Spence 1

Clay Spence

cspence16@cmc.edu

Professor Robert Faggen

(713)-202-9634

The Bible
12/14/2014
Gods Speech from the Whirlwind as a Repudiation of Genesis 1
On the Tanakh ordering, Job seems to be a repetition of old ideas on unjust suffering and
attempts at theodicy. Though a part of Hebrew wisdom literature, much of the hokmah in Job
appears elsewhere. Take for instance Isaiah 45:7-9: I form the light, and create darkness: I make
peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these thingsWoe unto him that striveth with his Maker!
Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it,
what makest thou?1 Alternately, an essential aspect of Gods speech is captured in Isaiah 55:9
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my
thoughts than your thoughts. Following Jack Miles, it is difficult not to see Job as a
culmination rather than an inauguration of those dark intuitions about the destructive,
inimical side of God (Miles, 304).
More broadly speaking, the problem of evil is not a uniquely Jewish idea. Narratives
highlighting the problem of evil appear in other religious texts in the region. Take for instance
the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer:
What seems good to oneself is worthless before the god/ And what is rejected by ones
heart finds favor with the god/ Who will comprehend the will of the gods in the midst of
the heavens/ The counsel of the god is full of obscurity; who will know it?/ How will
mortals learn the way of the god? (Interpreters Bible, 881).
In other respects, Job is a highly original text. The language in Jobs dialogue with his so-called
comforters is packed with a raw desperation and fervid eloquence which far outdoes any
comparable text for example, Stephen Mitchells translation of Jobs immortal opening line:
1 All quotations will be from the KJV unless specified otherwise.

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God damn the day I was born, and the night that forced me from the womb (Mitchell, 13).
Moreover, Job is structurally unique because it terminates in Gods answer from the whirlwind,
the only divine speech on the subject of unjust suffering. The intractable and seemingly
interminable disagreement between Job and his comforters on the justice of Jobs condition takes
up the majority of the Book of Job, spanning chapters 3 to 38. Yet Gods final speech from the
whirlwind scatters the discourse of the preceding chapters like dust. It is on this speech
particularly the second portion of Gods speech that this paper will focus.
This paper will not attempt a theodical analysis of Gods answer, per se. Such attempts
are uniformly unsatisfactory, and belong to the domain of theology anyway. And regardless of
ones theological views on the subject, one has to agree at a minimum that those reasons are not
made clear in Job. Denys Turner writes that It makes sense to say of our language about God
that it gets to the point of stretch at which its categories of similarity and difference fail, so that,
when stretched out to God, our language encounters its own failure to name the difference it
stretches out across (Turner, 43). This claim seems especially true of Gods speech, in which the
Joban author seems to run up against the problem of evil and then do his very best to avoid an
apophatic2 silence on the issue. Consequently, it is left to us to make what sense of Gods speech
as we can. This paper will attempt to characterize Gods speech as a repudiation of the first
creation account in Genesis in favor of a non-anthropocentric view of creation and of the Deity
Himself.
Gods speech from the whirlwind is split into two parts. Both take the form of a series of
questions that appear to be directed as challenges to Jobs diatribe. The first section (38:1-40:2)
2 Where Apophaticism is an ignorance of God acquired through critical reflection; theology as
a negative strategy for coming to terms with Gods basic inscrutability. I take the problem of evil
to be derivative of the broader problem of not being able to conceptualize the nature of God.

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concerns Gods total knowledge of creation from the inanimate foundations of the earth to an
assortment of animals that dwell upon it. Here God describes in soaring language the creation of
the world in the form of a litany of biting rhetorical questions such as: Where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth...When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy? (38:4,7). In the latter speech (40:6-41:34), God thunders Wilt thou condemn
me that thou mayest be righteous?, and then proceeds in an extreme non-sequitur to describe
two powerful beings that most critics transliterate as Behemoth and Leviathan. Behemoth is
a grass-eating, ox-like creature with bones like bars of iron (40:18) whose penis stiffens like a
pine (Mitchell, 85).3 Leviathan is a fire-breathing sea-serpent cloaked in an armor impenetrable
scales, a king over all the children of pride (41:34).
The two sections are separated by an interlude in which Job abases himself and returns to
silence an interlude which is highly relevant to interpretation of the speech as a whole. Though
I do not share his rationale, I agree with J.V. Kinnier Wilsons claim that:
The two cycles of speeches from the whirlwind must be seen to be quite different in their
motivation, and need to be separated from each otherIt is mistaken, we think, to
suggest that Behemoth and Leviathan belong properly in the same milieu as the lioness,
mountain goat, wild ass, and other animals of the first speech. (Kinnier, 13)
Explanations of Gods speech from the whirlwind that do not take into consideration the brief
interlude of Jobs speech fail to do justice to its structure. Generally critics riff on the following
three themes in Gods theophany: first, that God is supremely powerful4, second that Job lacks
understanding or knowledge, and third that Job ought to celebrate with God the beauty and
3 The alternate translation here is He moveth his tail like a cedar but I follow Mitchell in
thinking that tail is obviously a sex-euphemism the implication here being that the Behemoth
is a highly virile alpha-male animal (whether supernatural, or just extraordinarily large).
4 Which Hobbes took to be the main sense of Gods speech in his repurposing of the biblical
passage for Leviathan, his canonical work of political philosophy.

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majesty of the created world.5 However, none of these interpretations explains the separation
between the speeches. Why does God continue to lecture after the shell-shocked Job abandons
his complaint and vows silence? Isnt Gods aim accomplished after the first speech? Since the
author of Job was anything but thoughtless in his construction of the book, Gods second speech
is almost certainly not redundant. Any sustainable account of Gods speech from the whirlwind
must therefore grapple seriously with the caesura in Gods discourse.
Gods speech from the whirlwind is a panorama of creation a hint and a glimpse at
Gods staggeringly broad divine knowledge of the cosmos. In scope (and to a lesser degree in
structure), Gods speech strongly parallels the first creation account in Genesis (1:1-2:3). The
Genesis 1 creation account is familiar: On the first day God divided light from darkness, on the
second he created the sky; on the third day God created dry land and plants, on the fourth the
sun, moon and stars; on the fifth day God created birds, fish and the great sea monsters6, and on
the sixth day God created the beasts of the earth, and man in his image, after his likeness, to have
dominion over all living things. Though it does not retain Genesis 1s formulaic structure, eerie
abstractness, and absence of sensory detail, Gods first speech in Job is obviously a variant on the
same theme. God describes the laying of the foundations of the earth and the shutting up of the
sea; the commanding of the dawn to rise and rain to fall on the wastes of the earth; the
movements of the constellations and a parade of animals: the lion, the raven, the wild ass, the
unicorn, the ostrich, the magnificent horse, the hawk and the eagle. But in His second speech in
Job, God radically departs from the Genesis template, describing in close detail the Behemoth
5 See, e.g. Wesley Morristons Gods Answer to Job for a defense of these claims.
6 The KJV translates the Hebrew word tannnim as great whales, but a more appropriate
translation is the Jewish Study Bible Tanakh Translations sea monsters. Variants on the word
are used 27 times over the course of the Hebrew bible, and the sense of most translations is
serpent, dragon, or sea monster all decidedly reptilian. I break with Melville here.

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(which does not appear in Genesis) and the Leviathan (which may be very obliquely alluded to
by the phrase great sea monsters).
Why are the Behemoth and the Leviathan elevated to this final position of prominence,
and described in such painstaking detail? I submit to you the answer is that Gods speech in Job
is a reversal of the anthropocentric account of creation present in the first creation speech in
Genesis. In Gods speech from the whirlwind, man is no longer in the final position, nor is there
any reference to man being made in Gods image human beings dont appear at all in Gods
speech in Job. In Genesis an anthropic bias is unmistakable. God creates human beings with the
express purpose of let[ting] them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth (1:26). God says to man: replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth (1:27). In Job one notices a bias in another direction. The Behemoth is chief of
the ways of God (40:19), and the invincible Leviathan is accorded dominion He beholdeth
all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride (41:34). The main thrust of Gods
speech from the whirlwind is that man is only one creation, not as great as others, and
insignificant compared to the Behemoth and the Leviathan.7 What can Job do in response to such
a paradigm-shifting onslaught but cower, boil-ridden, in the dust and ashes?
In this sense, Gods speech in Job seems to renounce any special relationship with man
whether existential or in the form of covenant. As one critic puts it, human life has been taught
7 I find further confirmational evidence for this view in the fact that Gods speech is explicitly
comparative between Job (a representative of mankind) and the Leviathan. God challenges Job:
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?...Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
(41:1,7).

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to think of itself as a blob of protoplasm, an itch on the epidermis of a pigmy planet, an accident
of matter (Interpreters Bible, 1172). Like much of Job, this is not an especially new revelation
a similar abandonment of anthropocentric reasoning is captured eloquently in Ecclesiastes:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them:
as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no
preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and
all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of
the beast that goeth downward to the earth. (3:19-21)
David Wolfers, on a creative translation of the phrase Behemoth, which I made with
thee (40:15) as Behemoth, which I have saddled thee with, takes the reversal of the Genesis
value-orientation in Gods speech from the whirlwind as evidence for mans bestial nature.8
However the non-anthropocentrism in Job isnt a comment on human nature at all it is a
revelation of divine nature. The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind is an essentially
panentheistic entity,9 for whom the Behemoth, the Leviathan, the parade of animals, and the
inanimate natural forces at play in Gods speech are reflections of Gods divine image. When
God entreats Job to deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory
and beauty (40:10) he reveals his panentheistic nature the majesty, excellency, glory and
beauty here refer to the created universe which God inhabits, and with which God clothes
Himself. One remembers Gods speech in Jeremiah: Can any hide himself in secret places that I
shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? (23:24); one remembers that

8 Here Wolfers relies heavily on Psalms 73:22, which he translates as I have been a behemoth
with thee. On Wolfers view, this line supports a view of Behemoth as being part of mans
bestial nature. However both this translation and the saddled thee with translations seem to me
tenuous. My view will avoid Humpty-Dumpty linguistics almost entirely.
9 Without delving to deeply into theological matters, pan-en-theism is the view that God is a
cosmic animating force interpenetrating the universe. Contrast with classical Spinozan pantheism
which holds that God is identical with the totality of things in existence.

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the phrase And behold, it was very good in Genesis (1:31) applies to the whole of creation
not only a certain kind of advanced primate.
The world described in Job is, in Stephen Mitchells words our world, when we perceive
it clearly, without eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Mitchell, xxi). The
world, seen from this divine perspective, is utterly sublime. Gods speech is attitudinal not
argumentative, and the attitude which radiates through the prose is one of profound animalistic
joy in His creation a reveling in the entire natural continuum from the sweet influences of the
Pleiades to the greatest beasts of land and sea, in all its absurdity and grandeur (Job, 38:31).
Here the fearless Leviathan is Gods plaything in the manner suggested in Psalms: So this is the
great and wide seathere is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein (104:25-26).
This view makes sense of the distinction between the two speeches from the whirlwind in
the following way: The first speech attempts to impress upon Job the vastness and inscrutability
of creation (to the human mind), in all its absurdity and vibrancy and wild grandeur. Following
the first speech, Job attritely submits Behold I am vile; what shall I answer thee? (40:4). But
Jobs groveling radically misinterprets God, who aims not at Jobs submission, but at revoking
the anthropocentrism of Genesis. Gods second speech clarifies Gods repudiatory intent the
force of it is: No, this is what I mean. Behold the Behemoth and the Leviathan man is not the
pinnacle of creation. Vanity, vanity: All of what you think you know is vanity.
The view I have articulated here also helps explain a mysterious feature which obtains on
the Tanakh ordering of the Old Testament. On this ordering, the last time God speaks is in his
speech from the whirlwind. As Jack Miles points out, Within the book of Job itself, Gods
climactic and overwhelming reply seems to silence Job. But reading from the end of the Book of
Job onward, we see that it is Job who has somehow silenced God (Miles, 11). If Gods speech is

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truly a repudiation of the special and covenantal relationship with man articulated in Genesis,
then Gods silence in the Ketuvim makes sense: God has talked the talk, now he is walking the
walk. In Job, God releases himself from having to explain himself to man at all. Another
advantage of my model of Gods speeches in Job is that it explains the way that God seems
intimately involved with his creation. An account of God as panentheistic jibes well with a God
who is the father of the rain (38:28) and a sender of lightnings (38:35), who hunts prey for the
lion and the raven (38:39-41). God delights in the idiosyncrasies of his created fauna the
terrible glory of the horses nostrils, his neck clothed with thunder and seems to flicker
between the perspectives of each of the animals in the list as though inhabiting them. Doth the
hawk fly by thy wisdom asks God (39:27). Doth the eagle mount up at thy command?
(39:27). The God portrayed in Job is not a disinterested unmoved mover or first cause, but a
consciousness thrumming through every layer of his creation with unbridled joie de vivre.
Nonetheless, my thesis has a hurdle to clear in the form of the challenge that Gods second
speech may instead be a comment on the futility of Jobs rebelliousness. On this account, Gods
phrase, Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be righteous? suggests that Jobs complaints
may be taken as an act of rebellion against the will of God (Job 40:8). Justification for this view
rests primarily on an interpretation of the Leviathan as a rebellious serpent, from whom Job must
learn the lesson that God is all-powerful. Much has been written on the Leviathan in Gods
second speech from the whirlwind primarily because the great serpent appears in nearly every
contemporary religious text in the region. In these texts, a god creates the world by defeating a
great chaos-serpent in a cosmogonic battle.10 In Babylonian mythology the god Marduk defeats
the chaos serpent Tiamat, and in Canaanite myth the god Baal defeats the sea-monster Yamm in
10 See Mary Wakeman, The Biblical Earth Monster in the Cosmogonic Combat Myth, pp.313320

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the act of creation, for instance. The word Leviathan is itself probably derived from the word
lotan, which is a seven headed dragon that appears in Ugaritic myth. In these accounts the
conquering god entraps or pens the rebelling chaos-monster, but does not utterly vanquish it.
This mythological heritage shows up in the book of Job when Job desperately wonders Am I the
sea or the Dragon, that You have set a watch over me? (7:12).11 But is this mythological
tradition firmly enough ensconced in the Hebrew bible to legitimate the futility-of-rebellion
thesis?
The word Leviathan (liwytn) shows up in the Bible only six times; twice in Job (3:8;
40:25), twice in Psalms (74:14; 104:26) and twice in the Isaiah (27:1). In Job 3:8 (May those
who cast spells upon the day damn it, those prepared to disable Leviathan)12 the sense is highly
unclear, and in Psalm 104 the sense is that Leviathan was created as Gods plaything.13 But in
Psalm 74 the description of Leviathan fits the Leviathan-as-chaos-monster theory: Thou didst
divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest
the heads of Leviathan in pieces (74:13-14). Something very similar to this line appears in
Isaiah, though in the context of a prophecy about the apocalypse: In that day the Lord with his
sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea (27:1).14 These mythic parallels

11 Translation from the Jewish Study Bible. KJV translation is Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou
settest a watch over me?, but succumbs to the same problem as Genesis 1:21 (the great sea
monsters).
12 Jewish Study Bible translation the KJV translation Let them curse it that curse the day,
who are ready to raise up their mourning is even more indecipherable.
13 As discussed earlier, Psalm 104 seems to be evidence for my thesis.

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and others15 prompt Henry Rowold to suggest that Yahweh is placing in juxtaposition two
creatures each of whom has raised himself up against God that is, Job and the Leviathan
(Rowold, 107). If this is so, then perhaps Gods speech is not intended as a renunciation of
Genesis but rather as a comment on the futility of Jobs rage and sorrow at his misfortune.
Unfortunately, this view doesnt entirely bear out. It is true, mythological influences were
clearly at play when the Joban author set quill to paper. The evidence here is uncontroversial. In
the speech from the whirlwind God asks referring to the Leviathan Will he make a covenant
with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? This language is highly suggestive of a
cosmogonic combat myth wherein God subjugates the chaos-serpent Leviathan in the creative
act. No stretch of the imagination is required to think that the Leviathan is different than animals
of the garden (of Eden) variety. But while the analogy to the Leviathans rebellion may suggest a
lesson to Job, such a lesson is clearly peripheral to Gods speech from the whirlwind taken as a
whole. Even when our object of inquiry is restricted to Gods second speech, the futility-ofrebellion camp can only explain half of the discourse the Behemoth is quite clearly a created
being under Gods purview. John Gammie explains,
Three features in the opening verse suggest that the creature about to be described is an
animal of the natural world: (i) the semantic force of the initial words of the verse,
hinneh-na (Behold!) suggests that the creature could be seen; (ii) he is one whom I
made with you, i.e., with Job; Job is mortal, therefore it is less strained to take it that
Behemoth is also mortal; (iii) he eats grass like cattle; comparison is made to another
animal of the world of nature; grass is, of course, a widely acknowledged symbol of
mortality (cf. Isa 40:6-8). (Gammie, 219-220)
14 Two notes: 1) An alternate translation here is Leviathan the Elusive Serpent Leviathan the
Twisting Serpent (Jewish Study Bible). 2) This line doesnt necessarily imply there are two
separate Leviathans, but rather may be more plausibly interpreted as an emphasis-convention in
ancient Hebrew writing.
15 See e.g. Job 26:12-13, Isaiah 51:9, and Psalms 89:10.

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Some scholars have attempted to read the Behemoth as a mythical being in light of a brief
reference to a Bull of Heaven in Sumero-Akkadian religious texts.16 However such
interpretations require fighting an uphill battle against a total lack of textual evidence in the
Hebrew Bible, and the compelling countervailing evidence in Job. Consequently, most scholars
have tended to identify the Behemoth with the Hippopotamus in virtue of the lines describing its
marshy home (Job, 40:21-23). In any case there is no biblical evidence that the Behemoth ever
engaged in rebellion against his creator which is crucial to a defense of the view that the
function of Gods second speech is to teach Job that rebellion is futile. In light of the restricted
value of this thesis, one has to think that the rebellion-thesis is at best hopelessly marginal. As
Mitchell describes the second speech from the whirlwind: What is all this foolish chatter about
good and evil, the Voice says, about battles between a hero-god and some cosmic opponent?
Dont you understand that there is no one else in here? (Mitchell, xxiv). A final consideration is
that if the second speech aims to teach Job a lesson on the futility of rebelling against the
Almighty, it is a staggeringly redundant invective no point has been more forcefully and
repeatedly made in divine speech in the prior books of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, I tend to think
that obedience to the will of an all-powerful, vengeful God is the primary takeaway from Jewish
theology. This is what is meant when people use the phrase the God of the old testament.
It seems then that repudiation-of-Genesis thesis wins out. Gods speech from the whirlwind is
primarily a direct rejection of the anthropocentric logic manifest in the first creation account in
Genesis. But where does this leave us? The purpose of Gods speech from the whirlwind seems
to be to level the normative playing field, undermining the ethical hierarchy (dominion, man in
Gods image, man made last) articulated in Genesis 1. Jobs convictions of the injustice of his
16 See Marvin Pope, The Anchor Bible: Job. pp.270

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claims are swept away by the power of Gods speech, as are the concepts of justice, good and
bad. This flattening of value is captured in the following thought experiment of Wittgensteins:
Suppose one of you were an omniscient person andwrote all he knew in a big book,
then this book would contain the whole description of the worldthis book would
contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically
imply such a judgment. (Wittgenstein, 6)
This is the world left to a person like Melville who takes the lesson of Job to heart. Here
the rigid moral law of the Torah is thoroughly deflated. Yet though it is little consolation, this is a
world where Gods pure joy in his creation occasionally bursts through the seams a world
where a panentheistic creator revels in every aspect of his creation, human beings included. If
this recognition is theodical, it permanently brackets rather than explains the problem of evil.
Gods speech from the whirlwind is therefore deeply unsatisfactory from an ethical standpoint. In
the face of it, one can do little but follow the wisdom of Qoholeth: There is nothing better for a
man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor
(Ecclesiastes, 2:24).

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Citations:
The Interpreters Bible, Vol. 3: Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job. Abingdon
Press, New York. 1954.
Gammie, John. Behemoth and Leviathan: On the Didactic and Theological Significance of Job
40:15-41:26. In Israelite Wisdom: Theological and Literary Essays in Honor of Samuel Terrien.
Union Theological Seminary, New York. 1978.
Jewish Publication Society, Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation Ed. Adele Berlin and
Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford U.P., 2004.
Miles, Jack. God: A Biography. Alfred Knopf Publishers, New York. 1995.
Mitchell, Stephen. The Book of Job. North Point Press. Berkeley, California, 1979.
Morriston, Wesley. Gods Answer to Job. Religious Studies, Vol. 32.3, 1996.
Pope, Marvin. The Anchor Bible: Job. Doubleday & Company Inc., New York. 1965.
Rowold, Henry. Leviathan and Job in Job 41:2-3. Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 105.1,
1986.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge U.P.,
1995.
Wakeman, Mary. The Biblical Earth Monster in the Cosmogonic Combat Myth Journal of
Biblical Literature, Vol. 88.3, 1969.
Wilson, JV Kinnier. A Return to the Problems of Behemoth and Leviathan. Vetus
Testamentum, Vol.21 Fasc.1, 1975.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. A Lecture on Ethics. Duke U.P. on behalf of Philosophical Review, Vol.
74.1, Jan. 1965.
Wolfers, David. The Lords Second Speech in the Book of Job. Vetus Testamentum Vol 40.4,
1990.
Young, William A. Leviathan in the Book of Job and Moby-Dick Soundings, Vol. 65.4, 1982.