Job and the Trickster

Stanley Diamond

Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Books, 1974), pp. 281–291.

The Book of Job, generated by an archaic civilization, a society no longer primitive,

symbolizes the converse of the primitive notion of the trickster and also represents the
origin of our own conceptions of good and evil. It is, so to speak, an ideological pillar
of our civilization. This is implied in Primitive Man as Philosopher, where Paul Radin
contrasts an African folk tale with the Book of Job.
In this tale, the heroine is trapped in an analogue of Job’s dilemma:
She was an old woman of a family with a long genealogy. Leza [the high God of the
Ba-ila], “the Besetting-One,” stretched out his hand against the family. He slew her
mother and father while she was yet a child, and in the course of years all connected
with her perished.
She said to herself, “Surely I shall keep those who sit on my thighs.” But no, even
they, the children of her children, were taken from her. She became withered with age
and it seemed to her that she herself was about to be taken.
But no, a change came over her; she grew younger. Then came into her heart a
desperate resolution to find God and to ask the meaning of it all. Somewhere up there
in the sky must be his dwelling. She began to cut down trees, joining them together
and so planting a structure that would reach heaven.
Finally she gave up in despair, but not her intention of finding God. Somewhere on
earth there must be another way to heaven! So she began to travel, going through
country after country, always with the thought in her mind: “I shall come to where the
earth ends and there I shall find a road to God and I shall ask him: “What have I done
to thee that thou afflictest me in this manner?”
She never found where the earth ends, but though disappointed she did not give up her
search, and as she passed through the different countries they asked her, “What have
you come for, old woman?” And the answer would be, “I am seeking Leza.”
“Seeking Leza! For what?”
“My brothers, you ask me! Here in the nations is there one who suffers as I have
suffered?”
And they would ask again, “How have you suffered?”
“In this way. I am alone. As you see me, a solitary old woman; that is how I am!”
And they answered, “Yes, we see. That is how you are! Bereaved of friends and
husband? In what do you differ from others? The Besetting-One sits on the back of
every one of us and we cannot shake him off!”
She never obtained her desire: she died of a broken heart.
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The point of the tale, as Radin indicates, is that one must come to terms with the
realities of the world; anything short of this invites spiritual destruction, symbolized
by the death of the old woman. Thus, a “broken heart” is equivalent to a deeply moral
(not merely ethical) failure. Among primitive peoples, the belief in God or the
“supernatural” is not connected with the hope of other-worldly reward; “heaven” is
the double of earth. Religion never functions as a means of evading the moral
contradictions that must be confronted in this world. Radin contrasts the integrity of
the primitive tale with the embarrassing denouement felicity of the Book of Job —
Job restored to health, property and domestic felicity over and above his original
affluence. Radin has in mind, of course, a primitive culture in which the peculiar
delusions and pathologies of civilization have not yet become evident.
Radin does not discuss the substance of the Book of Job at all, nor does he elaborate
on the curiously civilized failure of the old woman. That failure may be defined as the
refusal to understand and accept the relationship between good and evil, and its
expression in human ambiguity. The principle of ambivalence is incorporated into the
myths and rituals of primitive peoples to an extraordinary degree and in a variety of
ways which need no explication here. Radin himself has provided us with endless
examples of the theme. That principle or rather personification of ambivalence (since
we are dealing with primitive perceptions and not abstract conceptualizations) is most
directly realized in the figure of the trickster, as Jung, Kerenyi and Radin have
sufficiently indicated. With the appearance of civilization, the concrete and ramifying
image of the trickster becomes a segregated and vicarious aspect of human
experience, acted out by the clown as an entertainment. At the same time, it is
epitomized abstractly in the civilized assumption that evil, reified, befalls good men.
Put another way, the concrete image of the trickster is suppressed and simultaneously
transformed into the problem of injustice. The circus that surrounds and depends upon
the clown is therefore the diminished setting for a moral struggle. The grotesque
inversions of the clown, the defiance of death, the terrifying reality that seems to
overflow the ring itself only to recede to a totally alien experience the next moment,
and the superhuman skill of the actors — these are serious matters indeed. Laughing
at a circus demands the capacity to laugh at oneself, to identify with the reversals and
risks of identity that take place before our eyes. Wit, laughing at the other, does not
work. And this laughing at oneself means accepting the ambivalence of the human
condition, for which civilization gives us very little instruction or structured
opportunity. Hence, the strange gravity of audiences, particularly the expressions on
the faces of children, encountered at circuses.
The Book of Job, like Plato’s Republic which was composed at roughly the same
time, is bent upon denying human ambivalence and social ambiguity. Thus Job and
Plato insist upon the obliteration of injustice. Plato tells us that the Republic is
conceived for one major reason: in this world as we know it, there is no remedy for
injustice. As Socrates says, many a blackguard goes to his grave with a reputation for
virtue and many a virtuous man dies a scoundrel in the public eye. (There is a perfect
parallel in Ecclesiastes: “There is a vanity which takes place on earth, that there are
righteous men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are
wicked men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous.”) Therefore
Plato constructs a heavenly city in which the divine and the human reflect one another
in complete harmony. Evil is eradicated for God cannot be the author of evil, and the
principle of ambiguity is denied. In the Book of Job, there is a parallel effort to
understand and come to terms with the blind injustice of the world. If Plato represents
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the civilized consciousness projected as a Utopia and brought to its highest pitch, Job
represents the religious conscience of western civilization, more nakedly expressed
than is the case with Plato and with no effort at a social prescription. Plato and Job
must be understood with reference to each other; together they explicate the root of
western ethics.
In both Plato and Job the relationship between the human and the divine is no longer
played out in dramatic form, but is orchestrated in imposing intellectual dialogues
which rationalize the very basis of our civilization. The one important difference,
apart from the distinctions inherent in the cultural styles of Greek and Hebrew, is that
Plato will reform the state by making it more perfect in the technical sense of the
term, more complete and more omniscient; in Job society is not questioned. But
correla-tively, the Plato of the Laws has abandoned Utopia, and obedience to the
mundane dictates of society (whose ultimate sanction is divine) is now considered the
mark of piety. Job would have made an exemplary citizen of the polity put forward in
Plato’s Laws. In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to consider the
Book of Job in greater detail.
To begin with, Job is rich, blessed and upright — as near perfect a father, husband,
and subject of his society and his God as can be imagined. Satan challenges God,
claiming Job is good because his life is easy and successful. God accepts the
challenge and permits Job to be tormented by the devil in order to test his loyalty to
Him. There then follows the first series of manipulated misfortunes. Job’s family,
excluding his wife, is exterminated. Job’s response is, “the Lord gave, and the Lord
has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Satan then argues further that as long as Job’s skin is saved, he will remain loyal to
God. This second challenge is also accepted, and God puts Job completely in Satan’s
hands — the sole caveat being that his life be spared. At this point, and for the first
time in the work, the relationship between good and evil is obscured, perhaps
deliberately. For God apparently commands Satan, but is distinguished from him, just
as evil is becoming segregated as a principle from the principle of good. At the same
time, since God can ultimately control Satan, He is omnipotent but not responsible for
the evil that men choose to do through the mediation of the devil as Calvin
formulated. At the beginning of the Book of Job, then, the concrete ambivalence of
the human condition is denied; good and evil have a dual rather than a single source
as in the complex unity of the primitive consciousness. In the Book of Job integrated
acts have been disintegrated into contrasting ideas; human behavior is now seen as
representing and being driven by principles that are abstracted from the reality of
actual behavior. Actual behavior is never wholly good nor wholly evil; such purity is
never encountered, least of all in primitive societies. It is only with the civilized
reversal of principles and persons that such an attitude becomes conceivable; the
abstraction becomes a weapon against the person.
Satan afflicts Job from head to foot. As he sits in agony, his wife commends him:
“Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
She demands, in effect, that Job must bow neither to God nor the devil; one is obliged
to remain faithful to the knowledge of oneself. If man is fated to die in misfortune,
and if God is responsible for the world as we know it, then die, she admonishes, but
curse that kind of God. If one finds it impossible to change one’s faith, she implies,
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then one should have the grace to die — and here we are reminded of the old woman
in the Ba-ila tale. Job, of course, dismisses his wife:
“Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”
This sounds like the recognition of ambivalence, but in his continued agony Job
pleads for death, wishes that he had never been born and curses himself. In so doing,
he disavows responsibility for his life, and the insight hinted at is revealed as an
abstraction. It should also be noted that Job actively pleads for death, whereas in the
Ba-ila tale the old woman inevitably dies of moral (“natural”) causes while still
denying the ambiguity of life.
The advice of his wife, who represents a totally different, a more primitive perception
of reality, is rejected. In western theology, when not ignored, she has been despised as
a second Eve. The Book of Job, then, is best understood as the theological reflection
of a patriarchal and theocratic state. The order of society is never seriously put to
question; the resolution of the tale is fully in accord with the status quo. Not a sparrow
has to move from its place in order to insure the primacy of God, the structure of
society and the piety of the subject. Whereas the Greeks spoke of Utopia, the
patriarchs guarded the structure of the world as it was; they only wished to clarify its
ethical order. But both Greeks and Hebrews were guardians of an order with which we
are fully capable of identifying.
After the disappearance of Job’s wife, his three friends appear on the scene and, after
a preliminary expression of sympathy, engage him in the conversation that carries
most of the tale and has caught the attention of the conventional commentators. The
pattern of the dialogue is exceedingly simple: each of the friends insists that Job has
sinned, for God is just and punishes only for sin. Job is also told that if he bears up, all
will end well. God will reward him. Moreover, he is suffering for his own good. As
one of them says, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Has not Job
similarly advised afflicted people?
But Job considers this hypocrisy. Since his friends are not suffering, they lack
compassion. He again begs for death:
“What is man, that thou dost make so much of him ... and test him every moment?”
The second friend, and one must note that the friends are interchangeable, asserts that
Job is being dealt with justly, for God deals with men according to their works. But
Job’s attention is elsewhere. He is reaching for another rationalization, and responds
that God is so much more powerful than man that man’s perfection and innocence,
even when they exist, must be insufficient, unimpressive and even perverse. Therefore
God destroys both the innocent and the wicked, not because that is the nature of the
world, but because in the eyes of God all are wicked. This expression of cosmic piety
leaves Job in an insoluble dilemma. If he were wicked, he says, then God would
certainly punish him. If he were righteous, then he dare not proclaim it because God’s
judgments are inscrutable. Yet, God made him, and might show him a little mercy
before his death because He knows Job is not wicked in the human sense. But this
casuistry cuts no ice. Job’s third friend repeats the refrain: Job is vain to consider
himself a just man, only God knows good and evil and when He punishes it must be
for a good reason. Only the wicked hope to die in the face of adversity — the good
will live through affliction and be rewarded.
Job again defends himself in front of his friends: he has as much wisdom as they, and
it is easy to speak when one is not suffering. God, says Job, is omnipotent, He creates
 5

and destroys for reasons beyond human comprehension. Here again one catches a
glimpse of God as a trickster, that is to say, of the principle of ambivalence and of the
relationship between good and evil, perhaps even of their personification. That is the
primitive substratum in the consciousness of Job. In the words of Radin, the trickster
is “creator and destroyer, giver and negator” knowing “neither good nor evil yet...
responsible for both.”
But this perspective is too dizzying, and Job reverses himself. He begs God to reveal
the nature of his iniquity; though God slay him, he will trust in Him and, moreover, he
will maintain his own ways before Him. That is, he will argue his innocence before
God. He will argue that he has been obedient to the spirit and the letter of the law. But
his friends reply that man is by nature wicked, an idea that has also occurred to Job;
therefore, how can Job insist on his innocence, which is no more than his lack of
knowledge of having sinned. Job scorns them for their lack of mercy and continues to
claim that he is innocent in his own eyes. His friends reply that he is presumptuous
and impatient. Job then despairs of them along with, in the passion of his suffering,
his family. God is torturing him for unknown reasons, he replies. (And this is truer
than he is ever to be permitted to understand.) His friends, he continues, desert him
when they insist that he is undergoing a just punishment, and he warns them of
retribution.
But they prove relentless, and Job finally responds that the wicked often go
unpunished in this world, giving many examples of this state of affairs. In so doing,
he not only unwittingly questions his own implicit conviction of the connection
between piety and worldly reward, but his more recently stated belief that God
punishes the wicked only. He also asserts what the Book has ostensibly set out to
question: Why do the just suffer and the wicked flourish? And so the dialogue comes
to a close, Job seeking sympathy and defending his behavior, his friends accusing him
of impudence, perfidy, hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
There are two related observations that should be made about the role of Job’s friends.
They are not only interchangeable, but are interchangeable with Job himself. In the
first instance, they comprise an intellectual chorus revealing different aspects of the
same argument, constantly reinforcing each other and representing, as a chorus, the
conscience of the dialogue, which is no more than the conscience of Job. The
structure of the argument is almost musical: Job makes a point and his friends make
the counterpoint. They then reverse the contrapuntal progression from a necessarily
limited repertoire of logical possibilities. For there is nothing that Job’s friends say
that Job himself has not said. They have, for example, advised him to endure, assured
him that God is just and predicted that all good men are eventually rewarded. They
have also made the subtle point that in God’s eyes even the just among men are
unjust, thereby excusing Job by rendering his misinterpretation of his own behavior
inevitable. They have suggested, finally, that he walk more humbly before God,
anticipating the argument of Elihu. It is, therefore, a curious theological mistake to
distinguish Job from his friends. They are in opposition not on principle, but only
because of an “accidental” reality.* It is exactly here that their lack of freedom,

*
Even so advanced a critic as Morris Jastrow — by now himself a classic — insists upon interpreting
Job’s contradictions as priestly distortions of an “original” text. He would, therefore, deny the
paradoxical structure, which is the real esthetic strength of the work, and the source of its terrifying
honesty. For it thereby stands as a faithful expression of the spirit of the times. One should approach a
text such as the Book of Job head on — its meaning for us is a deeper question than the issue of texual
“authenticity,” which can never be established, perhaps not even in the minds of the “original authors.”
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individuality and humanity is evident. And that leads to the second observation. In a
society such as that reflected in the Book of Job, men could no longer spontaneously
turn to their friends and peers and confront the acknowledged absurdities of life as
members of complexly related, reciprocating kin or quasi-kin groups. Job’s
relationship to his friends is one of classic alienation. They are his friends only in the
sense that they are of equivalent status and class. The paradox is that the common
values that motivate Job and his friends make it impossible for them to rely on each
other or even to understand each other in their extreme moments even though, or
rather because, they speak the same language. The friends of Job must adopt the
attitudes they do in order to rationalize their own positions, which are equivalent
before his disaster and potentially equivalent following his disaster. For how else can
they maintain their faith in the correctness of their ways?
Contrast this with the institution of best friend in indigenous Dahomey, which was a
protostate or early archaic civilization in West Africa. Each Dahomean had three best
friends, arming him against the restrictions imposed by the civil power in this
transitional society. The function of best friend is clearly revealed in the following
folk tale: It seems that a man was asked to help work the fields of his diviner, his
father-in-law and his best friend on the same day. Faced with this dilemma, since aid
could hardly be refused anyone, he went out into the bush. There he killed an animal.
He then went to his father-in-law’s house and told him he had killed a man. The
father-in-law shouted, “I don’t want to hear about it! I don’t want to hear anything
about it! You killed one of the king’s men and now you want to hide here? I don’t
want to hear anything about it!” So the hunter left and went to the house of the
diviner, where he repeated his story. The diviner said, “Ah, we can have nothing more
to do with each other. Today you killed a man belonging to the king, and now you
want to come here to hide. Go! You cannot hide in my house!” Now the hunter went
to the house of his best friend and told him, “I wanted to kill an antelope for you ...
but as I shot at it I shot a man.” The best friend asked him if he had told anyone. Then
they left the house, the best friend carrying his bow, and went out into the bush to hide
the body. Of course, the best friend soon discovered that it was not a man at all, but an
antelope. So he asked the hunter why he had claimed to kill a man. And the answer
was, “I wanted to know which of the three — friend, father-in-law, diviner — one
could follow unto death.” Then they both went to work in the best friend’s field, the
dilemma solved. That is why, the Dahomeans say, a man must be always closest to his
best friend.
The key to an understanding of the Book of Job, then, is in the triumph of orthodoxy;
the work is an awe-inspiring rationalization of God’s ambivalent nature. And the
abstract recourse to principle, punishment, reward and God-as-a-concept reflects the
patriarchal, theocratic polity — as the antithesis of the classless, ambivalently
structured cultures of primitive peoples.
Almost as an afterthought, and it may well have been that, the conclusion of the Book
of Job emerges. Whether or not it was an afterthought, the climax of Job is the
inevitable outcome of the thrust and conception of the work as a whole. A young man
(Elihu) appears and lectures Job on the omnipotence of God. God is not to be
approached on the human level. Why should Job demand to know his sins? God must
be approached in humility. Although Elihu sympathizes with Job, in contrast to the
increasing harshness of his (Job’s) friends, his intellectual differences from them are
Certain critics seem to be more interested in creating their own Job than in listening carefully to what
the “standard” Job has to say — and considering the pattern of the whole work relative to that.
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trivial. The Lord approves and, speaking out of a whirlwind, reveals the scope of His
achievements; He made the world, creation is His, can Job question such power? Can
Job dare to measure his notion of justice against all this? But again, the propositions
of the Lord are not substantially different from conclusions reached by Job’s
principled friends, by Elihu and by Job himself.
Job now abhors himself; he prostrates himself before God and asks forgiveness for his
blasphemy which originated, it would appear, in his all too human pride. In response,
God humbles the friends of Job for their hypocrisy and their presumption in claiming
to know His ways, and for their lack of confidence in Job. For Job, in the judgment of
the Lord, never lost faith in a humanly understandable justice. This apparent
contradiction aside, the theological “tragedy” ends happily. Job lives for another 140
years, and so on. In both Plato and Job, it should be noted, the abolition of injustice
depends on the obliteration of ambivalence, and the obliteration of ambivalence is the
death of tragedy. The Book of Job is in no sense a tragedy but something very
different, a theodicy, an apology for the projection of a certain concept of God.
One can readily understand why Radin preferred the African folk tale. It is harder to
decide whether or not Satan won his argument, for at its critical moments the basically
civilized tale of Job depends on a deus ex machina — the evil that has befallen Job is
simply assumed to be the work of the devil and in the end Job is redeemed from on
high. Both God and the devil are at an infinite and dissociated remove from human
experience, and this reflects the structure of civilization. Conversely, among primitive
peoples, all antinomies are bound into the ritual cycle. The sacred is an immediate
aspect of man’s experience. Good and evil, creation and destruction — the dual image
of the deity as expressed in the trickster — are fused in the network of actions that
define primitive society. Therefore moral fanaticism, based as it is on abstract notions
of pure good, pure evil and the exclusive moral possibility or fate of any particular
individual — what may be called moral exccptionalism — is absent among primitive
people. In primitive perspective, human beings are assumed to be capable of any
excess. But every step of the way, the person is held to account for those actions that
seriously threaten the balance of society and nature.
Even while creating their myths and ceremonials, their meanings and their insights,
primitive people are aware of the reality that they mold. Radin tells us that a Maori
witness before a native land-court in New Zealand stated in the course of certain
testimony:1
“The God of whom I speak is dead.”
The court replied: “Gods do not die.”
“You are mistaken,” continued the witness. “Gods do die, unless there are tohungas
(priests) to keep them alive.”
And in a Maori myth, one God advises another:
“When men no longer believe in us, we are dead.”
That reflects the existential, the created reality of the primitive world. There can be no
deeper antithesis to the Book of Job, which represents the determinism of civilization.

NOTES
1. Paul Radin, The World of a Primitive Man (New York: Henry Schuman, 1953), p. 47
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