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The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations By Carol A. Newsom Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. 301 pp. $49.95.
Carol Newsom's new study of Job alters Joban interpretation and expands biblical studies. Her achievement is to bring together in highly readable fashion Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of truth, understandings of literary form, as well as theories of narrative ethics, sublimity, and religious practice to interpret this classic and confounding biblical text. Newsom's interdisciplinary results amplify rather than shrink the literary puzzles facing readers, yet her interpretation is both inviting and immensely satisfying. She makes sense of the book as a literary whole, gives new meanings to individual parts, and presses readers to reflect not only on Job's predicament but also on human experiences of faith and the search for truth.
Newsom has been working with this biblical book for years. Her classes, essays, and beautiful commentary on Job in The New Interpreter's Bible (vol. 4, 1996) feed this more theoretical volume. Central to her interpretation is Bakhtin's theory of truth as dialogical. For Bakhtin, truth is glimpsed...