. Satan, ever alert to the faintest fluttering of potential treason, counters that, on the contrary, he thought Job would probably curse and betray Yahweh rather than worship him if his wealth and family were taken away. He thinks Job only worships Yahweh because Yahweh has pampered him. Yahweh, rattled, allows Satan to test Job.
Immediately, Sabean and Chaldean raiders seize Job’s flocks and massacre his servants; the ’fire of God’ falls on the rest of his possessions and destroys them [Job 1:16]; finally, a whirlwind causes a building to collapse on his children as they share a meal: they are all killed. Job loses everything.
Rather than curse God, Job continues to praise him, uttering words that are still part of the burial service today: “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” [Job 1:21].
Satan remains anxious and unconvinced by Job’s continued outward loyalty. He continues to press Yahweh, saying that if only he were allowed to “touch his bone and his flesh”, Job could be made by Satan to reveal his underlying faithlessness and curse his maker. Satan believes Job is weak and should be more strenuously tested. Yahweh, while insisting that Job should not be killed in the experiment, allows Satan to further afflict Job with an agonising disease that progressively eats his flesh.
Curse God and be done with it
Job is reduced to sitting on the town dungheap, rancid and filthy, scraping at his sores. His wife seems to say that he may as well curse God and be done with it, as Yahweh looks set to kill him anyway. But Job persists. Three friends arrive (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar – the ‘comforters’) to sit with Job for seven days. They do not recognise him at first as his disease has so disfigured Job and he is in such despair. They sit silently.
There ends the prologue of chapters One and Two of the Book of Job. In the next thirty-nine chapters, Job launches a passionate outcry against his own existence, in a poem which stands among the most thrilling of the Old Testament, with “a virtuosity that transcends all other Biblical poetry”.19 It begins:
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it [Job 3:2-5].
The comforters speak several times each and are replied to in turn by Job as they pontificate about what he could have done to invite such dreadful retribution; a conventional Hymn to Wisdom (Hokmah) is sung which cannot be attributed meaningfully to any of the story’s characters since its attitude suits none of them; a younger man, Elihu, butts in to offer a different take on Job’s moral standing; finally, Yahweh himself speaks, challenging Job directly in a poem that rivals Job’s own earlier hymn to annihilation in the simple power of its imagery.
These intermediary chapters, inserted by the compiler of the Book of Job between prologue and epilogue, provide the meat for centuries of raging historical, inter-faith, and secular debates about the theological and ethical meaning of Job’s trials, about theology and theodicy.
Out of the whirlwind
Robert Alter notes the “palpable discrepancy between the simple folktale world of the frame-story and the poetic heart of the book.”20 There are reasons to think that the frame story is merely a pretext for the author to insert the theological debates it bookends:
when the LORD speaks from the whirlwind at the end, He makes no reference whatever either to the wager with the Adversary or to any celestial meeting of 'the sons of God,' a notion of a council of the gods that ultimately goes back to Canaanite mythology. The old folktale, then, about the suffering of the righteous Job is merely a pretext, a narrative excuse, and a pre-text, a way of introducing the text proper, and what happens in it provides little help for thinking through the problem of theodicy.21
When the folk tale picks up again in the epilogue, as mentioned, God speaks to Job “out of the whirlwind”,22 and Job undergoes a transformation as a result of this experience (“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee,”) after which he keels over and submits, “in dust and ashes” [Job 42:5].
In a key section of the epilogue, Yahweh calls out the comforters, saying, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right” [Job 42:7]. He tells them to present sacrifices to Job, who is to intercede on their behalf with Yahweh to ask for his forgiveness for them. We’ll see later the sense in which they had not spoken of Yahweh “the thing that is right.”
Job’s latter end
As for Job himself, his fortunes and his children are restored: Yahweh “blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning” [Job 42:12]. Job went on to live to the age of a hundred and forty. His family prospered; his daughters were married off with great dowries. In the end, Job “died, being old and full of days” [Job 42:17].
Moralists love the bit of the story where Job gets a payoff for his endurance.
The prologue and epilogue together most likely recount an old Canaanite folk tale, with material newly written or inserted from other sources (Israelite liturgy, wisdom literature, Psalms) to pose theological questions and leaven the drama of the basic telling. This is the story Blake illustrated, albeit that he turned it into a vehicle for his own ideas about the nature of the compact between Yahweh and Satan. In turning Job’s story to his purposes Blake was no different to other commentators from the time of the poet of Job down to our own. What did he make of the story?
Blake’s use of Job
Blake dealt with aspects of Job’s drama at various points without telling the story as a whole or presenting any conclusions about it. His earliest depiction of Job is possibly the watercolour, Job and his Family, which Lindberg dates as early as 1784, though this is disputed.23
Blake’s engraving of Job, his wife and the comforters (Job, 1793), and the painting of Yahweh speaking from out of the whirlwind (Job Confesses His Presumption to God Who Answers From the Whirlwind, 1803-5), are pictured above. To these can be added Job and His Daughters (1799-1800), part of a series of tempura and ink images on themes from the Bible, probably commissioned by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts (which was eventually incorporated into the Job series when Blake was preparing the Linnell watercolours).
As well as illustrating the Job story as such, Blake used its themes independently of it: for example, in The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805) and The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (1805-1806), the characters of Leviathan and Behemoth play a central role in the political allegory, and they derive from Yahweh’s speech in [Job 40-41]. Thus the elements of the Job story, which themselves come from an older layer. ofmyth, are put to work independently by Blake.
Blake refers to Job in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), when he turns Milton’s hierarchy of reason and energy on its head, as noted above, and also, eg., in the final plate of his series, For Children: The Gates of Paradise, where he depicts the spiritual traveller, staff in hand at the end of his journey, seated at the edge of the grave, and he quotes Job: “I have said to the Worm, Thou art my mother & my sister.”24 This reflects Blake’s belief that death and the grave are to be welcomed since they are the gateway to eternal life. He associates this belief with the Job story, and Job’s claim that he will see his ‘redeemer’ in the flesh.
References to Job “occur frequently in Blake's writings”,25 both explicit, where Blake quotes Job to make a point, or implicit, where Blake lends the very structure of the Job story to his own work. In The Four Zoas, Enion echoes Job’s thoughts on the price of wisdom (“But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?” [Job 28:12], and concludes by quoting Job directly; “but it is not so with me.”26
In Milton, Satan accuses Palamabron before the divine council, exactly as happened to Job.27 The entire story arc of Jerusalem, describing Albion’s fall and recovery, is lifted from Job. In the course of the Jerusalem version, Behemoth and Leviathan are mentioned again,28 and Jerusalem quotes a key passage in Job, which Blake (mistakenly) took to reflect the promise of the resurrection of the body: “I know that in my flesh I shall see God.”29
Revenge and the redeemer
Interpreting these lines from the Book of Job as the Old Testament’s promise of bodily resurrection is a staple of Christian thought, but is completely anachronistic, and cannot be made to work at all outside of the typological attitude that sees the events of the Old Testament as prefiguring those of the New Testament and the life of Christ. The passage as a whole reads:
For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the Earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God. [Job 19:25-26]
From Clement of Rome, in the first century CE, through Thomas Aquinas, John Chrysostom and others, this has been interpreted by Christians to mean that the speaker expects to see their redeemer, assumed to be Jesus, “in the flesh”, which it is assumed can only happen once they have been bodily resurrected in heaven, where they will meet Jesus as God.30 In this way, Job gets to anticipate Christ.
This cannot be the meaning of the original text, since the author belonged to a culture that had no such concept of bodily resurrection, or, indeed, of Christ. The solution to the riddle lies with the Hebrew word, go’el, interpreted and translated in most Bibles as meaning ‘redeemer’ (“I know that my Redeemer liveth“).
In fact, in the Bronze Age society that gave rise to the Book of Job, a go’el was someone charged with visiting revenge upon an enemy in the context of a tribal vendetta. If a member of your family was attacked in the course of a feud, a go’el was appointed by the family, charged with exacting revenge. That Job should mention this redeemer at all in the context of a dispute with God is one of the truly remarkable things about the original story:31 Job imagines (out loud) employing a hitman against God.
The business of seeing this ‘redeemer’ / hitman “in the flesh” is simply a way of translating the original thought that, though Job’s body is riddled with worms and canker eating away at it, and Job himself surely hovering somewhere around death’s door, nevertheless he expects to live long enough to witness his redeemer’s revenge go down.
That Blake accepted the standard church explanation of these lines is worth noting, since he is assumed to be always at loggerheads with the Church, and the idea of bodily resurrection was especially important to him. Regarding the resurrection, a key part of his religion, Blake was orthodox.
The business of ‘seeing one’s redeemer’ is crucial to Blake’s wider message in the way he interprets it. For Blake, the Christian promise of resurrection means that our account with God is not closed in this lifetime. We may suffer unjustly, but we cannot complain because our account is finally settled, not in this life but in the next, when God will award or punish us accordingly. Blake accepts the essential moral calculus of the Church once the payment date has been pushed back until after the resurrection: pie in the sky when you die.
When we speak of Blake’s retelling of the Job story we have always to understand that Blake himself, and most of the artists and commentators he drew on, consciously and unconsciously, was not trying to ‘get into the head’ of the Job author or analyse the historical situation he described. The point was never to represent how the ancients interpreted Job’s story, but rather to present that story in the fully Christian sense that could only have emerged after the event, outside of the event itself:
The old illustrators of Job did not interpret the book according to our way of reading it; neither did they try to interpret it according to the meaning it originally held for the Jews. They viewed it in the light of patristic and theological tradition, and stressed its significance for the teachings and liturgy of the church, and for the faith and morals of the congregation (Bo Lindberg).32
Treatment of Job
Blake’s first attempt at a sustained treatment of Job comes with the set of nineteen watercolours created for Thomas Butts, c.1805-06. These follow the drift of the Job story but with some obvious departures to capture Blake’s perspective. In 1821, John Linnell paid for his own version of the Butts set. Butts lent his original set to Linnell to trace, and Blake then coloured the tracings. Blake took the opportunity to create two new images – #17, ‘The Vision of Christ’, and #20, ‘Job and His Daughters’ – in two versions, one for Butts and one for Linnell, thus rounding out the Butts and Linnell sets to twenty-one images each in total.33
Fountain Court
In a bid to raise income for Blake – now living with Catherine in the decrepit Fountain Court off the Strand, and desperate for work – on 25ᵗʰ March 1823 Linnell signed a contract commissioning Blake to turn the Job images into engravings to be printed and sold commercially. Blake engraved all twenty-one images, adding new scriptural and visual commentary in the wide borders around each image on the printed page. He also created a new image as the cover for the set, depicting the Seven Eyes of God, representing successive historical phases of religion and the awakening human mind (above).34
Linnell sold out the first edition of 315 sets, then printed a second edition of another one hundred sets of engravings, making a total across two editions of around 415 sets, sold originally at a trade price of £2 12s 6d. The project was eventually a commercial success.35
The Legend of Job
I’ve contrasted the Job story generally with Blake’s interpretation of it, but it needs emphasising again that the Job story itself is far from being reducible to the words of the Old Testament. In fact, the Job tradition as a whole is made up of a series of interlocking, overlapping and contradictory stories and images. The Book of Job was an amalgam from the start, based on a traditional Canaanite folk story, as mentioned above;36 the story of Job originated in folk tradition before it was written up by the Job poet, probably sometime around the end of the Babylonian exile and its immediate aftermath in the 6ᵗʰ or 5ᵗʰ century BCE.37 The story then continued to develop outside of the Bible among Jews, then Christians and Muslims, generating a wider Job tradition rooted in the Bible text but developing independently of it.
For instance, when the Gospel of James celebrates Job for his patience (making it proverbial, until it swamps the popular understanding of Job today), the author is almost certainly influenced not by the Old Testament Book of Job but rather the later, apocryphal Testament of Job, which argues that “patience is better than anything”.38 By contrast, the Hebrew words for ‘patience’ (erek) and its root (arak, ‘long-suffering’) are not to be found in the Book of Job.39 The so-called ‘patient Job’ was originally more of a militant and an iconoclast, challenging God to explain his suffering. His reputation has been whitewashed in popular culture.
From the town dump to the calvary of Christ
The Testament of Job was likely written by members of an ecstatic Egyptian sect, the Therapeutae, between 200 BCE and 200 CE.40 The story it tells differs in details from the Book of Job and lacks its convulsive poetry and radical theodicy.
The Testament is significant at this point because, when Blake painted his original image of Job and His Daughters (above, left), he showed Job dictating his story to the daughters. Behind Job on the wall are panels showing scenes from his life, towards which he gesticulates, his arms in a cruciform pose recalling Christ and the idea of Job as the ‘type of Christ’ / Jobus Christi.41 (through whom, according to Victor Hugo, “the dung heap of Job, transfigured, will become the Calvary of Christ”).42
This image was first created for the set Paintings Illustrating the Bible (1799-1803) but retroactively added to the Illustrations to the Book of Job when Blake was working on the Linnell set fifteen years later. Yet the idea that Job’s daughters were the first to record his history is not taken from the Book of Job: The Testament, on the other hand, claimed to have been written by Job’s daughters at Job’s dictation.
Blake's Job therefore draws on the alternative tradition of the Testament. This is just one example of Blake’s doing so. Lindberg thinks that there is the same influence on show in aspects of images 3, 5, 6, 14, 18 and 19 too, and that “the sense underlying Blake’s interpretation of the Book of Job, that our true life begins after death, is strongly emphasised by the Testament.”43
Blake cannot have read the Testament because it was not published in the West until 1833. But before then, “it had spread to the West in the form of folktales and poems, and part of its contents are preserved in German and English poetry, and in a French mystery play. Paintings and woodcuts illustrating the Testament are numerous, especially in the 15ᵗʰ century.”44
There are many other clues in Blake that he was familiar with wider folk and church traditions concerning Job, and incorporated legendary material into his art as well as inventing purely new scenes of his own. Many, if not most of Blake’s borrowings from the Job legend would have come to him through his lifelong study of pictorial traditions in Western art.45
True art and religion
In plate #1 Blake depicts Job and his family in front of a Gothic cathedral. Wicksteed and others claim that the significance of the Gothic in Blake’s art is that it is used to symbolise “true art and religion.”46 As Lindberg points out, such a meaning flies in the face of everything the plate is trying to say:
The Gothic church has been called a symbol of true art and religion... I do not think that symbolism to be Blake's. True art or true religion possessed by Job in plates one and four tends to make nonsense of Blake's picture story, in which Job achieves true art and true religion in the last scenes only.47
Job is shown at the outset of the story as being immersed in false religion and ignoring art: the family’s musical instruments hang in the branches of the tree, unused, indicating that true art and impassioned worship are missing from their lives. Blake makes this plain by adding to the engraved plate the text of St Paul’s warning to the Corinthians, “the Letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life” [Corinthians II 3:6].
Job and his wife read the books of law on their laps (Blake used books to indicate law and reason, and scrolls to suggest poetry) because they understand God only through his laws. They have a limited understanding, and they certainly do not embody (at least at the outset of the story) ‘true religion’. That comes later.
Alien and anachronistic
In these circumstances, it makes more sense to think that Blake put the cathedral in the background because he had heard of the tradition that Job had been a bishop, which would suit Blake’s anti-clericalism (since the bishop here is not a true Christian) but, of course, it is entirely foreign to the original, pre-Christian setting of the Book of Job. In any case, this looks like another detail in which Blake relies on an extra-canonical source.
It is worth taking in just how completely alien is the opening of Blake’s version of Job compared to the original. Job is situated by a cathedral, in a Christian context. Job is implicitly criticised for following the letter of the law rather than its spirit, and thus of being a dubious, naive believer, just as Paul criticised those who thought Christ could only be approached by those who kept the Jewish law. It is the Spirit that counts, not the law.
Job’s situation is anachronistic. He is goaded by Blake to accept the spirit over the letter of the law, yet the spirit, the Gospel, did not exist in his time, and was not an option. His situation is doubly ironic for those who believe the Book of Job to predate the Exodus from Egypt: in that case Job lived not only before the Gosel but before Moses received the Law too.
Spirit over law
The emphasis on Spirit over the Law is at the heart of Christianity. It is therefore hardly surprising that it is also at the centre of Blake’s thought… but it was an alien concept to the Job poet.
Blake inserts Job into a Christian context then critiques his Christianity as well-meant but carried out by rote and not from the heart, so that it is therefore lacking. This is at the heart of Blake’s telling because it sets the scene for the eventual transformation of Job’s relationship to Yahweh, recognising Christ in God, and thereby overcoming this inadequacy. The original story has no role for Christ, for the obvious reason that it was written more than half a millennium before he lived, and was set at least another five hundred years before that. The original tale is about many things, but it is surely not about how to set oneself right with God by recognising Christ. None of this means that Blake was wrong.
Andrew Wright summarises the gulf between Blake and the Job poet over the fundamental meaning of Job’s experience:
The Book of Job raises the question of suffering and leaves it unanswered on the grounds that God cannot be held accountable to man: the voice from the whirlwind comforts but does not enlighten Job... [He] is rewarded not because he comprehends but because he endures. To Blake, however, Job's failure to understand is rooted in an infirmity of imagination. Job is guilty of refusing to look, of contenting himself pridefully with a superficial apprehension of the world.48
This shift upsets the theodicy of the story because, originally, Job was innocent, whereas Blake’s Job suffers because of his banal and religiose attitude. It cannot be that the suffering of an innocent man is the same thing as the suffering of someone caused by their being out of step with God. Blake puts Job in the wrong, though he was far from being the first to do so.
Types of Christ
That Blake should choose to reinterpret the story in this way is not at all unusual, given the Christian tradition of reading the Old Testament ‘typologically’, so that its events foreshadow and predict Christ’s coming: so, for example, Jonah is considered a ‘type of Christ’ because, in escaping the belly of the whale, he escaped death; when Yahweh looks favourably on Abel’s sacrifice of the firstborn lamb of his flock, he is recognising that the ‘firstborn lamb’ is a typological stand-in for Christ, firstborn of God.
If Blake had simply rendered the original story we would perhaps be less interested – not because the original is a less interesting story, but because it isn’t Blake’s story. Blake accepted the typological approach that creates a unity of the entire Bible by seeing it as all essentially about Christ. Not only is this orthodox, it is at the heart of Blake’s idea of the divine. He saw the Bible as telling a single, unified story, and his only ambition was to properly tell that story: he “held the whole canon as total truth and totally true“ (Martha England).49 But for Blake, the meaning of Job is bound up with the example of Christ in a way that cannot be true of the author of the Book of Job.
Non-canonical stories about Job can be found in both Palestinian and Babylonian versions of the Talmud.50 Other textual sources feeding into the popular image of Job that Blake might have drawn upon include the Mishna (a collection of Jewish oral traditions) and the Targum of Job, an Aramaic version of the Job story from the first century BCE, complete with commentary, discovered at Qumran. I’m not suggesting that Blake drew directly on these particular texts, but they prove that the legend of Job was not uniquely tied to the Old Testament, and that it developed in parallel to it in other contexts.
A prophetic, ranting Job
Blake, of course, would have known all about Milton’s use of Job in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As is clear from his comments about reason and energy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he understood that Paradise Lost was a kind of retelling of Job’s story. As Stephen Vicchio says in his overview of Job literature, The Image of the Biblical Job, "... in Milton we see a rather curious and brilliant reinvention of the Book of Job."51
How unlike Blake not to have chosen a prophetic, ranting Job.
Milton depicts Job in line with tradition as ‘patient Job’, which surely influences Blake’s view – though I wouldn’t be the first to wonder how Blake really felt about Job’s legendary forbearance, being personally someone who liked to remind himself that "the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God."52 You’d think Blake would find the patient Job a bit bland for his taste. Curiously, this means that the indignation that characterises the original Job is underplayed in Blake’s telling, coming into play only in image #8: ‘Job's Despair’. How unlike Blake not to have chosen a prophetic, ranting Job.
In any case, there were plenty of sources of knowledge of the legend of Job available to Blake, and Job also appeared prominently in art and literature long before Blake’s time. Some aspects of the story had already condensed into legends, while others were still disputed and made new by each new generation of theologians and moralists.
The Book of Job was subject to commentary by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, St Jerome, St Augustine, Gregory the Great, Maimonides, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Spinoza, and Moses Mendelssohn, as well as literally hundreds of assorted lesser lights.53 The results of their deliberations were broadcast from pulpits across Europe since long before anyone could remember: Calvin’s commentaries are based on a run of forty sermons he delivered in 1554-55 on ‘aspects’ of Job’s tale; concluding characteristically, in the interests of social peace, that “... we must learn to keep our mouth shut when God afflicts us.“54
From the Bible of the Poor, via Blake, to the Wake
As much as any of this intellectual debate and criticism, among the key media shaping the perception of Job historically would have been the representations of his story in church murals and stained glass windows, and in works such as the Bible of the Poor (of which many competing versions were published), in which episodes from the life of Christ were depicted topologically in elaborate frames on each page, with scenes from different corners of the Bible appearing in the surrounding panels, so that each image reflects back and forth on the others, mutually supporting one another. Even in regular Bibles, the role of images was not merely to illustrate the narrative, much as is the case with many of Blake’s illustrations.
The typological approach – in which scenes of very different orders, trivial and grand, are connected across centuries of time – and the collaging of diverse texts and images on the same page, makes the Bible of the Poor a model of the type of non-linear narrative Blake would create with the mixed-media of his Illuminated works and which James Joyce made the tissue of Finnegans Wake.
Through such means, the elements of the Job story were transmitted, not always as a continuous narrative with a clear linear structure and a plain moral, but as atoms, molecules, and cells of meaning resonant with connections to other stories in the Bible and to everyday life, and all linked to the story of Christ’s promise of Job-like redemption.
For a long time, most people didn’t have access to a Bible. Even if they had, most of them couldn’t read it. Much of people’s knowledge of the Bible in pre-literate cultures was not strictly conceptual or discursive but absorbed in terms of images depicting events that were themselves the words with which God writes history.55 A brief glance at the Bible of the Poor reveals that its dramatic visual and textual contrasts and juxtapositions, and the way its elements call out to one another, create a similar web of intertextuality to that of Blake’s greatest works.
[The Book of Job] is an epic representation of human nature, and a theodicee or justification of the moral government of God, not in words, but in its exhibition of events, in that working, that is without words.
Johann Gottfried von Herder56
Polysemia at home
In this understanding of the Bible, each event is significant in and of itself, but widely separated events may also be relevant in conjunction or in contrast with one another, their meanings bound together typologically. From one point of view, the events unfold in linear order in time; from another, the events of Job’s story happen simultaneously and are still happening. In theodicy, virtue and reward must be arranged sequentially, laid out neatly, to make a point about God’s providence; but in the real world they exist side by side, much as they existed in the imaginations of those who got their idea of Job from devotional images.
Blake has woven these images together in his narrative, and his visions also call back and forward to each other, and to the original text, quite irrespective of how they are fixed on the plate. The autonomy of the individual Job image embodies a force, constantly threatening to prise apart the structure Blake places around the images as a whole. No matter how sublime Blake’s allegory, it can never exhaust the meaning of the original story, because that story is full of so much ambivalence and so many contradictions, and each element of the story is itself capable of being endlessly reformulated. Job’s story cannot be primly reformatted by Blake or anyone else.
In no way is this meant as a criticism of Blake. All narrative representations of the story of Job are faced with the fact that the legend of Job in its totality is more encompassing than anything they might invent to encapsulate it. If we bear this in mind, we are safe to start on the task of describing the myth that Blake built on top of Job.
Before describing the Blake illustrations individually we need to consider some issues to do with the structure of the images as a collection, as well as addressing the question of Blake’s use of symbolism in those images in the Job series specifically and in his art more generally.
Blake’s vision of Job
Joseph Wicksteed, author of the first long study of Blake’s Job (1910), argued that Blake’s cover for the engraved set reveals the overall structure of his story, based on Blake’s interpretation of the Prophet Zechariah’s ‘seven eyes of God’.57 According to this idea, Blake equates each of the seven eyes with a deity at the head of an associated religion, each of which religion is appropriate to one of the seven ages through which God attempts to awaken the sleeping Albion. This schema is often presented as the key to Blake’s Job.
Lucifer, Moloch, Elohim…
Blake names these deities Lucifer, Moloch, Elohim, Shaddai, Pachad, Jehova and Jesus; “the ‘eighth eye’ he occasionally speaks of is the apocalypse or awakening of Albion himself.”58 The first three ages are those known to Hesiod as the silver, bronze and iron ages, and these three ages are those of the Fall.
And they Elected Seven, calld the Seven Eyes of God;
Lucifer, Molech, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah, Jesus.
They namd the Eighth. he came not, he hid in Albions Forests
William Blake59
Foster Damon elaborated on this to argue that each of the seven deities listed above governs the meaning of two plates in turn of Blake’s Job; so Lucifer has plates one and two, Molech, three and four, and so on up to Jesus, with plates thirteen and fourteen. After that, he argues, the deities each have one more plate to explain, but the order of deities is reversed; so Jehova has plate fifteen, Jesus plate sixteen, Pahad plate seventeen, and so on up to Lucifer again for the final plate, twenty-one.)
Despite this scheme having become an accepted template for interpreting the Illustrations, Foster Damon has to tinker with the story itself and with the order of the eyes as well (you may have noticed in the description above that he arbitrarily swaps the positions of Jehova and Christ when assigning plates fifteen and sixteen, for instance) to come anywhere near Blake’s images. Lindberg argues that this system of the seven eyes doesn’t help understand Blake’s story in terms of its theology, its linguistics or the pictorial reading it encourages.60
Instead of this overarching explanatory structure to Blake’s story, Lindberg argues for a simpler breakdown, with each fifth image representing a turning point. This is a keyframing structure in which the first, sixth, eleventh, sixteenth and final plates are the keys, while each set of four plates separating the keyframes provides context for the main images or moves the story along.
So, the keyframe structure is: 1+4+1+4+1+4+1+4+1 (the keyframes are marked with a kappa, ϰ, in the titles when the individual images are discussed below). This means that Lindberg thinks images one, six, eleven, sixteen and twenty-one are the most important plates (see above). Note that this structure does not impose a particular meaning on either the series as a whole or the individual images, only on how the telling of the story is paced, and the emphasis placed on different parts of it. The most it requires is that the keyframing images are treated as especially telling for the story’s development.
Another point about the structure of Blake’s story is that it is entirely of Blake’s making. While many of the events of his story appear in the original, they are not necessarily in the original order, and some of the scenes are Blake’s invention. “The order of the designs was invented by Blake and does not follow the events of the book. It is original, not illustrative.”61
Job’s unity
It is worth emphasising that the Illustrations to the Book of Job form a unity; “The series forms an epic unity, and is conceived as a whole” (Lindberg).62 What this means is that the collection of the images taken as a whole, considered in the order in which Blake arranged them, tells a story unified teleologically by the point Blake is trying to make about the nature of the divine. The continuity between images is asserted by the manner of their arrangement and by the use of common motifs. To change the order of the images would be to change the story and the point of the story.
But this undoubted unity does not mean that the individual images in the series are meaningless outside of the totality constructed from them by Blake’s sequencing, design, and (with the engravings) commentary. This is true by analogy with the way that we can say that a page of the Bible of the Poor is not exhausted by thinking of the message of the overall design of the page, its theme, but also contains image and text elements with a life of their own, affecting the viewer independently of, or in addition to, their contribution to the whole. The individual image is not subsumed by its part in the series.
Where Blake’s Job is most coherent and most structured, is in the primary level of meaning of the story, aimed at the casual buyer. Where it is less structured is everywhere else.
Implicit and explicit work
This creates a tension in Blake’s work. On the one hand, spotlit on centre-stage is the narrative he wanted to create; the meaning or sense he consciously and artfully designed to share with his audience (the explicit work). This meaning can be inferred by adopting the point of view of Lindberg’s ‘educated observer’ and reading the visual and textual cues appropriately.
Sitting alongside is a parallel work, or indeed parallel works, authored by Blake’s unconscious and his habits, constructed from the same images and text elements as the other levels, but created spontaneously by Blake in response to his knowledge of the Job tradition, to express ideas he himself may have been only more or less aware of; the implicit work(s). Just as the character in a novel may import a backstory from elsewhere, Blake's themes and characters may have lives outside the Illustrations. The implicit work doesn’t cohere in the same way as the explicit. It may agree with the latter in some details, in others it may be at odds.
Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job should be studied to extract all the sense we can from it concerning not only Blake’s intentions but also his underground, implicit knowledge. The Lindberg framework is useful in deciphering the explicit meaning of the work, to do with Blake’s beliefs and intentions, but it is irrelevant when we look at the implicit meaning. I have found it useful to keep the five keyframes in mind when thinking about Blake’s telling of the story. It will not always bear more weight than that.
I treat the Butts and Linnell sets and the engravings as equivalent. The two sets were not created as trial runs for the final work somehow embodied in the engravings: in that case, the engravings would rightly be considered the definitive work for which the watercolours and sketches were only preparations. But, with the small exception of Job’s changing posture in different versions of image #18, ‘Job's Sacrifice / Job Praying for his Friends‘, there are no significant differences between the earlier watercolours and the final watercolour copies and engravings. The original Butts set is the definitive work: the Linnell sets and the engravings are copies, and copies of copies, of the Butts set.63 They were not attempts to improve on the originals, but to duplicate them.
The exception here is that Blake added significant commentary by way of added design elements and (usually) Biblical quotations in the margins of the engraved images. These clearly throw light on Blake’s intentions at each stage, and I’ll draw on them as appropriate. Other than in the matter of colouring, I discuss details of the images irrespective of which set they are from (watercolour sets, sketches or engravings) as they are essentially the same, certainly as regards their symbolism. I have mostly illustrated these notes with images from the Butts set.
#1: Job and His Family (ϰ)
This scene has been mentioned already: the significance of the cathedral, placing matters firmly in a Christian context, and the implication that Blake’s view is fundamentally not realistic or historical but typological, was noted. This holds for the entire series of images, not just this one, and it’s worth emphasising that this typological view is not just a way of interpreting the Bible, but the basis of Blake’s Christianity itself.
The image depicts the status quo ante. Job and his wife are pious and respectable, with their children and flocks alike arranged dutifully around them. Job and his wife both are reading books: in Blake’s iconography, books are identified with law, judgment and restriction, and are contrasted with scrolls, representing inspiration. The instruments hanging uselessly in the tree signify an absence, or attenuation, of arts and the imagination. Job recites the Lord’s Prayer by rote (we assume, since it is engraved in the margins). As if the message of the scene were not clear enough already, Blake adds to the engraving a quote from Corinthians, “The Letter Killeth / The Spirit giveth Life” [2 Corinthians 3:6]. This is Blake’s theme.
The sun shines on everyone. The flocks advertise Job’s prosperity. All seems well, but there is a weakness in Job that will prove disastrous for him, namely that his piety is merely verbal and performative (“the letter killeth”), not from the spirit (“the spirit giveth life”). He does what the law requires – perhaps willingly, possibly even enthusiastically – but his awareness of God stops at that limit.
Wicksteed says that “the whole design represents the ideal state of Innocence,” yet it comes across as barbed rather than innocent. To be fair, it is deliberately ambivalent. Most people will assume when first looking at it that it is a scene of rustic peace and simplicity, and only then will mark the signs that indicate that something is not right. Specifically, the image depicts a piety based on memory and adherence to the letter of the law, rather than imagination.
In relation to God, Job is not innocent, not “perfect and upright” – at least not in Blake’s telling. He is guilty of pride, says Blake. Such a situation can’t persist.
#2: Satan Before the Throne of God
Blake now conjures up an authentically Canaanite scene, with God shown holding court among his followers – the heavenly host, ‘bene ha Elohim’ – as the ancient Canaanites believed was the case, and as the Jews also believed during their earlier years in Canaan.
God and his allies on Mount Zaphon / Zion
The perspective has zoomed out to show earth and heaven together: in the original Ugaritic myth, the assembly of the gods was on Mount Zaphon; here the action unfolds in heaven.
I thought at first this might be why the Bible originally said Job was from ‘Uz’ – to allow the author to use this theatrical image of God and Satan debating in heaven about what to do with a mere mortal, like two cats squabbling over a mouse, as the people of Uz might have been held to have believed. But that wouldn’t satisfy a Jewish or Christian reader as an explanation for Job’s troubles, so we can only conclude that the Jewish compiler / author of the Book of Job saw it as compatible with Jewish belief to depict their supreme deity as the leader of a tribe of divine beings, of inferior status but similar stature to himself, among whom is the accuser, ha Satan.
The nature and hierarchical status of the members of this heavenly host has long been debated. According to the Canaanites, they were simply their other gods, among whom their supreme god, El, was first among (almost) equals. They were known collectively as the ‘Assembly of El’. It seems that at some point the Jews felt similarly for a while, and placed Yahweh at the centre of the same retinue, but they backed out by gradually evicting the lesser deities from heaven, demoting them to the status of cherubim or demons, while at the same time promoting Yahweh to unprecedented heights, as the one and only God on high, his peers cast off behind him like the abandoned rocket stages in an Apollo moon launch.
It’s clear that at the time of the story’s telling this separation between God and his heavenly supporters had yet to happen, and the heavenly hosts of the original Job text retain something of their original independence.
Subsequent commentators dealt with the problem of the status of the host members in a number of ways, making them angels (Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley and others), fallen angels (Olympiodorus, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Tertullian), sons of the gods (Philo), Cherubim (Philo of Alexandria), angelic lords (Rashi), and so on.64
Ancient of Days
At the head of the engraved plate for the image, Blake mentions seeing the Ancient of Days (see above), a figure who then transfers directly into Blake’s mythos and who he famously painted and engraved many times.
In the Old Testament, the Ancient of Days is mentioned only once, in the Book of Daniel: “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire” [Daniel 7:9]. This is who Blake has in mind here, dragging him into the Job story and his own mythos alike:
God is represented as the Ancient of Days and posseses white hair, ie. he is depicted as an old man. This is unique in the entire Old Testament. It agrees admirably, however, with the supreme god of the Ugaritic pantheon, El, who is called 'ab šnm, 'Father of Years'... El was an aged god. (John Day)65
Blake imports the “supremely aged” deity, El, from the oldest Ugaritic pantheon and makes him an icon of his own system.66 The fleeting appearance of the 'Ancient of Days is one of those little flashes in Blake’s work where we see the Ugaritic myth peak through.
Wicksteed said that God here looks like Job’s twin brother, and concluded that Yahweh was made in Job’s image and was therefore the creation of Job.67 Even if we accept that there is a likeness here (plenty of people are quick to point out that all Blake’s old men look similar anyway), we do not have to give in to those who, psychologising Job, think that Yahweh is merely Job’s authentic self. Chesterton pointed out that it would make sense for Yahweh to resemble Job since the latter was made in God’s image anyway, as all readers of the Bible would know.68
The faces of Yahweh
It is always best to tread carefully with Blake, even when you think you are on safe ground. In this case, while Yahweh may be Job’s inner God as well as his creator, and therefore identified with Job, things can get confusing when Satan adopts Yahweh’s role or steps into in his place. On top of that, the Church Fathers agreed that any direct vision of God, such as that of Moses and Job, was an experience of one of the divine attributes of God (The Word, Logos, Wisdom), and therefore essentially a vision of Christ.69
Back down on Earth, in the lower part of the image, Job is sat with his wife and their books, as before. Things there seem unchanged, but in heaven the ball has started rolling. The Jungian psychologist, Edward Erdinger, describes Blake’s design here as showing “an intense dynamism [approaching] Yahweh… Satan, the autonomous spirit, manifests in a stream of fire. As the urge to individuation and greater consciousness he stirs up doubts and questions which challenge the status quo and destroy the complacent living by the book.”70
Note the two faces engulfed in Satan’s flames, one under each of his armpits. I can only assume, as most others do at this point, that these are the spectres of Job and his wife – their pride, “the reasoning power in man.”71 The same spectres are seen departing alongside Satan later on, in image #16, ‘The Fall of Satan’, dropping headlong into the lake of fire on either side of him, so I assume they are here being brought on stage alongside him too, so that this image forms a pair and a line of continuity with #16.
Symmetry, pairings
This mirroring between plates is reminiscent of the pairings between poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The mirroring between images #1 and #21 – the first and last images of the seriesmight as well be titled ‘Job Lost’ and ‘Job Found’, after the poems ‘The Little Boy Lost’ and ‘The Little Boy Found’.
Such obvious symmetries as those between the first and last plates are quite neat and might be designed to appeal to the mind of the average buyer, lending the work obvious structure, or encouraging it to be seen that way. In other cases, the contrasts and inconsistencies between each half of the pair tend to multiply meanings and open up ambiguities that threaten the stability of the collection as a whole, as a simple structure. The continuities and reflections can serve either order (continuity implies connection) or disorder (the connections overdetermine one another, feed back, clash, conflict, trip up the narrative, and so on).
In heaven, the debate between Yahweh and Satan begins. In the engraving, comments are added in the margin; “I beheld the Ancient of Days” (see above), “There was a day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord & Satan came also among them to present himself before the Lord” [Job 2:1], and “Hast thou considered my Servant Job?” [Job 1:8] Yahweh and Satan discuss Job, with Satan challenging Yahweh, “put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face” [Job 1:11].
Eventually, Yahweh grants Satan permission to ‘touch’ Job and test his faith (though he is as yet forbidden from harming Job physically). The fact that such a wager takes place between Yahweh and Satan is a clue to how foreign this scene is to traditional Biblical theology: “God's quick acquiescence in the Adversary's perverse proposal is hard to justify in terms of any serious monotheistic theology” (Alter).72
The fact that Satan can dispute with Yahweh as a platinum club member of his court is interesting, but so are other features of the exchange. We learn that Yahweh is not all-knowing: Yahweh’s doubts as to how Job will behave under duress are authentic: he doesn’t know what the outcome will be. If you are one of those people who thinks that Satan and Yahweh are essentially gambling over Job’s future behaviour, you could say that it was a fair bet. No one knows what Job will do, except perhaps Job.
#3: Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan
Can’t go on, I can’t go on
Everything I have is Gone!
Stormy weather!
Fats Comet
Satan’s assault descends on Job in several waves. Sabbean and Chaldean bandits and the “fire of God” attack his servants, his flocks and his property, killing the servants and stealing Job’s property away [Job 1:16]. The final blow lands in the form of “a great wind from the wilderness” that “smote the four corners of the house” [Job 1:18-19]73 of Job’s eldest son, where Job’s children had all been sharing a meal. The wind brings down the roof, killing all the children.74
The “fire of god” is not the only divine element at work here. The “wind from the wilderness” that flattens the house is not an ordinary wind. Destructive winds were well-known to the people of the region, used to both desert storms and storms at sea, but a wind that comes from all directions at once, striking all “four corners of the house” is a divine, or demonic, wind.
Canaanites in space
The people of Job’s time did not think of space as we have, since Newton, as an intangible, immaterial container for massy things to squat and roll around in: they felt space itself actually move in the winds around them. To be master of the four winds, of the four directions, was to master all of space, and hence it was synonymous with absolute power. It was god-like. Such wind-deities were often shown with four wings, representing the four directions. Ezekiel’s Cherubim are descended from these deities, their four wings allowing them to move effortlessly in any direction at any time, and thus they steer Yahweh’s chariot instantly in any direction, like a UFO.75
Powered by wind
We should note that Satan, as he takes the form of the “great wind” in this scene, has acquired wings, which he did not possess in the previous image, ‘Satan Before the Throne of God’. These are the wings of a wind, or storm god.
Such total power was naturally also connected, or allied with, the sun, the ultimate source of life and power, the worship of which was also a feature of primitive Jewish religion, with the winged solar deity even becoming a seal of the Northern Kingdom for a while (presumably thereby scandalising the notoriously touchy Yahwistic prophets). There isn’t room here to discuss Freud’s proposal that the Jews when they left Egypt worshipped Akhenaten’s sun god, the Aten. On the other hand, it is possible that any association between Yahweh and the solar deity came about not via the Aten, but rather at a later date by inheriting the solar aspect of the residing Canaanite god, El, with which Yahweh eventually merged.76
All we need note at this point is that the four winds together were associated across the region with the divine and the demonic, and also with the idea of a supreme god (whether Aten or El). We will hear more examples where the details of Job’s story turn out to have vital connections with the early religion of the region, and where Yahweh is revealed to share a common mask with Baal, Marduk, and other deities of the Near East celebrated for bringing the world into existence by conquering the chaos dragon.
Chaoskamf
The war of the gods against this chaos monster at the beginning of time is known in Bible commentary and literature as the chaoskampf (the chaos war). The story of Job, above all books of the Bible, is saturated with intimations of this chaoskampf, which bleed through into Blake’s work and into his imagination.
In image #11, ‘Job’s Evil Dreams’ (ϰ), we will see that Blake, scandalously, pictures Yahweh merged with Satan, with cloven hoofs. Regarding the current scene, where a divine wind destroys Job’s children, we note that Yahweh was originally a storm god, suggesting the possibility that what is depicted here that looks like Satan is, in some sense, also Yahweh in his role as a storm god.77 If it is true that it is Yahweh-storm-god that kills Job’s children, then it must be Yahweh that is shown above, clearly looking thoroughly Satanic, destroying the building. The image of the winged Satan here would then be a more obscure precursor of the big reveal in image #11, ‘Job's Evil Dreams’ (ϰ). In both cases it is not always clear whether Satan replaces Yahweh, or merges with him, or stands in his stead, or what.
The architecture of this scene shifts from the Gothic to the ancient, with its great monoliths reminiscent of Stonehenge. The central figure seems both heroic yet somehow fundamentally aligned with Satan (look at the respective positions of their feet), perhaps like a puppet. The figure at the bottom-right has fallen into a crucifix posture.
#4: The Messengers Tell Job of His Misfortunes
In the original story, Satan’s attacks on Job come in waves, and each time a messenger arrives to tell Job of the latest blow, another messenger arrives hot on his heels with more bad news. Blake compresses the unfolding of the tragedy, and the announcement of each stage of it, into a single image, with a later messenger seen on his way even as the earlier messenger is delivering his share of the bad news to a grief-striken and astonished Job and his wife.
Psychologically, the power of this image lies in how it encompasses each of the successive blows Job experiences into a single combined blow, whose moment of impact contains within it the history of Job’s undoing, all of those previous blows, and we see it all being registered by Job and his wife. This is the point at which you might expect Job to shatter.
In the engraving, Blake adds as a comment the words of one of the messengers, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” [Job 1:15]: each time Satan ravaged Job’s world, he made sure that one person survived to share with Job the gory details of his losses.
#5: Satan Going Forth From the Presence of the Lord and Job's Charity
Satan is now calling the shots. Down below, Job continues to follow the letter of the law and, despite his troubles, is seen distributing alms. Job is morally victorious. Up above, it looks as though, as Wicksteed memorably puts it, “the contagion of [Satan’s] presence has infected the seraphs themselves.”78 Satan’s flames have spread to the rest of Yahweh’s court, which is disturbed. Yahweh himself looks depressed and joyless, but no more so than Blake, who looks forlorn despite his moral victory.
Fancy footwork
The positioning of feet is often significant with Blake, and there seems to be some point being made in the way the positions of Satan and Yahweh’s feet echo one another, with the left leg oddly extended and one knee raised. The concordance between Satan and Yahweh’s legs mirrors that between Satan and the most prominent of Job’s sons in image #3, ‘Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan.’ There are some strange entanglements here. As far as I can tell, everyone else has their right foot forward.
This almsgiving scene is not from the Bible. It comes from a tradition in the early church that Job shared his last meal with a beggar.79 It was chosen by Blake to be included here to emphasise that Job remained true to his beliefs, persisting in his generous ways. Despite losing everything, he continues to give alms. The angels look on approvingly.
Did I not weep for him who was in trouble?
In the margin of the corresponding engraving, Blake engraves “Did I not weep for him who was in trouble? Was not my Soul afflicted for the Poor”. We assume it is Job asking the question, and that it reveals him to be a little self-righteous. This is a clue to the dialectical nature of the image. Blake emphasises the continuity of Job’s practice and implicitly calls on us to admire him for it. And yet his virtue in this regard is the greatest barrier to his rapprochement with Yahweh.
By clinging to an outward show of piety, Job prevents Satan from busting him for his shortcomings, yet it is the very nature of this piety, the fact that it is enacted in rote conformance with tradition, and not ‘in the spirit’, that is Job’s weakness. Job is celebrated for persisting in his ways: in fact he doubles down on them. Ironically, his consistent piety only confirms his distance from Yahweh. Something must give, and the anxious expression on Job’s face shows he is unconsciously aware of this.
Satan’s great talent is for spotting weaknesses like that of Job. Having done so, he continues to press his case until he gets permission from Yahweh to now attack Job also in his body. The demonic energy Satan smeared around heaven in the image above is about to be channelled down with renewed force onto his victim. Satan is about to really bring the fire on Job.
#6: Satan Smiting Job with Boils (ϰ)
In Bible-speak, ‘boils’ generally mean venereal disease / STDs,80 although there was also a tradition in other circumstances of seeing these boils as evidence of leprosy.81 For Wicksteed, the fact that Satan is standing on Job’s right knee is enough to prove that the attack on Job is actually ‘spiritual’, rather than physical.82 But is Satan standing on Job at all? He looks to be hovering a few inches above him. And even if he were standing on Job’s right leg, half his foot is resting on his left. What would that signify? Wicksteed is having a stab in the dark, and the legs are being worked too hard by him.
As with image #3, ‘Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan’, the blues and yellows of this scene do a good job of manifesting Satan’s malice in action. Satan is seen to be pouring a dark infection on Job from the phial in his left hand. One can’t help but assume therefore that this image and the one immediately before, where Satan is also pouring the contents of his phial on Job, show two different perspectives on the same scene or situation.
An acute breakdown
For Erdinger, “This is the picture of an acute breakdown; all defences have collapsed. The picture shows Job being stricken with boils. In dreams boils represent festering, neglected complexes which are erupting into consciousness.”83
Additional designs by Blake in the margin of the corresponding engraving provide grist to the analytical mill:
In the margin below is the broken sheephook of Innocence, with symbols from the despairing last chapter of Ecclesiastes: "the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail." The pitcher is broken at the fountain, which now is choked with rubbish…84
Samuel Foster Damon
The broken pitcher below the picture suggests that the ego as a container may break if more is poured into it than it can stand... According to [Lurianic Cabbala] the creation of the finite world required that the divine light be poured into bowls or vessels. Some of these bowls (the seven lower Sefiroth of the Sefirotic tree) could not stand the impact of the light and broke, causing the light to spill. This picture suggests that Job is such a vessel.85
Edward Erdinger
But, whether we psychologise the boils as sexual repression or treat them straightforwardly as the clap, whether we see the broken jug as a symbol of Job himself as a busted flush, or sublimate it into a vision of the Sefirotic vessels as the receptacles of the divine effulgence, in either case Blake is devastated by Satan’s new attack and brought to his lowest ebb. His jug is ready to shatter.
Attentive readers will have noticed that the sun has been slowly going down in the previous plates. Now, as Erdinger notes, “This is the last glimpse of the sun. It will not reappear until the final picture."86 It is not necessary to connect Yahweh directly to either the Aten or El in his solar guise to know that the going down of the sun doesn’t bode well. With this image we have arrived at the nadir of Job’s story.
#7: Job's Comforters
Job’s friends – the ‘comforters’, as they are also called – put their worst (left) feet forward to come and console him in his pain and see if they can help. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar fail to recognise Job at first, such is the state of his decline. Not only that, but he looks so distraught that none dare speak to him, so they sit and keep company in silence with him for a week.
Significantly, in the margin of the engraving, Blake quotes the Gospel of James: “Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord” [James 5:11]. In repeating this, Blake emphasises Job’s consistency and forbearance, since, despite all, he still won’t condemn Yahweh, his maker.
Psychic shadow figures
Reading everything as part of an unfolding, possibly treatable, psychic drama, Erdinger concludes that the three friends “represent shadow figures… brought into conscious view with the breakdown of the ego. As Job loses the defensive boundaries of his conscious personality, repressed aspects of himself come into view.”87
It is hard to see what is gained by treating the friends as psychic shadow figures when their impact is typical of that of ordinary friends with whom we find ourselves in conflict, friends who have pissed us off. We don’t need shadow figures to explain well-meaning, misguided, annoying friends. Also, the messages the friends bear sound more like those of the irrepressible superego than of the shadow world of the unconscious. When friends give advice they are usually playing at being grown-ups.
The first figure to come to Blake’s mind in this regard would be his patron, the poet, William Hayley (1745-1820). Hayley sponsored Blake’s move to seaside Felpham, Sussex in 1800, to begin work for Hayley as an illustrator. There Blake experienced “three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean,”88 as Hayley’s underestimation of Blake’s judgement as an artist wore the latter down until Blake “determined to be no longer Pesterd with his Genteel Ignorance and Polite Disapprobation,”89 and he and Catherine returned to London.
Friendship energy
In the course of this dispute, Blake wrestled with his own spectre (of self-doubt) but eventually decided to take against the subtle attempts of Hayley to undo and undermine him. His struggle with Hayley is reflected in Milton, the visionary work conceived at Felpham, which includes an image of Milton’s track descending into Blake’s garden there, and which notes of friends:
To do unkind things in kindness! With power armd, to say
The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love
These are the stings of the Serpent!90
The feeling toward Haley may have been mutual:
Cloth'd in the Serpents folds, in selfish holiness demanding purity
Being Most impure, self-condemn’d to eternal tears , he drove
Me from his inmost Brain & the doors clos'd with thunders sound91
In his private notebooks, Blake implored Hayley “Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake / Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.”92 Blake was familiar with the vexation that can be caused by even the best-intentioned of friends. There is a lot of Hayley ‘friendship’ energy in the collective characters of the comforters. Blake’s image here encapsulates the resulting feeling of peak vexation, Job throws his head back in despair as he sees the “fools rush in”. Hasn’t he got enough problems already?
And that is before we even get into the specifics of what Eliphaz & Co. have to say that so irritates him.
Lindberg says that Job’s posture here is copied from Michaelangelo’s Pietà, in which case the attitude of the friends, their hands raised in grief, prefigures the lamentation over the body of the dead Christ.93 This could be true without upsetting the idea that Job is sick of hearing people’s advice. I bet people told Jesus too on his deathbed that he should have kept his hands clean and stayed out of trouble.
#8: Job's Despair
It is a dark illimitable ocean of conflicting forces, where the mysterious presence of Chaos and Old Night, ancestors of Nature, rule and hold eternal anarchy. Here the pregnant causes of all created universes are mixed confusedly, awaiting the Mighty Maker's hand.94
Walter Clyde Curry
Now we have a sudden change of direction because, finally, Job has had enough. Job does not curse Yahweh, instead, he “succumbs to the nigredo, the dark night of the soul. He falls into blackness and suicidal despair” (Erdinger).95 No explanation is given as to why Job suddenly turns angry and militant unless we understand it to be a delayed reaction to the arrival of the friends: maybe he got angry spending a week cooped up with his friends all around him, knowing all the while they secretly thought he must have done something wrong to invite such bad luck, as the ordinary ideas of divine retributive justice at the time would have quietly suggested to their conscience. He’s had enough and won’t be pushed further.
A song of annihilation
For whatever reason, Job bursts into a black chant, a song of annihilation, denouncing the day he was born, calling for its destruction. His poetic howl begins:
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it…
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?… For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest
… as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest… Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul;
Which long for death, but it cometh not; [Job 3:3…21]
This is the first time Job has been allowed to speak at length, and what a speech it is. His wife and the comforters look suitably cowed. I think we should bear in mind that this is where Job really comes on stage as a character. This is who he is. And he is angry.
Some have made a big deal of Job’s defiance at this point, supporting his right to question so bitterly why he’d been born into such misfortune, even if his way of putting it throws shade on God’s providence. The Babylonian Talmud exonerates Job entirely, saying that he did not mean what he said, arguing sensibly that “one is not liable for what he says while in pain." However, it also observes as further mitigation, "If one has friends like Job, it is better off to be dead."96
In Job’s song of annihilation, we experience the upsetting violence of his raw grief, absent of any context with which to make sense of it. Nowhere in this poem does Job defend himself or accuse Yahweh, and there is not a word wasted about justice or divine providence… only outrage turned against everything, by way of his despair.
Leviathan, the twisting snake
The poem is entirely nihilistic, but this nihilism takes a sophisticated, antique form. It does not halt at wanting the destruction of the hated day-of-Job’s-birth, but calls for that day to be literally annihilated, removed from existence. Not only should the cursed day be ‘forgotten and never brought to mind’, it should cease to have been. This next-level nihilism is expressed by including images from the old Canaanite (Ugaritic) myth of the emergence of order as a result of a war between a storm god and a chaos dragon.97 The chaos dragon must be defeated for there to be any order at all in the world. Welcome to the chaos war, chaoskampf.
Recent translations of the Book of Job are clearer than ever before about where this myth is being leaned on in telling the story. In the older King James version, we read:
Let them curse it that curse the day,
who are ready to raise up their mourning.
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark;
let it look for light, but have none;
neither let it see the dawning of the day:
[Job 3:8-9, King James Version (KJV)]
More recent translations bring out details of the original Hebrew that show the old Canaanite cosmogony bleeding through:
May those curse it who curse the day,
Those who are ready to arouse Leviathan.
May the stars of its morning be dark;
May it look for light, but have none
[Job 3:8-9, New King James Version (NKJV)]
May those who curse days curse that day,
those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.
May its morning stars become dark;
may it wait for daylight in vain
[Job 3:8-9, New International Version (NIV)]
What we see bubbling under here, clarified by further understanding of the Hebrew, is the idea that those who would curse the hated day can achieve this by rousing Leviathan. The poet also asks that “the morning stars become dark,” a phrase that gains a new resonance when you consider the possibility that the ‘morning stars’ are the supreme deity’s retinue and army.
In [Job 38], during Yahweh’s speech from the whirlwind:
… we find Yahweh described as laying the foundations of the earth on sockets, "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy", a feature of the myth which has no parallel elsewhere in the Old Testament, but which finds an echo in the rejoicing of the gods over the victory of Marduk in the Akkadian Epic of Creation, and also in the feast prepared by Baal for the gods and goddesses to celebrate the building of his palace.98
Singing a song in the morning
The Morning Stars and the Sons of God are either more or less the same thing, or at least roughly equivalent. John Day believes they are actually equivalents in Job, meaning that the morning stars in these verses really are Yahweh’s cohort.99 For the Morning Stars never to see the morning light would be for the whole of creation to have been aborted, and Yahweh himself and his retinue to have been defeated in the Chaoskamf. The morning stars appear in this context, as part of Yahweh’s retinue, explicitly in Blake’s image #14, ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together.’ Yahweh says ‘Let there be light!’; Job says ‘Let’s not’.
Let the day-cursers hex it
Similarly, to invoke Leviathan here is to invoke precisely the primordial chaos dragon / snake / serpent, sea monster, variously called Leviathan, Lotan, Rahab100 – ‘the twisting snake’, the titular star of this essay. Carol Newsom describes the lineage of this serpent-dragon:
… the name 'Leviathan' brings with it a well-developed set of symbolic associations. Both in Ugaritic mythology and in the Bible, 'Leviathan' (or 'Lotan') is the name of a sea monster with which Yahweh, Baal, and Anat do battle. In the Baal Epic, the god Mot refers to a victory of Baal "when you killed Lotan, the Fleeting Serpent, the seven-headed monster." Elsewhere, the goddess Anat says, "Didn't I demolish El's Darling Sea? Didn't I finish off the divine river, Rabbim? Didn't I snare the Dragon? I enveloped him, I demolished the Twisting Serpent, the seven-headed monster."101
Among the foremost contemporary translators of the Old Testament, Robert Alter, renders the relevant line from Job 3:8 as “Let the day-cursers hex it, those ready to rouse Leviathan", and explains:
Leviathan, who will be mentioned quite a few times in the course of the poem… is the fearsome sea-monster of Canaanite mythology (in some versions, he has seven heads) who had to be subdued by the weather-god whose realm is the dry land… The poetry of Job, then, at least in its metaphors, reaches deep into the chaotic sea, up to the stars where celestial beings dwell, and down into the kingdom of death... In this poem where intensification is the key to so much, mythology serves as the ultimate intensifier.102
Henry Hook outlines where else in the Bible, and in parallel, local religious traditions, Leviathan is to be found:
In Psalms 74:12-17 we have an account of how Yahweh, in a contest with the waters, smote the many-headed Leviathan, and then proceeded to create day and night, the heavenly bodies, and the order of the seasons... in the Akkadian Epic of Creation Marduk's slaying of the chaos-dragon Tiamat is followed by his ordering of the universe, and by the building of Esagila... But in the passage from Psalms 74 the name of the water-dragon, Leviathan, is the same as the Ugaritic Lotan, the dragon slain by Baal. Hence it is possible that the Hebrew poet was acquainted with the Canaanite form of the myth.103
Chaos and darkness
That Leviathan is invoked immediately before Job demands that the morning stars are left forever in darkness is no coincidence, since the chaoskampf myths combine chaos and darkness as the two faces of the primordial enemy. The supreme deity’s creation of the light stands alongside his banishing of chaos as two premises of the civilised life he establishes, needed for the existence of a world:
subdue the chaos
let there be light
Chaos and night belong together. We see them as such in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan has fought his way through the turmoil of chaos until he reaches the coast of darkness. There he meets the ‘two Powers of the Nethermost Abyss’, Chaos and ‘ancient’ Night.
... behold the throne
Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign
John Milton104
Having studied Milton, Blake would know all this, and would therefore recognise the conjunction of Chaos and Night as invoking an image of the primordial battle of Yahweh and Leviathan-chaos.
In the most basic form of the myth,105 the chaos dragon is a female sea goddess representing the chaos of the primordial sea (Abzu / Apsu / ‘the deep’). This chaos must be subdued at the dawn of time, which happens in a war between the twisting snake sea goddess (Leviathan, Tiamat) and her allies on the one hand, and a group of opponents led by a storm god (Marduk, Baal, Yahweh) on the other.
The battle takes place amid the roar of the storms and tempests that the storm god unleashes on his enemy, met by the corresponding storms at sea whipped up by the twisting snake, lashing the waters with its tail. Victory in the chaoskampf leads to the separation of the darkness and the light, and the creation of our ordered world, of which the storm god is crowned king (in some versions, anointed by the supreme god, El).106 The story of creation in Genesis is supplemented here by a prequel, in the form of the chaoskampf.
The Canaanite elements of the Job text didn’t have to have been understood literally by the Job author. By that time they would have been partly legendary, handed down by way of the annual Autumn harvest festival that originally reenacted the crowning of Yahweh-Baal, and whose hymns and liturgies, incorporated into Psalms, would have preserved knowledge of the chaoskampf down to the time of the author of the Book of Job, and indeed also the authors of Genesis and Ezekiel, who also freely cannibalised such works.107
Job in his torment wants to revive the chaos and the darkness, overturning Creation.
Urzeit and endzeit
According to the principle that, in myths, ‘urzeit is endzeit’, the end of the world therefore mirrors its beginning. The chaos dragon having lain dormant since being defeated by Marduk-Baal-Yahweh, the world will start to unravel and move toward its end once Leviathan is awakened, which is what Job has in mind. This expectation that the original chaos monster will reappear in the end times is reflected elsewhere in the Bible; in Isaiah, for example.108
In the Babylonian version of the myth, Lotan / Leviathan is a seven-headed monster. The earliest proposed representation of Leviathan is in a seal from the twenty-fourth century BCE, showing two men fighting a seven-headed monster. We don’t hear of him as such in Job, but this seven-headed monster is invoked in The Book of Revelation:
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. [Revelation 13:1]
So the Leviathan of the urzeit, beginning times, is also the seven-headed Great Beast of the endzeit. This all means that not only are Rahab, Leviathan and the rest the embodiment of brutal, cthonic powers, they are also harbingers of the end of the world.
Jörmungandr’s revenge
Related legends are more explicit in saying that when the chaos dragon awakens, the end of the world begins: for instance, in Norse myth, Thor kills the world serpent Jörmungandr (the Midgard Serpent / World Serpent), who is banished to the limits of the world, where he bites his tail to form the Ouroboros. Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, begins when Jörmungandr releases his tail from his mouth to start threshing the sea and creating cosmic storms.
For Leviathan to awaken would be to put an end to the world. As with the mention of the ‘morning stars’, the Job poet uses chaoskampf energy to inflate his nihilism to heroic proportions. The point to stress is that this energy suffuses the text irrespective of how it is put to work.
In this section, Job is a wily trickster, like Odysseus. He pleads only for the day of his birth to be extinguished, but the manner in which he wants to see it taken – booting up the apocalypse – takes the rest of the word with it.
These observations about the use of the Ugaritic-Canaanite origins myth in the song of annihilation apply to the original text. No sign of this is apparent in Blake’s images so far. This particular image shows no sign of Blake being aware of the Ugaritic / chaoskampf grounding of the original story, but that will change dramatically when we get to images #13-#15; ‘The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind’, ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’, and ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’.
#9: The Vision of Eliphaz
It is all one thing; Therefore I say, ‘He destroys the blameless and the wicked.’ [Job 9:22]
The Book of Job contains entire chapters devoted to speeches by the friends, followed by chapters of Job’s replies, then more speeches in the same vein, and so on. Just as image #4, ‘The Messengers Tell Job of His Misfortunes’, compressed several waves of Job’s misfortune into one image, here the one image stands in for all the chapters of dialogue between Job and his comforters. Note that, in doing so, Blake skips over the tortuous theological debates in those chapters, where the theodicy of Job’s circumstances is discussed (‘why must Job suffer?’) Blake is not interested in engaging with these ideas, at least not in the terms in which they are posed in the Book of Job.
The forest of the night
In the margins of the engraving are images of trees, forming “the 'forest of the night,' a traditional symbol for the sterile growth of errors, whose false theories block the path and hide the heavens” (Foster Damon).109 Imagine a crowded forest where every tree as a bad idea standing in the way in any direction you look; you bump into one idea, turn around, and slam into another.110 The image of the forest of the night captures the drift of the biblical debates, with so many arguments put forward to explain and even justify Job’s misery, so much argument by way of defence from Job, and so much vexation for everyone… especially Job. A representative sample of the comforters’ argument is illustrated in this image, where Eliphaz reports his dream-vision:
Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof. In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker? [Job 4:12-17]
In the image we see Eliphaz point to the scene he’s describing, where he meets “a spirit” in his “vision of the night”. The others stare into the projected space of this vision, perhaps considering the spirit’s question: “shall a man be more pure than his maker?” Eliphaz reports this revelation that he heard from the spirit: no one can be right against God. Doesn’t this mean that Job’s complaints about his treatment are impious? Bildad makes the same point in [Job 25:4].
Eliphaz is not a bad man, but he is a rather stupid and vexatious one. His basic theology – still in fashion today as a first-pass interpretation of Christian theodicy, especially by secular critics fancying a straw man – is that “those who fear God and conduct themselves with moral probity will in the long term… enjoy God’s visible favour and deliverance.”111 That is, if you do well, you will be well done by, but if you do wrong, you will suffer. Conversely, if you are suffering, you must have done wrong. Why will Job not admit as much?
Nobodaddy’s remainder
Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws
William Blake, ‘To Nobodaddy’
The point of talking about Job, today as in the past, is that he is the Biblical test case for theodicy. Theodicy exists to reconcile belief in God’s omnipotence and benevolence with the existence of suffering and evil. Theodicy wants to know why evil exists if God is both good and omnipotent: why does God allow the innocent to suffer while the guilty prosper? Traditional theodicy exists to make up the difference between divine reality (contingent) and Urizen’s projections of truth and power (certain).
Think about suffering from the point of view of Blake’s Nobodaddy: his law is everything; Nobodaddy’s word repeats itself indefinitely, bouncing around creation like a ball in a hall of mirrors; Nobodaddy roars and must be obeyed… yet everywhere order and law break down. Traditional theodicy is a congealed psychic slop stuck in the gap between Nobodaddy’s self-image and the Real. His system of commands leads nowhere and will do you no good, but theology is employed to obscure this.
The uses of suffering
The friends repeatedly appeal to the logic of retributive justice as the most likely explanation for Job’s suffering. This is the idea that if you are suffering it is because you have done something wrong (so that the suffering is ‘retribution’), and is the most common explanation offered in the Book of Job and subsequent commentary to explain Job’s troubles.112 Explanations for, and rationalisations of, evil and suffering that crop up in Job and elsewhere in the Bible and in the commentary on Job (with references to the Book of Job noted) include113:
retributive justice: you did the crime, now do the time. Job 1:5; 4:7; 8:3; 11:20; 13:26; 20:5; 22:16; 24:22; 31:3; 35:7-8; 36:13-14; and 38:15.
demons: suffering is none of God’s doing, but is caused by Satan (Augustine, Gregory, and Thomas Aquinas), or Iblis (Qu’ran).
free will: your suffering is your own fault for exercising your free will in favour of sin (Calvin). God has given you free will, you are a moral agent, responsible for the consequences of how you exercise that will.
original sin: Adam and Eve’s original sin makes everyone a fair target for suffering (Gregory, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin). Job 14:1; 15:14; and 25:4.
contrast: We need suffering in the world in order to know the good, the dark in order to see the light. Job 12:25; 17:12; 18:6 and 18; 22:11; 24:13-14; 30:26; and 38:19-20.114
test theodicy: God makes us suffer to test our moral character.
moral qualities: positive qualities such as courage and fortitude may only be developed by experiencing evil and suffering. Job 5:19-20 and 27; 11:7-11; 22:29-30; 33:16; 36:10 and 15.
divine perspective: We don’t always know why this or that person suffers, but God always has a plan, so it must make sense. Job 37:14-20 and 21-24, possibly Job 42:2 NKJV, where Job uses the word esa, or ‘plan’.115
absence of good: Evil and suffering are not positive things but simply the absence, or shadow, of God’s grace.
This list looks like the executive summary of a PR consultancy’s brief for company ‘spokesmen’ rebutting questions about some corporate outrage. All angles are covered to ensure God’s reputation stacks up in public. The fact that some of these arguments hold water and are both relevant and interesting only makes things worse. Theodicy can never avoid the suspicion of being a coverup.
The Bible represents these arguments without necessarily defending them, putting them in the mouths of the likes of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and similar, often unreliable narrators. In neither the Book of Job nor the Bible as a whole will you find a consistent theodicy. As we’ll see, Yahweh doesn’t seem too sold on the idea himself when says of the friends that they “have not spoken of [him] the thing that is right” [Job 42:7].
The comforters, like so many people then and now, are freelance theologians. They put their arguments to Job and examine his past and present for clues. Perhaps he was too lenient with his children. Perhaps he lacked modesty. Vexations. What Job needs is solidarity.
#10: Job Rebuked by his Friends
The Just Upright Man is laughed to scorn [Job 12:4]
This is a continuation of the previous image’s theme, focussing this time on the accusations the friends make concerning Job. Erdinger (though he ties himself in knots arguing that the friends here are only aspects of Job’s mind, criticising him from out of the well of his unconscious: basically, the ‘comforters’ are nagging doubts, and he is arguing with himself) makes the key point from Blake’s perspective: “It is essential that Job not succumb to the personalistic interpretations of his counsellors. If he were to decide that his misfortunes were all his own fault he would preclude the possibility of a manifestation of the numinosum. The ego-vessel would be broken, would lose its integrity, and could have no divine manifestation poured into it.”116
For Blake, the problem lies with Job’s attitude to God, which is out of alignment. If Job were to accept the criticisms of his friends, where they lay the blame at his door, he would remain trapped within their shared (Job and the friends) literalist, law-abiding piety, because he would be accepting that his troubles stemmed from his having done wrong and broken the law. He would therefore psychologically accept his punishment rather than continue to rail against it. Job and his friends are not disagreeing about the retributive nature of justice. Job agrees about that. He simply will not accept that he has sinned, which is why he puts pressure on Yahweh to explain himself – which makes everyone anxious all over again.
Test-dummy
Something not mentioned often enough in the literature is the fact that we readers already know why Job is afflicted. It is not due to any sin he has committed but because of a wager made in heaven which used him as a test dummy. To put it another way, Yahweh and Satan are not so much the cause of Job’s woes as the explanation for the fact that Job’s woes have no cause, morally speaking. Job really was “perfect and upright”, and the devastation he endured has no meaning. But Job cannot come to terms with this contingency if he accepts the friends’ law-abiding explanations for his plight. If he admits his guilt, order is restored in theory, but he has lost the opportunity to learn and to grow.
Zooming out further still, Blake’s aim in the narrative of the Illustrations is to justify Job’s suffering because it leads him to God; away from the letter and into the spirit. Blake is offering his own version of ‘contrast’ theodicy (‘We need suffering in the world in order to know the good’), in which the contemplation of his suffering, abiding with it, ‘persisting in his folly’ ("If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise" William Blake),117 leads Job to a Last Judgement and personal annihilation in God. In this, Blake is much more of a conventional theologian than is usually let on, even when he combines orthodox theodicy with a mystic’s view of personal annihilation.
Buff
Foster Damon notes that the bottom margin of the engraving shows “the cuckoo of slander” and “the owl of false wisdom” and “the adder of hate” eating away at the scrolls of inspiration, adding, “This is Blake's comment on the critics who attacked his work so blindly and unmercifully”118 Perhaps so. Blake certainly had enough reasons in life to feel sympathetic to the beleaguered Job. Don’t we all?
NB. Job is looking extraordinarily buff here for someone who has just been through hell, like those white-bearded OAPs they get to demonstrate chair exercises and Pilates on Facebook.
#11: Job's Evil Dreams (ϰ)
With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me & affrightest me with Visions [Job 7:14]
If this were the story of Alice Through the Looking Glass, this scene would be the mirror Alice climbs through. Its Janus-faced aspect – bringing the first part of the story to its conclusion with a radical twist presaging what is to come – and the way it finally reveals Yahweh’s own Janus-like nature (diabolical-angelic) makes it appropriate that the image looks so stunning in the high-contrast of the engraving. This is the story’s turning point, from which the other images hang, evenly balanced, on either side.
Note that this crucial turning point in Blake's narrative is a scene entirely of his own invention which does not appear in the Book of Job. In the Bible, Job’s evil dreams are simply one of his afflictions, without any of the significance Blake grants them here. This is Blake’s story.
Without the need for any special knowledge of Blake’s symbolism, many will recognise this as showing night terrors. Job lies on his bed, feeling the grip of the damned dragging him down to perdition, preparing chains for him, holding him fast against his resistance. Extraordinarily, Yahweh is shown hovering above Job, pressing down on him from above in concert with the damned pulling at him from below, while Job, startled, tries to resist. Maybe Yahweh is not the good guy Job thought he was. Even more extraordinarily, Yahweh has the cloven hooves of Satan and is wrapped in the coils of the serpent.
Wicksteed takes the Gnostic view that “the serpent shows us Nature as the alien and tyrannic power whose coils we cannot escape.”119 It seems more likely that the serpent here simply represents the snake of Genesis, who first encouraged Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and who thereby helped make mankind moralists: the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve into committing the original sin which, some argue, makes us all deserve to suffer.
In the Butts painting, the serpent has multicoloured, iridescent scales, while Yahweh’s lightning is yellow and the flames of Hell are both red and yellow. The effect is to make Yahweh look like he is of a piece with Hell. In the Linnell image, Hell looks the same but the lightning flashes circling Yahweh are blue, lessening the impression of the unity of the attack on Job.
I’ve cried wolf several times now, saying that Job is at, or near, breaking point. Here, something finally, really and definitively breaks, namely his earlier, legalistic, transactional idea of God. Job’s old God is finally revealed here in Job’s dream, on the stage of his unconscious, as an aspect of Satan, and Job recoils violently.
Some say this is just Satan disguised as Yahweh. Surely that would have been Job’s reaction at first. But a seed has been planted that will burst through after Elihu has spoken.
#12: The Wrath of Elihu
Elihu is a young interloper, a fourth ‘comforter’. There has been considerable debate as to Elihu’s identity, whether he was a Gentile prophet or even a demon of some kind.120 It is also debated whether Elihu’s speech was a part of the original Book of Job at all or a later insertion (he is not mentioned at all in the framing story, and may have been added in order to work in a novel theological point of view).121
Ye are very old
Elihu’s speech is unusual in several ways, including the range of his references to God, who he gives nine different names.122 The language he uses, in terms of the names of God employed and the range of moral concepts employed, resembles nothing so much as the language of Yahweh himself when he speaks from the whirlwind in the following chapter and the next image, making Elihu’s speech a prelude to the coming theophany.
Elihu initially promises to keep quiet on account of his youth:
I am young, and ye are very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew you mine opinion. / I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom. / But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding. [Job 32:6-8]
He finally intervenes only because he is offended by Job’s demeanour and decides to speak against him for justifying himself against God, and casting doubt on God’s justice. This time, unlike previous speeches by the friends, Job actually seems to take note of Elihu’s arguments, which appear summarised in the margins of the engravings.
Elihu says that God repeatedly tries to open our eyes in order to help us, speaking to us in dreams:
For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. / In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; / Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction. [Job 33:14-16]
Elihu strongly emphasises the divine vision as the chief instructor of men… Elihu says that God opens the ears of men and “sealeth their instruction” in dreams, in visions of the night. (Bo Lindberg)123
Blake could not have agreed more strongly about this, and therefore he has Job pick up on the clue, wondering what signs in his own dreams he might have overlooked. What was his ‘Evil Dream’ in the previous image saying? Elihu makes the point that God’s universe is too great to be comprehended, and human actions too insignificant to bother God: “If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or if thy transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? / If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand?” [Job 35:6-7] It is pointless to haggle with Yahweh, all we can do is accept and move on.
Arrogant and uncomprehending
Having begun with an almost transactional view of his relation to Yahweh (‘you scratch my back; I’ll light your sacrificial pyre’), Job starts to see the bigger picture. Earlier contributions from the comforters were offered ostensibly in friendship but were lame, duplicitous and hypocritical. The upstart Elihu erupts in anger against Job… and something finally starts to get through.
Some commentators on Job dismiss Elihu as arrogant and uncomprehending ("The fourth friend has neither the understanding nor the wisdom of Job and the other friends" Jerome, The Vulgate)124, and think his poetry second-rate (the “bombastic, repetitious, and highly stereotypical poetry he speaks is vastly inferior to anything written by the Job poet” Alter),125 but Blake scholars generally tend to think well of him on the basis of this plate, with its implication that he, unlike the other comforters, might be talking sense.
#13: The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind
Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind [Job 38:1]
Yahweh himself now enters the drama, sweeping on stage immediately Elihu is done, though responding to Job more than Elihu himself, and speaking as “the voice of the whirlwind.”
Indeed, there are two speeches from Yahweh [Job 38:1-39:30, Job 40:06-41:34], both of which are said to be spoken from the whirlwind [Job 38:1 and Job 40:5). One thing we can say for sure is that there was no whirlwind involved: the phrase, “the voice of the whirlwind” is the translation by the authors of the King James Bible (1611), now burrowed too far into English speakers’ minds to be argued with.
The Hebrew, searah / céarah, translated as ‘whirlwind’, means more accurately ‘storm’, and the memorable coinage of ‘the voice from the whirlwind-storm’ obscures what is really an image of the elemental storm god, Yahweh, appearing as well he might; as… a… storm.
Above Yahweh, in the top margin of the engraved plate, teams of wind demons link arms as they fly around in Yahweh as part of the storm conjured by him in the main image.
Whether thought of as a storm or a whirlwind, the supremacy of God’s power is emphasised: “The design shows God as the master of the whirlwind, and the whirlwind does the master of men; by means of the wind God accepts some and rejects others (Bo Lindberg).126
All commentators agree that the poetry of these speeches is outstanding, maybe on a par with the song of annihilation: here, “the author of Job proves himself to be one of the supreme poets of nature, a writer gifted with descriptive powers almost without parallel” (Peake and Strahan).127
Absconding god
In terms of the theological content of the speeches, a picture emerges of a God far removed from the everyday concerns and theological squabbles of the mortals who worship him. This image of God, “may well rank among the most remarkable in the history of religion.” (Rudolf Otto).128 In the original sequencing of the Old Testament (in the Masoretic Text, for example) this is the last appearance God makes in person: Yahweh tells Job of his indifference to the human world, then departs from it.
Both of Yahweh’s speeches are accounts of the Nature he has created, a kind of poetic fly-past review of his work in Genesis. The first speech begins with talk of cosmology and the weather:
Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. [Job 38:28-30]
Yahweh then continues making the same point, but now talking about animals:
Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south? Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high? [Job 39:26-27]
The next speech is entirely devoted to the monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan, discussed below in relation to Blake’s image #15, ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’
Picking up from Elihu, though not responding to him directly, Yahweh shows that the world is too vast, and he elevated too far above it, for the moral calculations of mortals to be much interest to him or even to make any sense. His argument is that Job can know nothing of the creation and its workings because he wasn’t there:
Yahweh reduces the problem to a question of origins... In order to understand the things that happen in the world and to apprehend the Divine counsel, it would have been necessary to be present at the origins of things. Before everything else, God founds the Earth and the Heavens. Where was Job at the creation? Are you the first man to have been born, and were you brought forth before the hills?129
To have made something is to know it. Yahweh made the world. At one level this section is a simple put-down of Job because he cannot have the knowledge or understanding required to dispute with Yahweh: “Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?” [Job 40:2].
This too is extraordinary
Yahweh implies that his concerns are far above those of mere mortals such as Job – yet here he is, talking directly to him, accounting for himself to Job. This too is extraordinary.
Is it possible that Yahweh’s real point here is to emphasise that he was the victor of the chaoskampf? On this and the next few slides the ancient chaos war is brought centre-stage by emphasising, first, that Yahweh is the storm God who made the world (image #13: “The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind’); second, that he led the heavenly hosts in that war and in celebrating its victory (image #14: ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’); and finally, that his army was victorious, quelling Behemoth and Leviathan (image #15: ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’). In emphasising this, perhaps Yahweh is making the point that Job’s talk of annihilation is ‘all talk and no trousers’. Job, unlike Yahweh, doesn’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. Job had better wise up.
To look at that from Job’s point of view, maybe when he says that he ‘sees’ Yahweh for the first time now (“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” [Job 42:5]), what he means has something to do with his ‘seeing’ the vision of the Morning Stars singing together, and of Behemoth and Leviathan at bay, as we see them in the following two images. Maybe these three scenes are all one event, and the visions of chaoskampf are part of the thunder and lightning of Yahweh’s storm.
#14: When the Morning Stars Sang Together
Let there be Light [Genesis 1:3]
The scene illustrated here is that invoked by Yahweh when he says:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. / Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? / Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; / When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? [Job 38:4-7]
As with the prominence of the storm in the previous image (#13: ‘The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind’), here too we are being treated to an image of an utterly primal scene.
The Mount of Assembly
The creation of the world in this way is captured also, for example, in Isaiah, where ‘the shining one’ says “I will ascend to the heavens; / I will raise my throne / above the stars of God (‘el); / I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly (har mô ed), / on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon” [Isaiah 14:13].130 We should recall that Ugarit’s assembly of the hosts of El did indeed meet on a mountain, Mount Zaphon. The ‘mount of assembly’ is the rallying place of the hosts of heaven, where they met to rejoice at the killing of Leviathan and to crown Baal, and where they had congregated ever since. It is the scene of Satan’s later wager with Yahweh.
What the image shows is Job, his wife and the friends witnessing a vision of the dawn of creation, when chaos was defeated, the light and the dark separated, and Yahweh and the ‘sons of ‘El’ and the Morning Stars all sang and celebrated together at the creation of the world. The model for this celebration was the feast and services accompanying the laying of the foundation of the Second Temple, where there was similar music and song, and in which the litanies and those songs would certainly have recycled the Ugaritic creation myths.
Blake’s image is coherent and full of symbolism. Yahweh’s arms are in a cruciform shape, delighting Christian typologists, of course, but the real significance of which may be the way the parting of his hands enacts the chthonic separation of the light and the dark, the key, founding task of creation. To Yahweh’s left now (sinister, female) is the dark, the moon, and the powers of the night. To his right is the Apollonian (male, energetic), solar power of goodness, power and light. Up above, the Mornings Stars sing and dance like the Busby Berkeley front row.
In Genesis, the stars as such were only created on the fourth day [Genesis 1:13-16]. The ‘Morning Stars’ singing here at the dawn of time are not quotidian stars but rather the heavenly followers of the high god (originally El, later Baal, Yahweh, Marduk…), the heavenly hosts, the Sons of God, bene ha Elohim.
Vicchio points out that, in the course of time, over the duration of the history of the Jews and the subsequent history of the Bible, “these deities are transmuted into forces of nature or cosmic beasts, who owe their existence to a single God,” which is true in terms of how subsequent generations may have read and understood the text.131
The author of the Book of Job himself thought of the Morning Stars not as one thing or the other, but as some sort of amalgam of primordial deities, angelic hosts, and actual lights in the firmament, the stars above. But then, ‘the author of the Book of Job’ is to some extent already an amalgam of those before him that told the folk tale, the celebrants that recited the litany or composed the hymns of which the book was a compendium, as well as being an original work of poetry. In any case, behind all of these overlapping interpretations lies the original host of El, the ‘good angels’, the bene ha Elohim.
Blake too identified the Morning Stars and the Sons of God – see how carefully he places a star above the head of each of Yahweh’s dancing retinue.
The margins of the engraved plate of this image retell the story of creation, from the separation of the light and dark to the creation of the firmament, each prefixed by the relevant divine command (“Let there be…”). Note how the designs in both the main image and in the margin freely mix Hebrew and pagan myth. On the left, Helios adopts the same posture as Yahweh, sweeping away the dark. On the right, Selene drives, or rides, two snakes instead of her usual cows. Job and his friends are trapped within what Blake would certainly have thought of as Plato’s cave. This collage of Hebrew and pagan is Blake’s commentary on the relation of the two forms of divinity:
The celestial bodies are gods. Idolaters worship them as the supreme gods, because they do not know the true God. Helios and Selene and all the gods of Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome are explained simply as the angels of God, his servants. The Hebrews called them the Cherubim and made sculptures and paintings of them to adorn the arch of God, the Temple of Jerusalem, the breast-plate of the high priest etc. These grand works are now destroyed or perhaps buried; a few survive in Greek, Roman or Egyptian copies.
What, then, is [image #14 in the Job set]? It is a reconstruction of Aaron's breast-plate, the original map of the universe, and an exposition of its meaning, reconstructed by William Blake aided by antique gems, Biblical and classical literature, the theories of Jacob Bryant, and the inspiration of God. The last mentioned is the most important agent. For this design was drawn by Blake from a vision… (Lindberg)132
Underpinning all of creation, however, is the giant serpent swimming in the primal waters from which creation rises like so many bubbles.
#15: Behemoth and Leviathan
The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being, by means of the Word.133
Lionel Bailly
Yahweh introduces his great beasts of land and sea, Behemoth and Leviathan, as if the discussion of them were simply a continuation of his verbal parade of the animals he created, moving on from the eagle, with which he had concluded his speech about the power of the animals:
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. / Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. [Job 40:15-16]
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? / Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? / Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? [Job 41:1-3]
Some commentators take this at face value, assuming perhaps that Yahweh needed to invent two fierce terrestrial animals to improve his flexing on Job, ‘going miracle for miracle’. Behemoth is mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, but is a relatively minor character compared to Leviathan and therefore easier to recast. Behemoth was likely originally “El’s calf Atik”, one of the original combatants on Leviathan’s side.134
Leviathan and Behemoth are mentioned together in documents like the Apocalypse of Enoch and Fourth Esdras, though both are relatively late sources (2ⁿᵈ and 1ˢᵗ Century BCE) and both are concerned with a battle at the end of time, and not with the equivalent primal scene.135 The Babylonian Talmud and Jewish haggidic tradition alike say that Behemoth and Leviathan, “and Ziz, a great bird, will become food for the righteous in a great Banquet.”136
Milton has Behemoth and Leviathan as “the river horse and the scaly crocodile."137 This doesn’t agree with what Yahweh says of the animals. For instance: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” Well, yes. Egyptians have caught crocodiles from the Nile using hooks and goads for centuries. And there is a connection between Behemoth and the rhinoceros only inasmuch as Blake may perhaps have drawn inspiration from Dürer’s Rhinoceros when creating his Behemoth.
Other commentators supposed the beasts to be generic demons or agents of Satan (“Behemoth and Leviathan, are disguises used by Satan,” Gregory the Great; “Behemoth is an allegory of the Devil, enslaving carnal people,” Philip the Priest.)138 But to see the beasts as either animals or mere agents of Satan adds little to the story compared to seeing them as primordial chaos demons.
To understand the impact of this image, and the role of the chaos monsters in the work of Blake, we need to return to the source. In the Ugaritic myth at the heart of these stories, the chaos that had to be subdued was probably originally, historically, that of the stormy seas threatening shipping off the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean. But in the myth that was built around this core, Leviathan (Lotan, the ‘twisting snake’, etc) and his followers (Behemoth, etc), as defenders of this stormy sea, come to represent the ultimate chaos that must be cleared away to found civilization, defined as the opposite of chaos.
In Genesis, God does not create the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. He shapes what is already there. He broods over the (pre-existing) waters of ‘the deep’ [Genesis 1:2]. He separates the light and the dark. He brings order to the prevailing chaos.
We’ve told the story of how Baal-Yahweh-Marduk waged war with the twisting snake and its allies, and how the deity and his supporters sang of their victory in the morning of the world. Behemoth and Leviathan represent the forces of chaos that had just been defeated. But what was this chaos?
Later thinkers saw this chaos in different ways. What the primal chaos was not, everyone agrees, is a simple lack of order: its disorder goes beyond that. Alchemists saw the chaos as the prima materia, the formless base of matter, and the starting point for the great work that leads to the Philosophers’ Stone. Neoplatonism had its idealist version of the same idea in its notion of unformed matter. Milton embodied this in Paradise Lost, where he has Satan struggle against Night and Chaos. In his analysis of Milton’s cosmology, Walter Curry says:
.. the conception of the divinity of both Chaos and Night was in accordance with the doctrines of Neoplatonic theology in its interpretations of Orphic and Pythagorean cosmogony. Specifically... Chaos may be identified with the second divine principle of the 'intelligible triad,' and Night with the first or summit of the so-called "intelligible and at the same time intellectual triad" of the Neoplatonic system. It suggests also that Milton could easily have found philosophical support for his fusion of these occult Powers – introduced primarily for poetic or dramatic reasons – with a cosmogony which, at first glance, might seem alien to them.139
My point in quoting this is not to take a view on its argument, but merely to show that Blake, who was more than familiar with Milton’s work, was thoroughly aware of these sorts of images bubbling up through the text.
To try to isolate the precise nature of the primordial chaos, represented by the image of ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’, would be a mistake, because you don’t have to take a view as to the essential nature of chaos before you can grasp the concept of disorder itself, which is what the concept surely represented to the Canaanites and Israelites.
The architecture of Blake’s image here is of interest. We are used to seeing the images divided, typically between earthly and heavenly spheres, as in images #2, #3, #5, #9, and #14. In image #11, ‘Job's Evil Dreams’, there are arguably three worlds depicted: heavenly, earthly and the underworld.
In the current image there is also a division into at least two parts. In heaven, Yahweh reaches down to indicate Bahemoth and Leviathan for the benefit of Job and company on earth, who look down on the beasts. Behemoth and Leviathan themselves are drawn in a separate globe. Foster Damon says that the beasts and Job have been placed in separate regions this way to emphasise that this “is a picture of the subconscious, the unredeemed portion of the psyche, which the bulrushes identify as Egypt – the unredeemed portion of mankind”; “Behemoth and Leviathan... exist in man himself”140
Naturally the unconscious is one place we are likely to feel the sway of chaos, but that is because chaos underpins the whole of nature, including the unconscious. Putting the beasts in their own domain emphasises this. It is this force of chaos and derangement, embedded throughout the Book of Job, and brought to the foreground in Blake’s Illustrations, that Blake is emphasising here. Not only that, but it is this Leviathan image that often makes the biggest impact, and is among the most widely reproduced (along with ‘The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind’).141
One remarkable aspect here is that, while the chaoskampf myths tell the story of the defeat of a primordial chaos serpent, and while all the paraphernalia of that situation are imported into the Book of Job, nevertheless, here and elsewhere in the Bible it is emphasised that Yahweh not only defeated Leviathan but also created him: “… behemoth, which I made with thee” [Job 40:15].
It is now accepted by most scholars that, among the opening words of Genesis 1:2 (“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”), the Hebrew word ‘tehôm’, used to refer to the abyss of waters (apsu, ‘the deep’) is a reference to the chaos dragon Tiamat / Lotan.142 This would mean that originally the Israelite myth followed the Ugaritic in that it proposed an original chaos that had to be conquered, yet by the time of the writing of the Book of Job the representatives of the chaos (Behemoth, Leviathan and the rest) could also be seen as something Yahweh might lay claim to have created.
These two views cannot be reconciled as cosmogonies, but the latter claim by Yahweh also to be the creator of chaos might perhaps give someone like Blake permission to think positively about this chaos, to be less resistant to it, to believe that it had a role to play outside of the original primordial and apocalyptic contexts.
To summarise, three of the most distinctive signposts of the chaoskampf myth – the storm god “speaking out of a whirlwind”; the morning stars as members of the chief deity’s retinue fighting and then singing together at the beginning of time: and their collective foes, Behemoth and Leviathan – have now appeared, one after the other, in the course of the previous three images. The reason they appear together like this is that they are all part of Job’s vision as part of ‘seeing’ Yahweh for the first time. What he sees are these images of the primordial chaos, and of the morning singing, and of Yahweh’s triumph.
None of these images are keyframes, central to the story itself, according to Lindberg, yet placing these three themes next to one another like this puts a huge spotlight on the themes of the chaoskampf, irrespective of the role they play in the developing story, which is arguably very little.
#16: The Fall of Satan (ϰ)
Hell is naked before him & Destruction has no covering [Job 26:6]
Each Man is in his Spectre’s power
Until the arrival of that hour
When his Humanity awake
And cast his Spectre into the Lake143
William Blake
Satan and his cohorts, the spectres of Job and his wife, fall into the burning lake. Foster Damon summarises:
Satan the Accuser is cast out of Job's heaven, and with him fall the errors of Job and his wife, now given full form. (In Illustration II they were only dim faces beneath Satan's arms.) They fall into the flames of annihilation – not of everlasting torture, for such a hell Blake did not admit; Error recognized is Error destroyed.144
This scene is not mentioned in the Book of Job but is another of Blake’s inventions, based on a remark of Jesus, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" [Luke 10:18], and on Blake’s belief that “Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”145 Job has now achieved such an apocalypse. This apocalypse, so crucial to Blake's story – and just like the Evil Dream that set Job on the path to his apocalypse – is an invention of Blake's without basis in the original text. Thus, the two central keyframes in Blake’s telling of Job’s story (#11, ‘Job’s Evil Dreams’, and this, #16) are entirely the work of Blake.
While, in the book, Yahweh goes on to bless Job with further prosperity and children, as Blake himself recognises in the following plates, this insertion of the Fall of Satan is Blake’s equivalent of the health and wealth Jehova brought to the restored Job: it is Blake’s version of the payoff for Job’s suffering.
In the text of the Book of Job, Job acknowledges the impact of Yahweh’s revelation, his speech from the whirlwind, and prostrates himself in submission:
I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. / Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. [Job 42:5-6]
To see God face to face (Yahweh ‘speaks out of the whirlwind’ but Job ‘sees’ him) as the immediate cause of your enlightenment is rare even in the Bible. For Blake to have Job see God just as Ezekiel saw God – face to face – is for Blake to put this experience at the centre of his faith. The experience is one of direct knowledge, and direct seeing.
Most interpretations of Job’s story hinge around an assumption that, at this point, Job has arrived at a higher understanding of God’s mystery, which he accepts, and he therefore submits. This is certainly Blake’s interpretation: Job has an epiphany that transforms him.
Considering the experience of the Shoah, Elie Wiesel suggests instead that there is something suspicious about the speed with which Job bends the knee here: “No sooner had God spoken than Job repented". Wiesel imagines an original ending to the book, excised from the Bible, in which Job “succumbed to his grief an uncompromising and whole man”, and never submitted in his heart to Yahweh. He did not actually repent, even if he got down in the “dust and ashes”.146 In Mark Larrimore’s summary of Wiesel’s Job, “Rather than becoming the ‘accomplice’ of the killer of his children, this Job took his passionate protest with him to his grave,” “By repenting sins he did not commit, by justifying a sorrow he did not deserve, he communicates to us that he did not believe in his own confessions. We should not either.”147
It’s easy to see here those victims of the Stalinist purges who condemned themselves at trial in the strongest terms, realising how absurd their speeches would sound to future generations, and how they would read into it a sign of the victim’s innocence. Perhaps Job expects the same consideration from us.
In Erdinger, this is a psychological apocalypse in which the subject sloughs off the false ego for a moment to connect with the real Self. Jung argued that Job’s intervention transforms Yahweh himself in response to Job’s pleading and arguments:
It is very interesting that Blake should follow his portrayal of the encounter between Job and Yahweh with a picture of Satan's being cast out of heaven as witnessed by Jesus. According to Jung, Yahweh became aware of his lack of moral differentiation through meeting Job and therefore had to give satisfaction to Job by incarnating in Christ.148 This involved at the same time a decisive separation of Yahweh and Satan, represented by Satan's being cast out of heaven… Psychologically, it indicates a decisive separation of the opposites.149
The separation of Satan and Yahweh here is Jung-speak for the personal transformation of the individual, described in terms of the relation of the ego and the Self rather than the individual and God. Whatever its value as theology, I like the suggestion that God can improve and has a history – a claim which is implicit in the existence of a New Testament as an addition to the Old.
In some ways, this is the culmination of Blake’s story of Job (paired with, and capped, perhaps, by the following plate, #17, ‘The Vision of Christ’), despite the fact that there are several more images to follow to tie up loose ends and draw conclusions.
#17: The Vision of Christ
A corollary of the previous page, rounding it off. This is one of the images Blake added to the Job set when preparing the Linnell set and engravings fifteen years later. Satan falling, or having fallen, Job sees a vision of a Christ-like God before him. The friends remain in darkness – they did not suffer, and are not transformed. This is the point at which Job’s (supposed) prostration, discussed above, actually occurs in Blake’s telling: “I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee” [Job 42:5]. Christopher Rowland comments:
This is the crucial plate of his Illustrations of the Book of Job. It has as its main text [Job 42:5], and encapsulates the way in which Blake reads the whole book… It depicts the moment when, to quote the words of the Preface to Blake’s Milton, a Poem, “the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration.” Blake’s understanding was profoundly influenced by the idea of the mutual indwelling of God and humanity, one of the central themes of the Gospel of John.”150
The friends seem to want to share the vision but can't bring themselves to do so. God is too much for them.
We should note in passing that it is typical of Blake that, while the friends can’t share his vision, his wife does. In the way that the original story has been told and retold historically, Job’s wife was not always by his side. When he is on the town dump scratching at his sores, she says “Baruch Elohim ve mos”, usually translated as “curse God and die.” These are her only lines, on which her reputation was founded.
Misogyny being what it is, she became famous as a goad to Job, encouraging him to betray Yahweh. Gregory the Great calls her a “mispersuading woman”; Thomas Acquinas said that Satan only spared her so she could encourage Job to curse Yahweh; Saint Augustine called her diablo aduirix, the 'Devil's Assistant', while Calvin preferred ‘Satan’s tool.’ It is typical of Blake that he sweeps all this aside and keeps Job’s wife – Job’s Catherine, as far as Blake was concerned – always by his side: “breaking with all traditions of interpretation and depiction, in Blake's vision Job's wife is his most loyal friend. She is by his side throughout and, uncowed, she sees God when he does.”151
It turns out that scholars now think her Hebrew was mistranslated: what she actually says is “bless God and die”, meaning that, as Job was on his last legs, he should end his life with a blessing to Yahweh. Blake, trusting his instinct, was ahead of his time in all this.
The marginal comments on the engraving are particularly busy, with a flurry of quotes from the Testament of John. Confirming the personal, psychological dimension of the story, this confrontation with the Christ-God is also a confrontation with and recognition of the Self: “we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him for we shall see him as He is” [1 John 3:2].
As with the poems of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, this image forms a pair with the preceding picture of the Fall of Satan – and as with the pair of images #5, ‘Satan Going Forth From the Presence of the Lord and Job's Charity’, and #6, ‘Satan Smiting Job with Boils’, they may be two synchronous views of the same event; Job sees Christ-Yahweh, and at the same time, Satan and the spectres fall. The usual two-tiered visualisation (of heaven and Earth) has gone. Christ speaks here from among the clouds: has Job’s vision now taken him to heaven itself? “In the Whirlwind God descended below the clouds into this world; now he has returned to heaven and brought man with him” (Foster Damon).152
In a sense, the entire thrust of Blake’s argument hangs on this and the previous image, where his story climaxes: Job was out of sorts with God, he was tested; indeed, by persevering in his error, Blake’s views were tested to destruction. In his dreamworld confrontation with Satan-Yahweh, Blake begins to reconfigure himself; Yahweh responds, speaking from the whirlwind and Satan and the spectres fall, and Job sees Christ in vision.
In the Erdinger’s Jungian version of this story arc:
Job's relation to Yahweh has now been healed. The ego's rapport with the Self – the ego-Self axis – has been restored. In the lower margin Blake quotes the saying of Christ in [John 14:20]. “At that day, ye shall know that I am in my Father & you in me & I in you” This quotation states explicitly that Job is reconciled to Yahweh through Christ, the same point that Jung makes in Answer to Job.
In other words, Yahweh's encounter with Job has required him, Yahweh, to undergo the Christian transformation. This will be the new world that Blake portrayed in Picture #14 (‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’-AW).153
This, with Jungian bells on, is the story as Blake sees and tells it. It has a pleasingly tidy structure, with Job tested and passing the test, his fortunes lost, then restored after much trouble and pain. This tidyness, and conformity to traditional storytelling, is perhaps appropriate to a commercial publishing project, perhaps even necessary. It may be ‘the whole story’ in Blake’s telling, but it is far from being all that matters. Behemoth and Leviathan do not even appear in the short version of the story, yet, along with other aspects of the chaoskampf scenario, they radiate powerfully from the work, often in a subterranean manner.
#18: Job's Sacrifice / Job Praying for his Friends
The' problem of evil' is an artifact of an idea of good whose objective reality is factories and crying, misery and slavery. The problem of evil is indeed a spelling mistake, a blot on the copybook of the idea that the world must be for good... must have a telos.154
Timothy Morton
the hollow innocent
drum full of judgement
Ken Fox
The image here is unusual in that Job changed it between the Butts and Linnell sets and engravings, reversing Job’s position so that he faced into the sacrificial pyre rather than facing the viewer, looking into himself and toward Yahweh rather than speaking to his audience.
In the Book of Job, Yahweh famously tells the friends that they have somehow impugned or misrepresented him:
… the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. / Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept: lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job. [Job 42:7-8]
Blake replaces the animal sacrifices with a simple flame, and Job prays for his friends, the comforters, on their behalf, as Yahweh commanded. A lot of ink has been spilt arguing that Job here is simply living his new life of contrition and forgiveness, so that the image merely “illustrates the attitude brought about by Job's encounter with Yahweh”.155 Job’s turning away from the audience to address God directly in the later image and plate are taken as a sign of Job’s newfound inwardness and forgiveness, and that is taken to be the point of the image: “I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end” (Blake).156
From theodicy to solidarity
We might ask precisely what Yahweh thought was ‘not right’ in what the comforters said. He can’t be thinking of any of their specific arguments, as these were many and various, and are generally thought to be mostly sound, even if somehow irrelevant or OT in the circumstances.
What they did wrong was in thinking in theological terms at all, thinking in terms of theodicy, trying to explain what Job had done wrong to cause his misfortune. As the readers all know, the only thing Job did wrong (from Blake’s point of view) was to have the wrong understanding of God – but that particular sin never occurs to the friends. Instead, they drone on rather complacently about how he might have forgotten or overlooked some earlier sin.
Three people inform Job that his suffering has meaning, but Job doesn't accept any of their reasons, simply staying with the contingency. Blake's genius is reading Job in terms of 'Who am I as a biological being? What is the reason for my life?' The kind answer is, none whatsoever; this is a pure accident. The kind answer is also a sacred answer: where the sacred and ecological thinking align is in a view of life as beautiful contingency (Timothy Morton).157
Most readers of the Book of Job come away with the impression that the friends are vastly annoying to Job even when, in abstract, purely theological terms, they are right, eg., in raising the possibility that, at least according to conventional wisdom and popular theology, Job’s misfortunes may be retribution for some forgotten sin. They are right, in principle, when they suppose that suffering might benefit a person by offering them a new perspective on life, or that they might be being tested by their misfortune somehow (we happen to know that Job was being tested), and so on down the list of reasons offered in the Book of Job for the existence of evil and suffering.
All of the above
The explanations of the comforters are sound in theory, but if they really applied to Job’s situation then Job’s anguish would make no sense at all and we wouldn’t sympathise with him. We could not sympathise with Job’s sense of abandonment if we thought he was fundamentally in the wrong in the way the friends suppose.
Question: what did they say that misrepresents Yahweh?
Answer: all of the above.
It is not that their arguments are incorrect, but rather that it is wrong, useless and vexatious to speculate about any of these things in such circumstances. In the presence of real suffering, what is called for is not theology, but solidarity and fellow feeling.
The sin of the comforters is that they are morally impoverished as much as they are theologically up-to-date. Their arguments are the stuff of teleology and a crushing obsession with the sins of others. In some ways, their persistent view of Job resembles Satan’s. In the depth of Job’s crisis – not to mention his physical pain – such arguments smell of cheap perfume. The friends don’t lay on the support that is clearly called for: the comforters offer no comfort because the friends behave like moralising busybodies rather than friends. They speculate about Job’s possible sins without considering that they may be wrong in doing so. Here, Job asks Yahweh to forgive them.
An excretion
We live in a world that crushes people systematically with poverty, violence and injustice. Yet mainstream religion often seems focused on the inconsequential sins and frailties of individuals, grist to Satan’s mill. It lectures them while they are ground down, telling them God would approve of their suffering, that they must have done something wrong for this to be happening to them: “I deserve it, don’t I?”
Traditional theodicy may turn out to be an excretion on Nobodaddy’s part, plastered over the fact that his fantasy of command, that he runs the universe like a factory, wheel upon starry wheel (“O Satan… art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts / And of the Wheels of Heaven”),158 and his claim that everything has a divine rationale, purpose or teleology, are lies. Nobodaddy is out of his depth. Theodicy is a fog that obscures this. There is no big plan: what we need is comradeship and solidarity, not conformity and speculation.
#19: Every Man Also Gave Him a Piece of Money
This image is a tribute to the virtue of charity, but also to the virtue of modesty, which Job displays by gratefully accepting the help of friends. The friends are offering rings, perhaps signifying new integrity in Job’s personality. Erdinger thought so:
The picture shows his family and friends each bringing him money and a gold ring. This expresses the unification of the personality.
Money signifies libido and this is now becoming available to the ego from all the various aspects of the psyche. A ring signifies unity, wholeness and the marriage pledge – that is, it is an emblem of the coniunctio – the union of opposites in the psyche.159
What I like about this image is the suggestion that it is a “tender and passionate acknowledgement” of the support of the Linnells in commissioning the Job series when Blake was at a low ebb financially.160 This seems more likely than the idea that the image exists to symbolise the unified personality. But in that case, the picture also celebrates Blake’s graciousness in accepting the gift.
If this is right, as I think it is, then this image is a cuckoo’s egg, maybe even a watermelon in easter hay, dropped into the story to pay tribute to Blake’s patron.
#20: Job and his Daughters
Many years after the last scene, Job relates his story to his daughters. As noted earlier, this isn’t part of the original Job story but from the apocryphal Testament of Job. I have struggled to see why Blake included this image if it is supposed to symbolise something especially significant for the story. It was part of the Job legend that, at the end of his days, resting in his happiness, he had narrated his story to his daughters.
Art alignment
The scene, with its satisfied Job enjoying the company of his daughters while telling his fabulous story, adds to the image of a just and benevolent conclusion to the story, with Yahweh’s favour shining brightly on Job. This is already a good reason to include the scene in the telling of Job’s story.
Foster Damon may be right to say that the significance of the scene follows if you understand that the daughters represent the three muses. Job has understood that art is the way to pursue alignment with God, and he is training his daughters, the muses, appropriately:
It is not enough to be saved: the redeemed must show the way to others. This is done by means of the arts. Job is relating his experiences to his three daughters – Poetry, Painting, and Music – who had vanished during the period of Job's trials but have now reappeared. (In the first version of this illustration, a water color made for Thomas Butts, the daughters hold the instruments of their arts)...
Art is the sacrificial wine of the Eucharist. In the margins are fruiting grapevines and instruments of music.161
Note that Blake’s arms mirror his posture earlier in image #18, ‘Job's Sacrifice / Job Praying for his Friends’, except now he is facing outward into his audience, whereas before (except in the original Butts image – see the notes above) he faced away from them. It is not unlikely that at some point Blake was struck by the elegance of the symmetry between these two images if the postures were mirrored this way between them, and that is perhaps why he reversed the posture of Job in the sequentially earlier plates when creating the later (1821- f) versions.
I sometimes wonder if Job’s posture with his arms here doesn’t resemble the image of a fisherman talking about the ‘one that got away’. More seriously, I’ve spoken a few times of this or that character having a ‘cruciform posture. In the images of Yahweh, Satan and Job above, Lindberg sees a Blakean extension of the ‘pathos formula’:
… in pl. 14, the outstretched arms of God do not only create and sustain the universe: they express its contraries: the spiritual world of angels, and the material world of men; the freedom above and the imprisonment below.
Blake applies this divine formula to Satan, too. In pl. 3 it is expressive of Satan's all-encompassing power; in pl. 11 it reveals the contraries of the law of stone in Heaven, and the punishment of fire in Hell. At the same time it shows the co-operation and unity of these contraries: “Heaven & Hell are born together.”
Often Blake applies the gesture to mortals. In pl. 20 the outstretched arms of Job repeat the gesture of God and Satan in the paintings on the wall behind him. The divine gesture applied to a mortal unites him with the spiritual powers; Job tells us by his attitude that God and Satan dwell in him, and he in them.162
Lindberg is right to see a characteristic formula, as he says, but perhaps wrong to apply it also to this plate: a lot hinges on how significant you think it is that, in the other images, Satan, Job and Yahweh have their palms facing down in an attitude of containment or embrace, while in image #20 here the palms face upward, perhaps enjoining the viewer to inspect the surrounding images from Job’s story instead. Or just telling a fishy story.
#21: Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity (ϰ)
So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning (Job 42:12)
Putting a seal on the idea of the Illustrations coming to a satisfying (for potential customers) conclusion, the final image mirrors the first (#1, ‘Job and His Family’), except this time all the symbolic flashing lights have been reversed: the red lights have turned green and it is now safe to cross. The instruments (of art and imagination) have been taken up in prayer and rejoicing. Job’s wealth and family have been restored and surround him once again. In the last two images, Job is shown lifted above the world of possessions, living in the exercise of art. The hero’s journey is done. Here, without doubt, endeth a story.
That this and image #1 are both keyframes, and their visible resemblance, emphasises their availability to snap together like poppers to lock the story into an arc, or cycle.
The Moon and the Sun alike are in the sky, evoking image #14, ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’, suggesting some sort of totality of overview. This new security and happiness is therefore also a new creation.
The symbol killeth
Blake’s major illuminated works are characterised by increasing contradiction, ambivalence, and a deliberate dislocation, or rewiring, of meaning. Blake achieves this in several ways at different times, including using multiple perspectives and even contradicting himself. In Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Julia Wright has shown how systematically and deliberately Blake undermined conventional readings of his work. She also explains why she believes he meant do so:
Blake resists his works’ implication in the production of readers as reproductive receptacles, passively repeating what they are told, by splitting his texts into an assemblage of textual and visual parts with varying significatory interests… Heterogeneity repudiates the universality, absoluteness, and coherence on which prescriptive models depend and so questions their authority.163
In Milton, the complicity of texts in the propagation of infectious militarism is made explicit: "This Wine-press is call'd War on Earth, it is the Printing-Press / Of Los; and here he lays his words in order above the mortal brain / As cogs are formd in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel"… The Printing-Press "prolong[s] Corporeal War" because it, like the classical models, deflects subjects from their "own Imaginations," controlling the brain as an "adverse wheel," at once opposed and unwilling – like a virus. Thus "The Wine-press on the Rhine groans loud... Where Human Thought is crushd beneath the iron hand of Power"."164
Blake creates ‘disorder’ in his work by introducing formal complexity that ends up multiplying the significance of elements in his work indefinitely. He layers potential readings in order to make a point about his ability to create worlds through his art, and our ability to create worlds by responding to it.165 Blake is not often recognised as a hacker, but often that is what he seems to be doing, rewiring stories experimentally to stop them barking. The Moravian Church of Blake’s parents encouraged their followers to read competing arguments and use their heart in drawing conclusions. This is how we should read Blake’s polyphony. Satan-is-Yahweh-is-Christ… and vice versa.
Polysemia against spoken power
In this situation, Blake pits polysemia (multiple meanings) against spoken power.166 Yet in the Illustrations to the Book of Job there is a clear sense of structure, and a clean storyline, even if, as with any art, it sometimes takes some tuning in to and thinking about before you see it. There is certainly a great deal of coherence in how the set has been presented by later commentators (even if they disagree as to what story precisely is being cohered), and such coherence is given a trumpet fanfare of an introduction by way of the mirrored ‘before and after’ images of Job’s family.
The Book of Job itself is already a multiplicity of voices talking across one another, as Mark Larrimore observes:
We are increasingly coming to understand that the multiplicity of voices may be constitutive of the power of the book of Job. Indeed, so effectively do its voices complicate each other that it may be understood as a polyphonic whole...167
This could be the ideal scenario for Blake to illustrate, given his preference for this sort of polysemia… and yet his Illustrations are relatively coherently structured. This may come down to the difference between the original (Jewish) interpretation, and the later, Christian, teleological one. To create the necessary structure and make the Job story illustrate his own beliefs, Blake invented scenes at the two central turning points of his narrative, the keyframes #11 and #16 (‘Job’s Evil Dreams’ and ‘The Fall of Satan‘).
The solitary meaning
The symmetry of the first and last image is the clue to the reader that something like a traditional story arc is at work. We compare the first and last frames to see what has changed, and conclude that between these frames lies the story of how that change took place. Not every step of the way between needs to be clear before we are persuaded that there is, nevertheless, a path.
I suspect this was done to appeal to potential buyers, to conform with their idea of what was then considered to constitute a book, in a way that his great illuminated works increasingly did not. Of course, that there is such a storyline or arc is in itself no guarantee of simplicity. The problem is that subsequent commentaries, especially from ‘systematisers’ (see below) have amplified the effect further by inserting and overlaying their own ideas as to the solitary meaning of the work, to which its details are assumed to be subordinated and around which they must turn.
The problem with emphasizing such narrative coherence is twofold:
doubling down on the ‘big story’ means underestimating the impact and significance of the hidden payload(s) of Blake’s story, primarily in the form of the chaoskampf motifs he goes out of his way to foreground. Such images may carry more charge than the official punchlines.
emphasis on the systematic nature of the narrative quickly leads to commentators augmenting, and then supplanting, Blake’s vision with a coherent system that is really their own contribution, rather than his. They import this system to firm up aspects of Blake’s architecture they find lacking, papering over the cracks. This happens in one of two ways: either Blake’s work is read as a collection of symbols that point to a reality outside of Blake’s framing (usually Hermeticism, esoteric Neoplatonism or Traditionalism), but which is taken to be Blake’s intent (ie. “Blake was a Neoplatonist”); or Blake’s myths are seen as presaging and illustrating ideas from some more recent science of the psyche (often concerning Jung, and sometimes Iain McGilchrist’s ideas about the bicameral brain.168)
Choke to death
The temptation to systematise in this way may grow in proportion to Blake’s recourse to polysemia, if this polysemic ‘chaos’ were seen as a bug, rather than a feature, of Blake’s art. The greater the polyphony, the greater the call for some idea to come in and take charge.
The problem with the systematisers’ approach is that it turns the details of Blake’s work into mere symbols of a deeper truth, which Blake does no more than to illustrate, just as iron fillings will align themselves with a nearby magnet. Every detail of an image can be made to confirm the overarching message, until the image becomes so stuffed with meaning that it might choke to death. Such an approach is going to create problems when talking about an author for whom “to Generalise is to be an Idiot To Particularise is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”169
Pictorial expression in European art
Blake did use a kind of symbolic language (for example, with his placement and positioning of people’s feet in order to make his point, with his differently accented use of books and scrolls, etc.), but this system has more of the character of a shared pictorial language used by many artists, not a closed structure of references to a separate system of thought. Bo Lindberg’s analysis of the Illustrations shows that in many cases what was at work in them was not so much a system of symbolic correspondences, a private symbolic language, as a public pictorial language available to all artists and used by many of the best. In setting out to rebut accusations that Blake stole ideas from other artists, he discovered:
“The figures [Blake] preferred to 'steal' were those which had been stolen many times before. I began to realize that I had not found the sources of Blake's figures. I had found a common language of art, used by Blake and others. If this be so, the borrowed figures have nothing to do with the question of originality. Originality, of course, cannot be determined by the language itself, but by the use of it. Milton is neither more nor less original because he writes English, or because he employs the same metric formulae as Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. Now the subject of my study grew: I was no longer studying the sources of Blake's paintings and drawings, I was studying Blake's adoption of the common modes of pictorial expression developed in European art.170
Such a pictorial language would be within the ken of Blake’s potential buyers, Lindberg’s ‘educated viewers’, or at least he might reasonably assume so, or reasonably assume that they had some working knowledge of its outlines. This is not necessarily part of the experience or education of modern readers, who may then substitute an interpretive system of their own.
Keen to sell books
The systematising commentators become brahmins interpreting the symbolism of Blake’s image to reveal a reality and truth beyond it that would remain invisible to Lindberg’s ‘educated viewer’, then or now, without the supplementary, specialised knowledge of the initiate-adept. They imagine that Blake designed his work to be fully and essentially understood only by the small minority who shared his esoteric symbolism. This seems an unlikely hermeneutic strategy for someone keen to sell books in Blake’s time, though it has turned out to be an excellent strategy for selling books today if those books promise to explain the ‘hidden meaning’ of Blake to their readers. Blake sometimes felt the need to obfuscate what he was saying to avoid the attention of gossips and cops, but he never spoke in code.
Fun and games for all the family
It is not that Blake’s visions do not need interpretation, because they do. But they don’t need decoding: “Whatever Blakes's prophecies may be, they can hardly be code messages. They may need interpretation, but not deciphering: there can be no 'key' and no open-sesame formula and no patented system of translation” (Leo Damrosch).171 The difference between interpretation and decoding is that decoding requires only knowledge of the table of correspondences that allows translation from Blake’s ‘symbols’ into their esoteric (gnostic-Jugian-bilateral-neoplatonic-traditionalist) meaning, while interpretation is the ordinary work of a person somewhat resembling Lindberg’s educated viewer, requiring less specialised and exhaustive knowledge, but a much broader and inclusive set of references and ideas.
It is not that trying to map Blake onto systems of esotericism is not suggestive or informative or useful, or that Blake has nothing to say on these matters, or that he didn’t occasionally lean on arcane and esoteric sources. But the results of such collisions should have warning stickers attached telling the reader that they are essentially about esotericism (or neurology), and not about Blake.
A further problem is that people capable of merging Blake so easily into third-party belief systems are rarely able to resist the temptation to expand their remit further by blending further esoteric systems into the mix until they have mapped entire continents of meaning from diverse centuries and cultural contexts directly onto Blake, and onto each other, creating a seamless whole so that Blake can now be talked about from many different occult viewpoints simultaneously. This is a highly recommended and fun game for all the family, but it is not a guide to ‘what Blake felt and thought and knew’.
Raines and pours
To take an extreme case, Kathleen Raine wrote a book about Blake’s Job without noticing that, in key details, Blake is not telling the story in the Book of Job at all. And just as she ignores the actual Book of Job, she also ignores the actual William Blake who created the illustrations to it, swapping out his views for her own. As Bo Lindberg memorably put it:
Since Raine does not separate the knower from the known, she fails to realize that Blake as an object of knowing is separate from herself. Therefore she tends to confuse Blake’s ideas with her own and makes Blake a spokesman for Raine. 172
The tendency of such systematisers is to turn Blake into a Tamagotchi version of their preferred Truth who can be relied on to say the right thing when the right buttons are pressed in the right order. The systematisers' commentary dilutes and obscures Blake with other spiritual and intellectual traditions until Blake’s contribution is overwhelmed: coherence, systematicity and high-toned exegesis replace conviction and the contemplation of Blake’s images.
Blake’s chaos
What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?
Rimbaud
Having bent the stick back from the emphasis on the big-screen narrative, we can begin to see more clearly the figure of Leviathan and related chaoskampf motifs stand out. We already know that Leviathan and Behemoth lived independently of Job in Blake’s imagination. since he used them as such in. eg., The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805) and The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (1805-1806),
It is perfectly possible that talk such as that from “the voice of the whirlwind”, about “Behemoth which I made with thee” [Job 40:15] – treating Behemoth and Leviathan like the animals that preceded them in Yahweh’s speech, ie., treating them as Yahweh’s creations, with a role of some sort to play in this world, rather than merely his foes of long ago – although completely out of line with traditional Canaanite cosmogony, might have led Blake to see something exemplary about these forces of chaos despite their overwhelmingly negative reputation.
What is this chaos Blake confronts in Job? In the first place it consists of the realisation of the essential contingency of existence, its ‘chaos’ to our plans, and the resulting fact that, as Job found out, it cannot be relied on. Underneath Yahweh’s world ‘order’ lie unruly forces that had to be defeated for the world to begin at all, as we know, but which continue to underpin it (hence Leviathan swimming happily away at the bottom of the engraving #14, ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’, or Behemoth and Leviathan pictured at the heart of the globe which Job and friends are sitting on in image #15, ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’).
Swallow the reality of chaos
Far from being an ‘Other’ Yahweh had to conquer, Leviathan has been incorporated into this world as part of its underpinning. When this chaos raises its head within Yahweh’s pristine ‘order’, people like Job get hurt. Maybe in Blake’s mind, Leviathan denoted the chaos that had destroyed Job’s house and family. Job’s vision of Leviathan immediately proceeds ‘The Fall of Satan’: perhaps Job had to swallow the reality of that chaos before he could finally get on with Yahweh.
That covers the sense in which Blake might have recognised that being right with God requires accepting the essential contingency of things, accepting chaos, the unformed. But there is also a sense of Leviathan’s chaos and disorder which Blake drew on in his own work, rather than discovering in God’s.
Blake was never a raging nihilist like the angry Job, he didn’t want disorder for the sake of destruction, but rather as a way of taming the order of conventional narrative that is threatening always to slide into authoritarianism. Blake sought to subdue the tones of race, class, colonial and national authority in his own voice because he didn’t want to succumb to the same rationalistic ego-mania and closed-mindedness as the enemy. He may not always have succeeded. Julia Wright thought he failed in key respects, and that later works such as Jerusalem are a hybrid of two opposing rhetorical tendencies:
In Milton… Blake begins to cobble together his critical stances to form his own vision of the renovated nation, a vision that is completed in Jerusalem. Although he retains subversive strategies, such as multiperspectivism and defamiliarising settings, Blake can only use hegemonic strategies to put his own system into place. Submerging difference in a totalising system and imagining a countercolonisation that sweeps the globe, Blake's discourse itself becomes hybrid, infected by the very paradigms that he had so long contested.173
Whatever you make of this balance sheet account of the outcome, Blake certainly used multiple techniques to undermine and weaken the linear, authorial voice in his work: images are contrasted, voices speak polyphonically, texts and their accompanying depictions conflict and, just as in the Bible of the Poor, characters and scenes call back to one another, producing an ensemble effect that is inaudible when reading the text linearly and literally.
Polyvocalising approach
Blake obfuscates and puts on masks, but mostly his chaos takes the form of competing, overlapping voices: a polyphony leading to ambiguity and polysemia (“… from Ancient Greek (polý-) 'many', and (sêma) 'sign', is the capacity for a sign… to have multiple related meanings”).174 Blake could make grand, direct and unequivocal statements, but he just as often sought in his art to avoid too neat and clean a voice or message: “That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.”175
This polyvocalising approach reaches a peak in Laocoön, (1826-1827), Blake’s extraordinary engraving showing the pagan priest Laocoön and his sons attacked by a snake or snakes – at least Blake’s original image is a copy of a famous statue of those figures, probably made from a plaster copy in the Royal Academy. Blake, in a Hebraicising mood, interprets the Greek version as a copy of a supposed original statue featuring Jehova and his sons, Adam and Satan, attacked by serpents representing good and evil.176
The original behind all these images may be based on the ancient constellation of Ophiuchus, from the Greek Ὀφιοῦχος (Ophioukhos, ‘serpent-bearer’) in which a man handles a snake, which itself forms the constellation Serpens. Later myths identified Ophiuchus with Laocoön, the Trojan priest who warned his people of the danger of the Trojan Horse, and was punished when the gods sent a pair of sea serpents to attack him and his family.
Some suggest that Ophiuchus is descended from a Babylonian constellation representing Nirah, a serpent God.177 How would it be if Blake’s understanding of Leviathan as a snake-like beast of chaos defeated by Yahweh and his cohorts, as told in his Illustrations, should lead him finally to produce this extraordinary, and extraordinarily chaotic image of…. a snake mauling Jehova and his children, Adam and Satan, the original ‘Sons of God’.
What astonishes us today are the garlands of networked text Blake places around the central image, which breaks every rule of traditional composition or print layout to queer the meaning of every word in the image. Samples of the text elements and components of the image include the following observations, all of which have a part to play in any commentary on Blake’s Job:
The Angel of the Divine Presence Satans Wife The Goddess Nature is War & Misery & Heroism a Miser Good & Evil are Riches & Poverty a Tree of Misery propagating Generation & Death The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION. God himself that is JESUS We are his Members The Divine Body | HEBREW ART is called SIN by the Deist SCIENCE The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists Their Works were destroyd by the Seven Angels of the Seven Churches in Asia. Antichrist Science SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH ART is the Tree of LIFE GOD is JESUS The Gods of Priam are the Cherubim of Moses & Solomon The Hosts of Heaven Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations Spiritual War Israel deliverd from Egypt is Art deliverd from Nature & Imitation The outward Ceremony is Antichrist The True Christian Charity not dependent on Money (the lifes blood of Poor Families) that is on Caesar or Empire or Natural Religion Money, which is The Great Satan or Reason the Root of Good & Evil In The Accusation of Sin Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, Is not every Vice possible to Man described in the Bible openly All is not Sin that Satan calls so all the Loves & Graces of Eternity. If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed.
In the engraved image, these texts run in every direction, in straight and curved lines; several languages (Greek, English, Hebrew) intermingle, and no particular train of thought is mandated by the text:
The verbal content of the texts in Blake’s Laocoön challenges existing histories of art by claiming, for instance, that classical art is derived from Hebraic art, while Blake’s arrangement of the texts challenges GE. Lessing’s oft-cited theory that writing is linear and visual art is spatial. Blake thus offers a two-pronged attack on the priority of linearity in theories of art in the period, particularly theories of art implicated in nationalist genealogies of cultural progress.178
The ruffled and fractured surface of Blake’s image here might as well be the stormy sea churned up by Leviathan’s tail.
This spirit of chaos in art would emerge less than a century later travelling under its own banner with the Dadaists, in Zurich, Paris and Berlin during the First World War, a group whose taste for collage, ambiguity and nonsense as a tool aimed at bourgeois rationality and respectability created a strikingly similar aesthetic, allied to a strikingly similar antagonism toward War and Empire.
The Dadaists, and especially the Surrealists after them, used automatism, delirium, hypnogogic states, divination, and any technique they thought helped disorder the rational mind to reveal the unconscious Real beneath. They were ‘conductors of chaos’, as Blake had been in his own way.
Blake anticipated the Dadaists and Surrealists in this absorption of chaos into his work. Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job are awash with clues that he was tuned in to the primal chaos that burns in the Canaanite myth of the war at the dawn of creation, then glows and simmers throughout the story of Job.
To look at image #15, ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’, for a while is to see this primal power of disorder rendered as an icon. That Blake should not only register the chaotic impulses flaring up in the Book of Job, but choose to focus on them in his illustrations as he does, shows how attuned he was to chaos as an aspect of creation, both Yahweh’s and his own.
Jason Wright (2023), Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming, Abingdon: Routledge, p46.
Along with Jung, Wright draws freely on the full range of esoteric, mystical and fringe scientific traditions, which he generally treats as equivalent. Eg.: "The aim then would be to become more coherent with the emergent unfolding process of the whole, a spiritual experience not unlike that expressed by Blake's internal human divine, or the perspective of the right brain, as discussed in McGilchrist and Ray. Mystical thought such as Hermeticism, Alchemy or the Kabbalah have always considered such experiences. Bohm articulates this in the context of quantum dynamics, postulating an explicate order (time and space as we experience it) as a projection unfolding out of implicate quantum interconnectedness. Blake's image of seeing heaven in a wild flower, the world in a grain of sand or eternity in an hour, is an apperceptive and poetic expression of the implicate beyond and between the revealed moment. Hillman and Jung come to this through the world of imagination and hermeneutics, symbol and relation, rather than fact and matter, which is embedded in embodied experience."
Jason Wright (2023), pp30‑1.
Unless stated otherwise, biblical quotes are from the King James Version.
See Stephen Vicchio (2020), The Book of Job: A History of Interpretation and Commentary, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, pviv.
“The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers – a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward. Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct both lexically and imagistically from its biblical counterparts.”
Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, New York: Norton, 2010, p3.
Mark Larrimore (2013), The Book of Job: A Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p183.
“When we say that a picture can be understood immediately, spontaneously, we mean that no background knowledge is needed except that mastered by any civilised Western man.
We might ask if such information will suffice for the interpretation of Blake's Job. If so, then every civilised European who is reasonably skilled in the examination of pictures, and who looks at Blake's prints with patience and care, can understand them, not fully, but enough to get an instructive and significant story out of them. If Blake's set of prints cannot stand this test, then it is not only visually defective; it is dull, and lacks human and scholarly interest, notwithstanding all the subtleties of meaning that Blake experts detect in it.”
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job, PhD. thesis, Turku: Åbo Academi, p56.
I did my best to ignore the ugly talk of “civilized Western man”, thinking that he might only mean the culture that Blake was part of, for good or ill. But the image of the “civilized Western man” and the “civilized European” inevitably circumscribe how we think about the types of knowledge available to Blake, normalising elite perspectives. Despite this, I agree with Lindberg’s general approach, which I read as saying that Blake’s images should be judged by how they would appear to members of his ideal audience, given their assumptions. Settling precisely who that audience was and what were their assumptions, is another story, and whether they could be best categorised as ‘civilized Europeans’ is dubious.
See, for example, Joseph Wicksteed Blake's Vision of the Book of Job: A Study (1910); Laurence Binyon and Geoffrey Keynes, Introduction to Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job (1935); Samuel Foster Damon Blake's Job: William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (1966); Edward Erdinger Encounter With the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1986); Bo Ossian Lindberg William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (1973).
Kathleen Raine understood the original Job so poorly that she didn’t even notice how radically Blake had departed from him, or indeed, that he had departed from him at all. See Bo Ossian Lindberg (1986), ‘Review: Kathleen Raine: The Human Face of God’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly Vol 19.4, Spring 1986, pp151-5.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell V-VI, in David Erdman (ed), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1965), New York: Random House, 1988, pp34-5. Further references to Blake’s writings are given as page references to the Erdman collection, prefixed with the letter ‘E’, hence in this case: E34-5.
See Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p65.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p125. See Origen, Anonymus in Job, Migne, Patrologia Graeca 17, col 375.
“The name Job, or its cognates, has been found in several archaeological inscriptions beginning about 2000 BCE. A number of well-to-do Canaanite men had the name Job. Thus, there is no reason to believe that the author made up the name... The name 'Job,' then, is attested outside of ancient Israel. Dhorme says the name "belongs to the West Semitic group of names, as confirmed by the uninflected form A-ia-ab."
The transformation of Aiab into Ayob, and then on to the Arabic Ayyub and the Hebrew Iyyov, is a series of short jumps, indeed. A certain Ayab is mentioned in the fourteenth-century BCE Tell el-Amarna Letters. He is referred to as the ‘Prince of Ashtartu in Bashan.’ W. F. Albright discusses this name in an essay for the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The name Job occurs as A-ja-ab in another of the Amarna Letters, as well as another text among the Egyptian Execration Texts from around 2000 BCE.
In addition to the name Job appearing in ancient Semitic inscriptions, the name also appears at Ezekiel 14:14 and 20, where the name is mentioned together with Noah and Dan‘el (not the biblical Daniel), another ancient Near Eastern worthy of some moral character.”
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p47.
This great variety of the names of God is especially evident in the speeches of Elihu: “In most of the chapters of Elihu speeches, he regularly shifts back and forth from El, Eloah, and Elohim, as well as Shaddai, or the 'Almighty' which the fourth friend employs five times at 32:8, 33:4 and 12; 35:13; and 37:23. If we add ch28's hymn to Wisdom, we can add Yahweh to this list, for that name for God appears at 28:28. We also should add 37:23, where the word 'Power’ is employed to refer to God.
Altogether, in the six short chapters devoted to the Elihu speeches, the fourth friend makes thirty different references to the Divine. He employs El, Eloah, Elohim, Shaddai, or 'Almighty', Kabbir, or 'Mighty,' and Asah and Paal, or 'Maker.' If we add the Yahweh used at 28:28, and 'Power' employed at 37:23, we have nine different names for the Divine used in ch. 28 and 32-37 – a range far greater than any other six chapters of the book."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pp215-6.
Unless the context dictates otherwise, I generally speak of ‘Yahweh’ in the text above, since the associated conception of the most high God would apply in most of the contexts discussed.
Whether one considers the patriarchs (the ancestors of the Israelites, from Adam to Abraham) historical or not, to the authors of the Book of Job he was one of them, living in the distant past as a legendary precursor of the Israelites.
See Stephen Vicchio (2020), p48-50.
"The Hebrew term ha Satan comes from the tri-consonant Semitic root STN, that means 'Adversary,' 'Opponent,' or 'Accuser.' The word Satan is used as an adjective, a noun, and a verb in the Hebrew Bible. At 1 Sam 29:4 and 1 Kgs 5:4 and 18, the word is used to refer to a military opponent. It is also employed to mean a traitor in battle, as in 1 Sam 29:4. It is also employed to mean an opponent in general, as at 2 Sam 19:23. At Num 22:32, ha Satan is used as an antagonist in the way of a human being, in this case Balaam. Whenever the term ha Satan is used in the Hebrew Bible, it is always clear that both good and evil come from God, as 1 Sam 16:14, 1 Kgs 22:22, and Isa 14:7 all imply..."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p52.
The situation described in the Book of Job, where God commands from on high in the company of his retinue of advisers and enforcers – including his prosecutor, ha Satan – is typical of the Canaanite theology of the late patriarchal Jewish context, which the Jews absorbed, combining polytheism, including this notion of this heavenly assembly, with a henotheistic emphasis on the primacy of the chief God (in Canaan, El; for the Jews, a version of El absorbed into their chief god, Yahweh, by a sort of reverse takeover), which is later transformed into a full-blown monotheism, arguably under the impact of Assyrian imperialism which also displaced local deities with their own supreme god, Ashur. There is an argument (put most famously by Freud) that the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora originally worshipped the Sun God, Aten, alone, but adopted a local storm god, Yahweh, on their wanderings. (See Sigmund Freud (1939), Moses and Monotheism, London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis). This Yahwistic religion they then combined with the religion of their Canaanite neighbours as they settled in the region, before slowly raising Yahweh infinitely higher than his retinue, turning the latter into sub-deities, demons (Satan) and the like along the way. See ‘How Did Yahweh Become God? The Origins of Monotheism’, Esoterica, YouTube, youtube.com, accessed 2025-06-02.
“And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?”
Job 1:8-9.
Robert Alter (2010), p18.
Robert Alter (2010), p5.
Ibid.
"And the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind..." (Job 38:1). “Though the Hebrew searah probably means simply 'storm,' this translation choice, and the consequent phrase, the ‘voice from the whirlwind’, have been so deeply embedded in the imagination of speakers of English after the King James Version that it seems wise not to tamper with it."
Robert Alter (2010), The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, New York: Norton, p158, n1.
Note that when Job’s children are killed it is due to a ‘mighty wind’. As Francis Anderson notes, “The ‘great wind’ must have been a whirlwind…” (Francis Andersen (1976), Job: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndall Old Testament Commentaries Vol 14, Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008, p92.), though he says this on the basis that only one house was destroyed by the wind. Whether Job’s children were killed by whirlwinds or storms, it is worth bearing in mind that Yahweh, when he was first adopted by the Jews, was a god of storms.
See Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p10. However, the identification of Job is disputed, with Martin Butler and the Blake Archive both claiming that it is instead an image of Enoch, illustrating Genesis 5:22 or 5:24. See the Blake Archive, blakearchive.org, accessed 2025-05-30.
He compresses Job somewhat: “ I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.”
Job 17:14.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p36.
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity
Thus could I sing & thus rejoice, but it is not so with me!
Ahania heard the Lamentation & a swift Vibration
Spread thro her Golden frame. She rose up eer the dawn of day
William Blake, The Four Zoas Night II:36:12-15, E325.
Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me:
Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with me.
Job 9:34-35.
For Satan flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness
Accus'd Palamabron before the Assembly of ingratitude! of malice:
He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll,
Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah
William Blake, Milton 9:19-22, E103.
the Spectre reads the Voids
Between the Stars; among the arches of Albions Tomb sublime
Rolling the Sea in rocky paths: forming Leviathan
And Behemoth
William Blake, Milton 91:36-39, E251.
Shall Albion arise? I know he shall arise at the Last Day!
I know that in my flesh I shall see God: but Emanations
Are weak. they know not whence they are, nor whither tend.
William Blake, Jerusalem 62:15-17, E213.
And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.
Job 19:26.
"Clement of Rome, in the first century CE, sees Job 19:25-27 as a proof text for resurrection of the body. Jerome, as well, tells us this passage "proves the hope and reality of resurrection." Jerome assents here to the Jobus Christi and the resurrected Job motifs. Indeed, about verse 26, Jerome suggests:
When all flesh shall see the salvation of God, and Jesus as God, then I also shall see Him, and no stranger, the Redeemer and Savior, and my God.
The Vulgate renders the Go’el passage as ‘Redemptor meus.’ Most Christian exegetes to the eighteenth century also gave this understanding of 19:25-27. In Judaism, on the other hand, this view is not adopted. Saadiah Gaon, for example, says the Go’el "refers to a human being, rather than to a God." Gersonides takes the position of the Talmud that "Job did not believe in the resurrection, but since he lived before the time of the Torah, there is no reason to expect he would have known it…” In the Christian tradition, the pericope continued to be read as a prophecy of the resurrection. Thomas Aquinas, for example, says that "Job knows his Redeemer that lives through the certitude of his faith." He adds, "Now this glory is the hope for a future resurrection." Like Jerome, Thomas also assents here to the Jobus Christi as well as the resurrected Job motifs. Before Thomas, both John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian saw the Go’el passage in similar ways. Ephrem observes, "Here the blessed Job predicts the future manifestations of Emmanuel in the flesh at the end of time." John Chrysostom tells us this about verses 25-27:
Notice the state of the soul of those in distress; they want not only those who are seeing these events now, but also those who will come later, to be witnesses of their own misfortune. Did Job know the doctrine of the resurrection? I believe so.
Clearly, Chrysostom, Ephrem, and Thomas Aquinas were all advocates of the resurrected Job motif, as well as the Jobus Christi image. This also was true in general of ancient and medieval Christian views of the Man from Uz and his book."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pp149-150.
"In a moment of mystic ecstasy, he sees his vindication through a redeemer, who will act to revenge his suffering. The term he uses, Go`el, means a kinsman, a blood avenger, who in earlier Hebrew law, was duty bound to see that justice was done by his aggrieved brother." Robert Gordis (1965) on Job 19:25, Book of God and Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p82.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p125.
There also exists a full set of the twenty-one Job images as watercolours, known as the New Zealand set, first mentioned when they went on sale at Sotheby’s in 1928. Laurence Binyon originally identified this set as being created by Blake’s hand, and this judgement has been accepted by the likes of Geoffrey Keynes, who, along with Binyon as joint editor, had the set reproduced in full as part of the Pierpont Morgan Library edition of the Illustrations, along with the Butts and Linnell watercolours, the sketches and the engravings. Others have rejected the attribution to Blake, and there are good reasons to think that the set is the work of the copyist, Albin Martin, working for John Linnell. I am convinced by the latter argument and do not discuss the New Zealand set in the rest of what follows. See Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), pp33-36.
And they Elected Seven, calld the Seven Eyes of God;
Lucifer, Molech, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah, Jesus.
They namd the Eighth. he came not, he hid in Albions Forests
But first they said: (& their Words stood in Chariots in array
Curbing their Tygers with golden bits & bridles of silver & ivory)
William Blake, Jerusalem III 55:31-5, E205.
“The seven attempts made by God to awaken Albion divide history into seven great periods, each with a dominating religion. These Blake identifies with the ‘Seven Eyes of God’ mentioned in Zechariah, and he gives these ‘Eyes’ the names of Lucifer, Moloch, the Elohim, Shaddai, Pachad, Jehovah and Jesus. The ‘eighth eye’ he occasionally speaks of is the apocalypse or awakening of Albion himself.”
Northrop Frye (1947), Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Princeton University Press, 1990, p128.
“It was in hopes of obtaining a profit sufficient to supply his future wants that the publication of Job was begun at my suggestion & expense But as I had also the expectation & have still of remuneration (the Plates being my property) I have no claim to any notice upon that account - and though we were both disappointed in our expectations as to the extent of sale, yet the few buyers of the work being among the most distinguished for taste & learning we were sufficiently encouraged to commence another work (the Dante-AW).”
John Linnell, Letter to Bernard Barton, 3ʳᵈ Apr 1830. Quoted in Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p47. Lindberg notes that “the Job seems to have brought John Linnell a handsome net of over £1000 during his lifetime. Such a sum would have been sufficient for Blake and his wife to live on for some 10 or 20 years.” op. cit., p51.
“The frame-story (Chapters 1 and 2, concluded in Chapter 42) is in all likelihood a folktale that had been in circulation for centuries, probably through oral transmission. In the original form of the story, with no debate involved, the three companions would not have appeared: instead, Job would have been tested through the wager between God and the Adversary, undergone his sufferings, and in the end would have had his fortunes splendidly restored.“
Robert Alter (2010), p3.
Robert Alter (2010), pp4-5.
The Testament of Job XVII:634. See Mark Larrimore (2013), The Book of Job: A Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p42.
See Stephen Vicchio (2020), pviv.
Mark Larrimore (2013), p41.
Jobus Christi is Job considered topologically as the ‘type of Christ’: "The Jobus Christi view is self-explanatory. Some exegetes say the most important aspect of the Man from Uz and his book is his affinity to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, many Christian interpreters over the centuries have maintained that Job is a 'Christ-figure.' This perspective is not found in Judaism, nor in Islamic scholars."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pxiv.
Victor Hugo (1864), 'Men of Genius', Shakespeare, London, p31.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p137.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p138.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p149.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p67.
Ibid.
Andrew Wright (1972), Blake's Job: A Commentary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pxv.
“Blake held the whole canon as total truth and totally true. He intended to supercede nothing but erroneous readings of the Bible, Milton's among them, and had nothing to add to the Bible except the correct reading of what was already there.
That reading was not orthodox, but it was consistent, and he held himself responsible to his own interpretation. His acceptance of the entire canon sets him apart from Ann Lea, the Muggletonians, the Swedenborgians, the deists, the Christian Scientists. His refusal to add to the truth of the scripture as he read it sets him apart from the Masons, the Mormons, the Muslims. His refusal to read the Bible as historical allegory sets him apart from Locke and Newton and the sects that subscribe to numerology."
Martha Winburn England, John Sparrow (1966), Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers, New York: New York Public Library, p75.
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p3.
Stephen Vicchio (2006), The Image of the Biblical Job: A History vol. 3: Job in the Modern World, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, p39.
To give an idea of the scale and extent of the commentary on Job, Stephen Vicchio says that there were over fifty commentaries on Job published between 1527 and 1670 alone. See Stephen Vicchio (2006), p25.
John Calvin, Sermons on Job, quoted in Mark Larrimore (2013), p105.
See Mark Larrimore (2013), p34.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, James Marsh (tr), The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Burlington: Edward Smith, 1833, p120.
“For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.”
Zechariah 3:9.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), Princeton University Press, 1990, p128.
“There are several defects in this argument.
First, of method: the reversed order, beginning in plate 15 is adjusted, putting Jehovah first, Jesus second; in a truly reversed order Jesus should come first. & Secondly, of reading Blake: there is no hint anywhere in Blake's writings, that the eyes could follow in the reversed order. Thirdly, of theology: Damon does not mention that the eyes are a common theological concept symbolic of the history of the created world, and he fails to give the biblical source for it, Zechariah. Fourthly, of linguistics: the translations given by Damon are not Blake's, nor those of Hebrew and Latin dictionaries: 'elohim' is plural, 'gods' and does not mean 'judge', Molech means 'king', not 'executioner', and the latin 'lucifer' (Hebr. helal) means 'morning star', not 'contented in selfhood'. Fifthly, of pictorial analysis; Damon's scheme destroys the symmetrical composition of the set, and substitutes plate 14 as the turning-point instead of plate 11. There is nothing in the plates that requires the seven eyes of God for an explanation, and his hypothesis cannot throw much light upon the contents of the designs.”
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), pp81-2.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p57.
“The Job illustrations are by no means a haphazard collection of the most picturesque scenes from the Biblical story. The series forms an epic unity, and is conceived as a whole... This epic quality is not literary but pictorial, created by visual means; one design is continued in another; a repeated figure or scene, or a similar composition, provide transition and cross-references within the set.”
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p56.
The later works are copies of the Butts set, with only the minor exception, already mentioned, of the two images added when preparing the Linnell sets: eg. images 17 and 20, ‘The Vision of Christ’, and ‘Job and His Daughters’. These additions do not alter Blake’s message significantly, only adding detail.
“The expression bene ha Elohim is used in three places of the book of Job, at 1:6; 2:1; and 38:7. It is employed elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible at Gen 6:2; Pss 29:1; 82:1; and 89:6; and at Dan 3:25. These imply that the sons of God are most often associated with angels of the heavenly court. Thus, the expression appears to be synonymous with Seba Hashamayim, or ‘the Hosts of Heaven,’ at places like Isa 34:4; 37:32; 54:5; Jer 11:17; Amos 5:16; and Ps 11:4.
The sons of God may also be identified with the Hebrew word mal’akim, the Hebrew plural of angel. It is used at Job 4:18, and a variety of other places in the Psalms (85:5; 68:17; 78:49; 91:11; 103:20; 104:4; and 148:2, for examples). The NIV, and a few other modern translations, render bene ha Elohim simply as 'angels.' Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley also both prefer this translation, as do most Christian exegetes. Thomas describes the scene as involving "the Lord sitting upon His lofty throne." And, "One should know that the angels here, who are called the sons of God are said to assist the Lord in two ways.", Indeed, Thomas distinguishes between the bene ha Elohim, or 'Good Angels,' and those who are ‘Fallen, or Bad Angels.’
Olympiodorus, and many of the early church fathers, identify the bene ha Elohim as 'fallen angels,’ as well. The same view is held by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Athenagoras, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine, and many other fathers both East and West. Marvin Pope, in his commentary, renders bene ha Elohim as "sons of the gods." Pope points to others who render the expression 'the gods.' Philo says they are 'sons of God' because "they were created incorporeal." John Gammie, in his essay 'The Angelology and Demonology in the Septuagint of the Book of Job,' renders the phrase as 'celestial beings.' Philo of Alexandria believes the bene ha Elohim are 'Cherubim.' E.P. Dhorme renders bene ha elohim as ‘fils d'Elohim.’ Leveque, in his Job et son Dieu, suggests that the bene ha Elohim are "intermediaries between God and man."
Among Jewish scholars, Josephus believes the bene ha Elohim are angels. Rashi sees them as "angelic Lords, the sons of lords and judges." Contemporary Jewish scholar Julian Morgenstein, in his essay 'The Mythological Background of Psalm 82,' suggests that the sons of God are part of the ‘Assembly of El’ or the ‘Council of El’."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pp51-2.
John Day (2000), ‘Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament #265, London: Sheffield Academic Press, p161.
“One instance where a strong case can be made for the influence of El symbolism on Yahweh concerns those few places where Yahweh is represented as an aged God with many years. In the Ugaritic texts El is frequently given the epithet 'ab inm, 'Father of Years' (e.g. KTU 1.4.IV.24), a concept reinforced by the references to his grey hair (e.g. KTU 1.3.V.2, 24-25; 1.4.V.4). In the Old Testament there are just three places where Yahweh's 'years' are alluded to, and it is therefore particularly striking that in two of these he is specifically called by the name El. The first of these is in Job 36:26, where Elihu declares, "Behold, God ('el) is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable." Clearly Yahweh is being represented as a supremely aged deity.”
John Day (2000), p17.
See Joseph Wicksteed (1910), p93.
G.K. Chesterton (1910), William Blake, London: Duckworth & Co., p149.
“The Church Fathers viewed the theophanies of the Old Testament as visions of Christ. God the Father and God the Son are one [John 10:30], and since the Father is essentially invisible [John 1:18] every vision of God must be a vision of God the Son.86 The Church interpreted the divine names and attributes (Jahveh, Wisdom, the Word, the Sun etc.) as manifestations of the Second Person in the Deity. Abraham, Job and Moses had seen God; they knew his name and had heard his Word; consequently they had seen Christ and were his disciples. Medieval German poems make Job pray to Jesus: “Der herre Job lach in miste, rief uf zu Christe”, and there is a miniature, in a Ms. in the Bodleian Library, of Christ appearing to Job. It is therefore not surprising that Blake should represent God appearing to Job in the form of Christ (pl.17) standing on earth and speaking with the words of our Saviour: “I and my Father are one.””
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p86.
Edward Erdinger (1986), Encounter With the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake’s ‘Illustrations of the Book of Job’ (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, Series Ed., Daryl Sharp), Toronto: Inner City Books, 1986., p19.
The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; & when separated
From Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio
Of the Things of Memory. It thence frames Laws & Moralities
To destroy Imagination! the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars
William Blake, Jerusalem III 74:11-13, E229.
Robert Alter (2010), p5.
“While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: / And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Job 1:18-19.
Curiously, in Blake’s telling, the children are represented by seven sons and their wives, as opposed to the combined sons and daughters of the original.
“… the cherubim's four wings embody the four winds. The creatures’ ‘fourness’ allows them to move and face in every direction without needing to turn around.” Scott B Noegel, ‘On the Wings of the Winds: Towards an Understanding of Winged Mischwesen in the Ancient Near East’, Kaskal: Rivista di storia, ambienti e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico, Vol 14 2017, Florence: Logisma, 2017, p22.
“And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went… / And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.” Ezekiel 1:12, 14.
“An aspect of Yahweh that may be traced back to El, though only with great caution, is his solar appearance. Even though the theophany texts depict Yahweh primarily as a warrior storm-god, there are elements in the description which seem to assume that Yahweh is a solar deity."
Karel van der Toorn, ‘Yahweh’, in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Peter W van der Horst (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, Michigan: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999, p917.
See, for example, Daniel E. Fleming, ‘Yahweh among the Baals: Israel and the Storm Gods’, Stephen C. Russell and Esther J. Hamori (eds), Mighty Baal: Essays in Honour of Mark S. Smith, Harvard Semitic Studies Vol. 66, 2020, pp160-174.
“The contagion of his presence has infected the seraphs themselves, who are now seen bathed in flames like his own. He has gained some terrible power over Jehovah himself, whose whole figure betrays grief and suffering in strange contrast to his divine calm, as shown in the second Illustration, before his power had been deputed to the Fiend.”
Joseph Wicksteed (1910), Blake's Vision of the Book of Job: A Study, London: J M Dent & Sons, p67.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p153.
“Boils were traditionally the signs of a venereal disease.”
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), Blake's Job: William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, Hannover and London: Brown University Press, p22.
“… the Septuagint's rendering of schechin as 'lepra' which gave rise to the earliest Christian understandings of Jobs disease, as well as the intial interpretation of Jewish scholars until about 500 CE. The Testament of Job, for example, that was completed sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE, clearly identifies Job's disease as leprosy.
This same diagnosis was given by Tertullian, Jerome, Saint Augustine, and most of the early church fathers... This tradition also stretches forward to the Reformation, where Theodor Beza and Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli also identify Job's disease as leprosy."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p58.
Joseph Wicksteed (1910), p73.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p29.
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p22.
“Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”
Ecclesiastes 12:5.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p31.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p29.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p35.
"After my three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public."
William Blake, Jerusalem 3, E145.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p129.
Walter Clyde Curry (1957), Milton's Ontology, Cosmology & Physics, University of Kentucky, p6
Edward Erdinger (1986), p37.
Rabbi Rava, in the Babylonian Talmud, quoted in Stephen Vicchio (2020), p64.
I use the terms Canaanite and Ugaritic interchangeably here. ‘Ugaritic’ refers to the Bronze Age trading city of Ugarit (Ras Shamra) in Northern Syria, its inhabitants, its language, and its religion. Ugarit was situated about six miles north of modern Latakia, and it left a rich archeological record and also a large cache of cuneiform texts from which scholars have been able to learn a great deal about the people of the region, including their religion. Scholars speak of an Ugaritic-Canaanite religion, an ancient Syro-Palestinian paganism, which was the religion the Israelites encountered on entering the region, and many of whose features they adopted, as we are discovering.
Samuel Henry Hooke (1963), Middle Eastern Mythology, New York: Dover Publications, 2004 (originally published as Middle Eastern Mythology: From the Assyrians to the Hebrews, New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p107.
He is referring specifically to Job 38:7; “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”. See John Day (2000), p25.
"It would appear that 'the twisting serpent' is identical with Rahab. Since 'the twisting Serpent' is another name of Leviathan (cf. Isaiah 27:1, "Leviathan the twisting serpent, even Leviathan the crooked serpent"), it follows that Rahab is probably an alternative name for Leviathan."
John Day (2000), p39.
Carol Newsom (1999), 'Job and His Friends', Interpretation 53, quoted in Stephen Vicchio (2006), p280.
Robert Alter (2010), The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, New York: Norton, p9.
Samuel Henry Hooke (1963), p106.
John Milton (1674), Paradise Lost II:959-963.
An earlier generation of scholars thought that the chaoskampf myth originated in the Babylonian myth of creation, the Enuma Elish, but it is now accepted that the Canaanite version is the original: “Granted that there are passages in the Old Testament which associate the creation of the world with a divine conflict with a dragon or the sea, what is the origin of this mythological motif? As was noted above, Gunkel argued that the Old Testament references were an Israelite version of the conflict between Marduk and Tiamat contained in Enuma elish. In this myth the god Marduk, armed with the powers of the storm, defeated the terrible monster Tiamat, representing the salt-water ocean, together with her helpers, and proceeded to make heaven and earth out of the two halves of her body. Since the discovery of the Ugaritic texts from 1929 onwards, however, it has become clear that the immediate background of the Old Testament allusions to the sea monster is not Babylonian but Canaanite. The Ugaritic texts contain not only an account of Baal's defeat of the rebellious sea-god Yam, as a result of which he was acclaimed king (CTA 2 = KTU 1.2), but also allusions to a defeat of Leviathan (Itn = Lītän, lit. ' twisting one', from lwh 'to twist)? whom we learn had seven heads... and who is called not only [p5] ‘the twisting serpent'... but also ‘the crooked serpent.’ We also find Leviathan called tnn ' dragon', a term identical with the tannīn mentioned in various Old Testament passages”
John Day (2000), pp4-5.
Israel seems to have combined both versions of the myth at different times and places. In some, Yahweh was retro-merged into El, the supreme Canaanite deity: “… in some parts of the Jerusalem cultus, Yahweh was first identified with Baal, the god who fought the dragon, and subsequently, as Yahweh was identified with El-Elyon, Yahweh-Baal was demoted to the role of an angel, whence the figure of the one like a son of man in Dan 7. That Yahweh was equated with Baal in certain circles is clear, for example, from Hos. 2:18, where the prophet refers to those who call Yahweh 'my Baal'. In such circles, Yahweh-Baal would presumably have remained inferior to El, like Baal in the Ugaritic texts."
John Day (2000), p165.
See, eg., John Day (2000), p1.
“The mythological significance of Leviathan is well known. Appearing as the Lothan of seven heads that Baal destroys in the Ugaritic Myth, he is likewise the sea serpent of many heads that Elohim defeated in the beginning of time (Psalm 74: 12-14). One mythological tradition of the eschaton represents a final battle of Yahweh with Leviathan (Isaiah 27:1). This Leviathan is doubtless the mythological origin of the dragon of seven heads in Revelations 17. Leviathan, as well as Behemoth, appear with eschatological significance in Enoch 60:7-9, IV Ezra 6:49-52, and the Apocryphal Baruch 24:2.3.”
James Williams, 'The Theophany of Job', in Roy Zucker (ed), Sitting With Job, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992, pp224-5.
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p28. He says that the ‘forest of the night’ is a traditional symbol for the confusion of ideas. I am still looking for a reference for the expression.
Blake’s Tyger wandered “in the forests of the night.” I don’t know if anyone has written about the poem from that point of view, or even if Blake’s poem is the source of the image of the “forests of the night.”.
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night
William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience 42:1-2, E24.
David J.A. Clines (1989), ‘Job 4:1-5:27: Commentary’, World Biblical Commentary #17: Job 1-20, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, p123.
“This is a fairly common response in the Old Testament...”
Antti Laato, Theodicy in the World of the Bible, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pxxxviii.
Here I’m indebted to Stephen Vecchio’s summary in Stephen Vicchio (2020), ppxii-xiii.
“In all of these, owr, or 'light,' is associated with God and goodness, while choshek, or 'dark' is associated with evil."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pxiii.
“At 42:2, Job uses the word esa, or 'plan,' in answering Yahweh's voice from the whirlwind. This verse, then, also may be interpreted with the divine plan theory."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), pxiii.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p43.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
William Blake, 'Proverbs of Hell', The Marriage of Heaven and Hell pl.7, E36.
S Foster Damon (1996), p30.
Joseph Wicksteed (1910), p98.
"The Babylonian Talmud pronounced that he was 'one of the seven prophets of the Gentiles'. Rabbi Akiba says that Elihu was Balaam, and Rabbi Eleazer says that he represented Isaac because his name was 'barachel.' Rabbi Judah argues that job's words were in praise of God, much more than those of Elihu. In the Testament of Job, a Greek apocryphal work, the figure of Elibu appears as a Satanic beast."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p217.
"The figure of Elihu was descended from Nahor, according to 32:2 and 34:1. He is said to have descended from Buz, who may be from the line of Abraham. At Gen 22:20-21, a Buz is mentioned as a nephew of Abraham. Of the four friends, only with Elihu do we have his clan, his tribe, and his home country, with the other three we only get their country."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p218.
“A considerable amount of debate has arisen about whether these chapters were an original part of the book of Job... It is our opinion that the Elihu speeches were, in fact, not original to the book. We have made this claim for a number of reasons, some about the structure and content of the book, some theological, and some grammatical and etymological."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p212.
“when the friends of Job are introduced in 2:11-13, Elihu is not among them.
God addresses Eliphaz "and his two friends", at 42:7, but Elihu is nowhere mentioned.
... at 31:35, the end of Job's final speech of the dialogue, Job asks for the Almighty to show up and tell him why he is suffering. If we take out Elihu's speeches, that is precisely what happens next when God speaks from the whirlwind, beginning in 38:1ff.
... the first six verses of the Elihu speeches, that is 32:1-6, are written in prose. This is the only prose of the book besides the prologue and epilogue. Could it be that a redactor chose to introduce the fourth friend in prose, just as the other three friends were introduced in ch. 2, and God, Satan, and Job in ch. 1 in prose?
... the final words of ch. 31 are, "The words of Job are ended." This appears to be an indication that the... book may have come to an end. In fact, Job speaks two more times, at 40:3-5 and 42:1-6.
Elihu refers directly to the other three friends and to Job, but none of the other characters refer to Elihu.
Elihu quotes Job word for word at 33:8-11 and 13:24; 34:5-9 and 27:3; 35:3 and 7:20. The other three friends do not quote Job directly.
Elihu calls Job by name in several places in the book (32:12; 33:1; 34:5; 36:16; and 37:13-14). The other three friends never do this.
Job responds to all of the speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, but he does not respond to anything said by... Elihu. Perhaps this is because his theological point of view is vastly different than the retributive justice views of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar."
Stephen Vicchio (2020), p213.
“Altogether, in the six short chapters devoted to the Elihu speeches, the fourth friend makes thirty different references to the Divine. He employs El, Eloah, Elohim, Shaddai, or 'Almighty', Kabbir, or 'Mighty,' and Asah and Paal, or 'Maker.' If we add the Yahweh used at 28:28, and 'Power' employed at 37:23, we have nine different names for the Divine used in ch. 28 and 32-37— a range far greater than any other six chapters of the book." Stephen Vicchio (2020), pp215-6.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p61.
Jerome, The Vulgate, quoted Stephen Vicchio (2020), p220. The condemnation of Elihu was not universal, however: “Among the friends, his is the most perfect in knowledge." (Moses Maimonides, A Guide to the Perplexed, quoted Stephen Vicchio (2020), p218.); "Elihu's debate against Job is added here, and he, of course, uses sharper arguments against Job than the prior speakers, and approaches closer to the truth." (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Job, quoted p220.)
Robert Alter (2010), p6.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p97.
Arthur Peake and R. H. Strahan, quoted in H.H. Rowley (1970), Job, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, p309.
Rudolf Otto, (1969) 'The Numinous of the Old Testament', in Nahum Glatzer, The Dimensions of Job, New York: Schocken, 1969, pp225-8, p225.
Édouard Paul Dhorme (1926), Le Livre de Job, Paris: Victor Lecoffre, p575, quoted in Stephen Vicchio (2020), p259.
Isaiah 14:13, New International Version UK.
Stephen Vicchio (2006), p226.
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p291.
“For Lacan, the Real is what is expelled when a signifier becomes attached to some morsel of reality: it is the bit that the signifier fails to capture… The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being, by means of the Word.”
Lionel Bailly (2009), Lacan, London: Oneworld Publications, p98.
“… origins of dragon myth in Canaanite religion where El's son, Baal, defeats the Leviathan (aka Rahab) and his ally, 'El's calf Atik', who becomes Behemoth. Baal represents the victory of order and light over chaos and darkness.”
John Day (2000), p1
Stephen Vicchio (2006), p276.
Ibid.
John Milton (1674), Paradise Lost VII:474. Some have other animals in mind: “Behemoth is the elephant” (Thomas Aquinas); “elephant or, probably, hippopotamus” (J. S. Exell); “African river-horse” (George Garland); “Behemoth... elephant or river horse” (Thomas Scott); and so on. See Stephen Vicchio (2020), p279.
Quoted in Manlio Simonetti, Marco Conti (2006), Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Job, London: Inter-Varsity Press, pp209-10.
Walter Clyde Curry (1957), p50.
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p40.
Including its use as the cover of Jason Wright’s book, Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming, with which this essay began. See Jason Wright (2023).
Samuel Henry Hooke (1963), p106.
“Satan the Accuser is cast out of Job's heaven, and with him fall the errors of Job and his wife, now given full form. (In Illustration II they were only dim faces beneath Satan's arms.) They fall into the flames of annihilation – not of everlasting torture, for such a hell Blake did not admit; Error recognized is Error destroyed.
God is again seated firmly on his throne; he still holds his book, for Law is essential to life; but his halo now contains figures of love and pity, whose attitudes are repeated by the two attending angels. The fall of Satan has opened a gulf between Job and his friends. In the margins, flames consume the material creation…"
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p42.
Ellie Wiesel (1975), Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, London: Random House, p215.
Mark Larrimore (2013), pp224,225.
Carl Jung, Answer to Job: Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Princeton: Princeton University Press, #642.
Edward Erdinger (1986), pp59-60.
Christopher Rowland, ‘Commentary: Now My Eye Seeth Thee’, Visual Commentary on Scripture, thevcs.org, accessed 2024-06-17. The quote is from William Blake, ‘Preface’, Milton 1, E95.
Mark Larrimore (2013), p186
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p44.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p63.
Timothy Morton (2024), Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, New York: Columbia University Press, pp194-195
Edward Erdinger (1986), p67.
Timothy Morton (2024), p171.
“O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts / And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day & night? / Art thou not Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke / To Mortals thy Mills seem every thing & the Harrow of Shaddai”
William Blake, Milton 4:9-12, E98.
Edward Erdinger (1986), p69.
Joseph Wicksteed (1910), p200.
Samuel Foster Damon (1996), p50.
“… in pl. 14, the outstretched arms of God do not only create and sustain the universe: they express its contraries: the spiritual world of angels, and the material world of men; the freedom above and the imprisonment below.
Blake applies this divine formula to Satan, too. In pl. 3 it is expressive of Satan's all-encompassing power; in pl. 11 it reveals the contraries of the law of stone in Heaven, and the punishment of fire in Hell. At the same time it shows the co-operation and unity of these contraries: »Heaven & Hell are born together».67
Often Blake applies the gesture to mortals. In pl. 20 the outstretched arms of Job repeat the gesture of God and Satan in the paintings on the wall behind him. The divine gesture applied to a mortal unites him with the spiritual powers; Job tells us by his attitude that God and Satan dwell in him, and he in them. But at the same time the formula illustrates the speech of Job: he is describing his life to his daughters, and his outstretched arms encompass his total experience. And, at the same time, his arms point at the contraries of his life: the persecutions of Satan, and the blessings of God.”
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p115
"Blake resists his works implication in the production of readers as reproductive receptacles, passively repeating what they are told, by splitting his texts into an assemblage of textual and visual parts with varying significatory interests. The preludeiums to America and Europe, through the childbirth metaphor, establish a crucial link between the discursive incorporation of individuals into an idealogically invested norm, and the normalising effects of ideological invested discourses on individuals…
Blake goes still further in contesting the passive receptivity of the reader, as well as its corollary, the hermeneutic control of the author. He fragments his text visually in ways that contradict conventional logical groupings, rendering it too complex to be comprehended definitively and therefore resistant to passive reading. Heterogeneity offers an avenue through which enforced homogeneity, the rule of paradigms that are defined by absolutes such as ‘women cannot’ and propagated by the replicated text, can be transgressed. Heterogeneity repudiates the universality, absoluteness, and coherence on which prescriptive models depend and so questions their authority. In America and Europe, females do not necessarily wish to be mothers, women can be intellectually creative, printing is akin to sexual violence, the auditor can relinquish, at least in part, his authority, the text need not be a coherent expression of the author's position, and the reader need not yield to the author's dictates. Blake's advocacy of heterogeneity and active reception unsettles the conventional distribution of power on the level of politics by proposing an engaging, untotalizable population that generates ideas of its own rather than bowing to those of an elite, a proposal that has much to do with the politics of Paine."
Julia Wright (2004), Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, pp89-92.
“The tyger glows in a tangled bank of ignorance, but that is what life is. The forest is the ideas we repeat about physical existence. The tyger is the physical body seen as evil. The fake-looking Tyger is the real one! Or the narrator might just be someone talking fake-fiercely to their pussycat. The narrator of 'The Lamb' is most assuredly a child ("I a child") who embodies the Christ-like ‘human form divine’ and who speaks with a childlike sureness and simplicity. The narrator of 'The Tyger' could be anyone... 'The Tyger' is about poems as such, because every possible narrator turns into powder as we consider them, 'experience' them. Hell might not be all it's cracked up to be. There is no way to be the finally successful police officer of meaning who determines what 'The Tyger' is about. The very idea that 'This poem is about anything' or 'This poem is about being about anything' is not finally successful. The poem acts like a universal Turing machine, a supercomputer munching away at all the other that I am done with it. That damn tyger is still burning bright somewhere. It is as if Blake had created life."
Timothy Morton (2024), pp198-9.
Try saying it quickly three times:
Blake pits polysemia against spoken power
Blake pits polysemia against spoken power
Blake pits polysemia against spoken power
"However uneasily it fits, the book of Job comes to us as part of the greater whole of scripture – Jewish or Christian – and has long been understood in that context. Pruning it so it can stand on its own is another interpretive intervention. We are increasingly coming to understand that the multiplicity of voices may be constitutive of the power of the book of Job. Indeed, so effectively do its voices complicate each other that it may be understood as a polyphonic whole, perhaps even the work of a single ingenious author." Mark Larrimore (2013) , p10.
See Iain McGilchrist (2019), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, London: Yale University Press.
“To Generalise is to be an Idiot To Particularise is the Alone Distinction of Merit - General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess”
William Blake, Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, E641.
"I have followed the track advised by professor Blunt and found sometimes ten or fifteen sources for a single figure. It appears that Blake very rarely copied one particular figure out of one particular picture. The figures he preferred to 'steal' were those which had been stolen many times before. I began to realize that I had not found the sources of Blake's figures. I had found a common language of art, used by Blake and others. If this be so, the borrowed figures have nothing to do with the question of originality. Originality, of course, cannot be determined by the language itself, but by the use of it. Milton is neither more nor less original because he writes English, or because he employs the same metric formulae as Shakespeare or Ben Jonson.
Now the subject of my study grew: I was no longer studying the sources of Blake's paintings and drawings, I was studying Blake's adoption of the common modes of pictorial expression developed in European art. In interpreting this material, I found the Warburgian concept of pathos-formulae very useful. By pathos-formula I mean an attitude, gesture or grimace, mostly in a human being, expressive of character, feeling, passion, manner, intention, thought, meaning, or merely of motion or space.
Until now I had regarded the expression ‘language of art’ only as figurative speech.
But when I found that Blake's figures were arranged to conform with distinct, traditional pathos-formulae, which fulfil the same function in pictorial art as words do in written or spoken language, I began to conceive the pictorial arts as drawn, painted and carved language.
I found that attitudes or gestures embodying a special meaning in one work of art, tend to carry this same meaning in other works by the same artist or by another. That is: they have a conventional meaning. Artists can use pathos-formulae as writers use words; and, like the meaning of a word, the meaning of a pathos-formula can be modified or altered by the context. The study of these formulae is the lexicography of art, and my lists of sources and influences accompanying every entry in the Catalogue Raisonnée should be looked upon as extracts out of a dictionary of the language of art."
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p114-5.
Leo Damrosch (1980), Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp4-5.
“Her ‘method’ of investigation is based on her familiarity with the symbolic language of esoteric philosophy and on her sympathy for it. But this ‘method’ is very unsystematic, and the question is whether it should be termed 'method' at all. It may even be that Raine is against ‘method,’ because it is apt to direct thought and thus clip the wings of intellect. The lack of method is made manifest in the discrepancy between the title and the contents of the book. It is not about Blake and the Book of Job; it is a commentary on Blake’s set of twenty-two engravings illustrative of the Book of Job. There is no attempt to compare Blake’s Job to the Job of the Bible, and Job illustrations by Blake outside the engraved set are rarely mentioned, Job illustrations by other artists not at all. There is nothing about the role of the Book of Job in Western thought, save Jung’s interpretation of it.“
Bo Ossian Lindberg (1973), p151.
“To summarize my objections to Raine’s book: (1) Raine’s view of the relationship between spirit and matter is different from that of Blake. Hers is dualistic, his is dialectic. (2) Since Raine does not separate the knower from the known, she fails to realize that Blake as an object of knowing is separate from herself. Therefore she tends to confuse Blake’s ideas with her own and makes Blake a spokesman for Raine. (3) I understand that from Raine’s point of view my criticism of her book is not valid. It is the criticism of a materialist for whom the world has an autonomous existence, irrespective of a perceiving mind. I think that Blake is what he is, regardless of what I can perceive or know about him. She thinks that Raine is the “place” of Blake. Such mutually exclusive views can never be reconciled. (4) Blake’s engravings are not, for Raine, works of art. They are diagrams illustrating esoteric tenets. Their meaning is explained by collecting passages from Blake’s poetical works and from esoteric writings by various authors. The result is juxtaposition more than illumination; very little new light is shed on the designs. (5) Raine’s attitude to Blake is sympathetic. She thinks that we should admire Blake and learn from him. Tenets which she likes are attributed to him, but he is denied views not shared by Raine. Thus she distorts him, in a friendly way. Well could Blake exclaim: “God defend me from my Friends”! I would like somebody to write a book about what he hates in Blake. Blake needs an enemy, “for Friendship’s sake.” He has been made too perfect a character. And, as even Raine knows, everybody hates a perfect character.’”
Bo Ossian Lindberg, ‘Review: Kathleen Raine: The Human Face of God’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly Vol 19.4, Spring 1986, pp151-5, p155.
Julia Wright (2004), ppxxxii-xxxiii.
“Polysemy (/pəˈlɪsɪmi/ or /ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi/; from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) 'many', and σῆμα (sêma) 'sign') is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning.”
’Polysemy’, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, accessed 2024-06-19.
“You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act.”
William Blake, Letter to the Rev’d Trusler, August 23ʳᵈ 1799, E701-2.
“This single, separate plate is a careful reproduction of the famous Hellenistic sculptural group, the Laocoön, very probably copied by Blake after the plaster copy in the Royal Academy, London... While the original statue represents the Trojan priest, Laocoön, and his two sons, Blake has reinterpreted it as a work of Hebraic art representing Jehovah and his two sons, Adam and Satan, struggling with two serpents, labelled on the plate ‘Evil’ (line 5) and ‘Good’ (line 31). Both serpents coil around all three figures; both have their mouths open and are biting Laocoön and the son on the left. The central nude figure of Laocoön/God is bearded and his hair is long... He holds the serpent of ‘Good’ in both hands. The nude, youthful son on the left struggles with the serpent of ‘Evil.’ He… is probably Satan... The youthful, muscular nude son on the right… is… probably Adam.”
Notes, ‘Laocoön’, The Blake Archive, blakearchive.org, accessed 2024-06-20.
Gavin White, Babylonian Star-lore, Solaria Pubs, 2008, p187f. It may well be that there is some continuity between the snake in Ophiuchus and the Babylonian constellation, Nirah, but Nirah doesn’t sound like the chaoskampf serpent. Of course, while the identification of the snake asterism in the sky may have remained constant, the myths attached to the snake may have changed entirely.
Julia Wright (2004), pxxviii.