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The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. By Carol A. Newsom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xi + 301 pp. $49.95 (cloth).
How to make sense of a book like Job, made up of stich heterogeneous parts? Newsom utilizes Mikhail Bakhtins concept of a polyphonic work: a text that embodies a dialogic sense of truth (p. 1), expresses the authors position without privileging it (p. 2), and ends without any finalizing disclosure (p. 3). The interpreter does not adjudicate the different voices and perspectives, but facilitates an ongoing conversation among them. Genre, understood as a rhetorical convention embodying a distinctive way of perceiving reality, is the key with which Newsom unlocks each section of Job. Each is allowed to imagine its own "truth" about the moral predicament of Job-the man who was cruelly abused in being made the object of a wager by God. Hence the description of her interpretation as "a context of moral imaginations."
No quick summary can do justice to Newsom's rich interpretation, but perhaps briefly noting the way she uses genre classification, as...