Who is the King of Terrors?
Job 18:13-14
Who or what is the King of Terrors?
In The Book of Job: The Oldest Problem, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes:
“Suffering, like death, strips away the illusion of control. It forces us to confront our frailty and to ask the hardest questions. That is the terror, and yet also the truth, that we face.”
Sacks is referring to the terrifying and mysterious figure that shows up in this chapter. The king of terrors may represent not just physical death but the humbling realization of human vulnerability. What are we most terrified of?
In chapter 18, Job’s faux-friend Bildad delivers his second retort, in which he continues to insist that suffering is the result of sin and that God’s justice is absolute. He goes into great length in describing the fault and and the eventual fate of the wicked, including these violent verses:
יֹאכַל בַּדֵּי עוֹרוֹ יֹאכַל בַּדָּיו בְּכוֹר מָוֶת׃ יִנָּתֵק מֵאׇהֳלוֹ מִבְטַחוֹ וְתַצְעִדֵהוּ לְמֶלֶךְ בַּלָּהוֹת׃
The tendons under his skin will be consumed;
Death’s first-born will consume his tendons.
He shall be torn from the safety of his tent;
Terror marches him to the king of terrors.
Job 18:13-14
Robert Alter helps unpack the mythic morbid imagery here:
“Death’s Firstborn is clearly a mythological figure, as is the King of Terrors in the next verse. The Hebrew term for death, mawet, or Mot, is identical with the name of the Canaanite god of death, Mot. The vivid cannibalistic image of Death gnawing away at the limbs of the transgressor is not conventional language. “
The medieval commentator Rashi likewise reads these verses as metaphors for death itself:
“This is the Angel of Death, who is king over all terrors, for none can escape his reach.”
Some modern commentators view the king of terrors not as death - but as symbolic of the ultimate fear of the unknown, particularly the fear of death and what follows. The phrase captures the universal human experience of existential dread, which looms larger for those who feel unmoored or estranged from a sense of purpose or moral grounding.
Elie Wiesel, in his reflections on Job, suggests that
“the ultimate terror might not be death itself but the fear of being forgotten—of living a life without meaning or legacy. For the wicked, the king of terrors could symbolize the loss of any lasting impact or memory, leaving them to vanish into obscurity.”
Bildad’s words about the fear of obscurity, of being forgotten and swallowed up by death itself seem to trigger Job. in the next chapter he will respond to Bildad -- with fury, and with one of the earliest human ways to tackle the fear of the unknown and the kings of terror beyond the moral coil -- the art of writing down our feelings and thoughts, hopes and hurts.
Job shows us one of the ways with which we are able to translate angst into articulated narratives that will transcend our existence and last beyond our grave. Perhaps that is indeed one way to not let the fear of the final frontier silence our spirit.
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It is a chilling thought, the one that reminds us that we will, almost definitely, given a generation or 10, be forgotten. Our names, that is. Our deeds. The we existed. We put so much weight into the continuation of our individuality and so very little into the power or our daily influence, how our being radiates out in subtle yet powerful ways, the pebble dropping into the still pond of existence. And while the ripples get smaller over time and space, their influence never ends one begun. What would change in this world if we attended to that reality instead of continuing to chase being remembered?