“They kept close to the door and closer to one another, for the stillness of the empty room was more dreadful than any of the forms they had seen Oz take.
Presently they heard a solemn Voice, that seemed to come from somewhere near the top of the great dome, and it said:
“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Why do you seek me?”
They looked again in every part of the room, and then, seeing no one, Dorothy asked, “Where are you?”
“I am everywhere,” answered the Voice, “but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible. I will now seat myself upon my throne, that you may converse with me.” Indeed, the Voice seemed just then to come straight from the throne itself.”
This memorable scene from Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz brings us back to the biblical land of Oz - which was also part of Baum’s inspiration.
The wizard shows up on Dorothy’s journey with her three friends, behind the curtain of mystery, to reveal the road home.
In Job’s tale, along with his three friends and fourth visitor who was just done speaking and summoning God - the Creator appears in a storm with a stormy speech that has nothing to do with what Job has been asking for. There will be no admission of guilt or discussion of justice during the next few chapters that conclude this book. God will undermine Job’s claims for a trial by holding on to the grand vision of reality: In the overall scheme of things, with a world to manage - one person’s pain is not a priority, and human humility is the stance most desired. It's a high drama and powerful poetry but what is it telling us about Job’s theology - and ours?
Every reader of Job over the ages has tried to make sense of this surprising end to the book.
Robert Alter wrote:
“With God’s speech as the climax of the book, the Job poet takes a risk that only a supreme artist confident in his genius could do. He had already created for Job the most extraordinarily powerful poetry to express Job’s intolerable anguish and his anger against God. Now, when God finally speaks, the poet fashions for Him still greater poetry, which thus becomes a poetic manifestation of God’s transcendent power and also an image-for-image response to the death-wish poem that frames Job’s entire argument.”
One of the intriguing hints that give us a glimpse into what’s behind the curtain of this speech is the name used to describe God in these chapters - from the very start:
וַיַּעַן־יְהֹוָה אֶת־אִיּוֹב מִן הַסְּעָרָה וַיֹּאמַר׃ מִי זֶה מַחְשִׁיךְ עֵצָה בְמִלִּין בְּלִי־דָעַת׃ אֱזׇר־נָא כְגֶבֶר חֲלָצֶיךָ וְאֶשְׁאָלְךָ וְהוֹדִיעֵנִי׃ אֵיפֹה הָיִיתָ בְּיׇסְדִי־אָרֶץ הַגֵּד אִם־יָדַעְתָּ בִינָה׃
Then YHWH replied to Job out of the whirlwind and said:
Who is this who darkens counsel,
Speaking without knowledge?
Gird your loins like a man;
I will ask and you will inform Me.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Job 38:1-4
God has been evoked numerous times throughout this epic poem but mostly referred to by the more primal names such as El, Elhoim and Shadai. The name ‘YHWH’ appears in the first chapters - the prose/fable set up of the story but not throughout the bulk of the book which is the poetry. Here, to wrap it all up, God shows up and immediately reveals the name with which the divine would be identified in Jewish life: The Tetragrammaton, YHWH.
Why is this important?
Kushner writes that
‘YHWH is God’s intimate name, shared only with those who are, so to speak, on a first name basis with Him. It is the name God revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the first step towards liberating Israel from Egypt. If that represented the first step towards freeing the slaves and bringing them into a new relationship with the Redeemer God, the use of that name in the opening words from the whirlwind may presage God’s forging a new, deeper relationship with Job. When Job and his friends talk about God they use more abstract terms - but when Job actually encounters God - the relationship is a more personal one. No longer the object of theological conjecture and debate, God has become an awesomely real presence… For 35 chapters Job and his friends have been concerned with theology. With God’s appearance out of the whirlwind, the narrative turns to religion.”
At no point throughout the following chapters does YHWH try to justify the Divine actions. There’s no defense, no reasoning, no attempt to make Job’s suffering make sense. Instead, YHWH speaks of the vastness of creation, the deep and mysterious order that sustains the natural world - with few mentions of human beings. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” is a clear challenge—if Job, or any of us, can explain how to build a universe from nothing, then maybe we can also claim to understand the moral structure that governs it.
This powerful and poetic response does not respond to Job’s suffering and quest for justice. No speech, no matter how profound, could ever erase the grief of losing a child, not to mention ten. And yet—something shifts. Job finds comfort, not in an explanation, but in the fact that YHWH shows up, first name basis. YHWH doesn’t ignore him or silence him but engages, listens, and responds. What Job, or any of us need most most is often not a theology of suffering, but the reassurance that we and our pain matter. That we are heard and not alone. And maybe, when faced with pain too great for words, inside the whirlwinds, that is the only real answer there is.
Image: William Blake - God Out of the Whirlwind" 1821
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A bit off topic, but ah, yes, The Wizard of Oz! The first book I read and finished all by myself as a kid, but not a German translation of the American original, but a German translation of the 1939 re-telling by the Soviet author Aleksandr Volkov called "The Wizard of Emerald City". Volkov also published a sequel to the book entitled "The Seven Subterranean Kings". This was, in retrospect, a see-through socialist parable of the oppressed banding together, overthrowing the kings, and emerging from their subterranean world. Brothers, to sun, to freedom!
The books had been gifted to me by a cousin of my mother's who lived in Eastern Germany. Not that she was a big communist, but these were gifts she was able to buy in her town. How the content of the second book flew under the radar of my fiercely anti-communist mother baffles me to this day.