Salvation from “whiteness”: a subversive reading of Job

For Martin Luther King Day, I wanted to consider a very challenging quote from black liberation theologian James Cone: “When whites undergo the true experience of conversion wherein they die to whiteness and are reborn anew in order to struggle against white oppression and for the liberation of the oppressed, there is a place for them in the black struggle of freedom.” When Cone talks about whiteness, he’s not talking literally about the color of our skin. He’s talking about a set of attitudes that many white people are usually completely unaware of having and which all too often our Christianity has been tailored to validate. In my last semester of seminary, I wrote a term paper in Hebrew poetry on the way that the book of Job describes a “white” man who is literally turned black by God (Job 30:30). When we see Job’s “whiteness” come through in his speech from chapters 29-31, we’re able to see that his fall from privilege, or his “dying to whiteness,” is his salvation.

First of all, one of the “whitest” interpretive moves that Christians often make in studying the book of Job is to turn him into an Everyman, a generic universal figure. Job was a prince who was extraordinarily wealthy: “His possessions also were seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the children of the east” (Job 1:3). Satan makes a fair criticism of Job that those of us who live in privilege should hear and reflect on: “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:9-11). Job’s privilege is a central concern to the text. Only people who are wealthy themselves could turn Job into a universal figure; Job’s tragedy is that he becomes like the 95% of the ancient world who were desperately poor.

How many of our lives could fall under Satan’s critique? “Whiteness” is partly the blissful ignorance of the “fences” that separate our everyday world from the world that other people experience. Too often our Christianity serves the function of being a “fence” around us that validates our wealth whose primary purpose is to keep us and our family safe. I call this kind of Christianity suburbianity. It’s a completely different phenomenon than the prosperity gospel, which appeals to working class people who desperately dream of gaining the wealth that people like me have the privilege to be scornful of. Suburbianity in contrast seeks a “tough” gospel with a strict God who validates the suburban ethic of hyper-competitive meritocracy. The more wicked the world is imagined to be, the more legitimate are the “fences” of suburbia. I have described this doctrine as the total depravity of everyone else. Suburbia is the form that “whiteness” takes in a post-segregationist social order. You don’t have to be ethnically western European anymore to be “white” and fit into suburbia; you just have to act culturally white (and saying something like “There’s no such thing as white culture” is the epitome of acting white).

Getting back to Job, the section of the book in which we get the most insight into Job’s character is Job 29-31, his last speech before Elihu and then God’s response (though I talked about chapter 31 in my term paper, I’m going to stick to 29 and 30 for this blog post). We see in this section that Satan was at least partly right. Job’s righteousness has given him a sense of entitlement. His willingness to be a good person is at least in part contingent upon his status as a prince. In chapter 29, Job wistfully remembers the deferential honor with which he was treated in the past: “When I went out to the gate of the city, when I took my seat in the square,the young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose up and stood;the nobles refrained from talking, and laid their hands on their mouths;the voices of princes were hushed, and their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths” (vv. 7-10).

Job starts chapter 29 talking about how God is the source of his providence, using the imagery of God providing a light shining over his head: “O that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me;when his lamp shone over my head, and by his light I walked through darkness.” But by the end of the chapter, God is no longer a part of the equation. Job himself is the light of his people: “They waited for me as for the rain; they opened their mouths as for the spring rain. I smiled on them when they had no confidence; and the light of my countenance they did not extinguish.I chose their way, and sat as chief, and I lived like a king among his troops, like one who comforts mourners” (vv. 23-25). Job supplants God as the provider. He is perfectly happy to be righteous as long as he is the “king among his troops.”

Another presumptuous thing Job says is to identify his body metaphorically with the bodies of the oppressed, saying that he was “eyes to the blind and feet to the lame” (v. 15). There’s a drastic difference between calling yourself the body of the oppressed as their benevolent ruler and actually having an oppressed body. Job’s attitude is completely different when he talks about the oppression of his actual physical body in chapter 30: “My inward parts are in turmoil, and are never still; days of affliction come to meet me. I go about in sunless gloom; I stand up in the assembly and cry for help. I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches. My skin turns black and falls from me, and my bones burn with heat” (vv. 27-30).

The ugly side of Job comes out when he talks about the people with whom he has to keep company as a brother of jackals: “But now they make sport of me, those who are younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.What could I gain from the strength of their hands? All their vigor is gone.Through want and hard hunger they gnaw the dry and desolate ground,they pick mallow and the leaves of bushes, and to warm themselves the roots of broom.They are driven out from society; people shout after them as after a thief.In the gullies of wadis they must live, in holes in the ground, and in the rocks.Among the bushes they bray; under the nettles they huddle together.A senseless, disreputable brood, they have been whipped out of the land” (vv. 1-8).

This passage is very interesting. Job starts with scorn. When he’s in power, he is willing to be eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. But now he’s mixed in with people he wouldn’t have put with his dogs. And then he admits that his main concern with the poor is “what [he can] gain from the strength of their hands.” David Clines observes that Job here “speaks like the coarsest of nineteenth-century mill owners, for whom people have no value apart from their productivity.”[1]

But then Job’s tone seems to shift. It’s as if his change of circumstances has opened his eyes to people who have to “gnaw the dry and desolate ground.” In the ancient world, most cities were walled. Inside the city gates was civilization where everything was in perfect order underneath the benevolent watchful eye of princes like Job who took care of their people and thus earned the justification of their wealth. Outside the city gates were the bandits and monsters that everyone feared. When Job’s misfortune casts him out of the city gates, he encounters a desolate poverty that he had never imagined before. He doesn’t quite come to the point of having compassion, but it’s clear that he’s haunted by the plight of the people of the wadis.

Job uses a Hebrew phrase in Job 30:8 for the outsiders he has encountered that gets lost in the translation to English: banei b’li shem — literally “the sons with no name.” In the ancient world, your family name was everything. To be without a name was not to exist. This is another aspect of “whiteness.” It’s walking through a world in which the dozens of service employees we interact with daily are banei b’li shem who don’t really exist. They’re just part of the background. Maybe I’m just an unusually snobby person, but there’s a nasty little voice in my head that presumes that the people who stand behind the many different cash registers I visit must have dropped out of high school or have a criminal record or a mental illness or handicap that made a better career unworkable unless their thick accent shows that they’re a recent immigrant. That’s my “whiteness” talking.

Outside the borders of our country is a whole world filled with banei b’li shem who aren’t relevant to the global market. But they’re relevant to God. That’s actually the message of God’s whirlwind speech that most readers of Job presume to be no more than God saying, “I created the world; you didn’t; so shut up!” The speech is actually filled with God’s wild compassion for His created order. Even the ground outside the boundaries of the human social order is made an object of God’s love: “Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?” (Job 38:25-27). God’s love for the raven’s young who “cry out to God and wander about for lack of food” (Job 38:41) is squarely antithetical to Job’s cruel assessment in chapter 30 that human scavengers are unworthy of compassion.

As Catherine Keller writes, “the whirlwind oracle brims with laughter: not a gentle, reassuring laughter to be sure, but the noisy, defiant laughter of the creatures.”[2] Particularly prominent in this laughter is the wild donkey who “laughs at the commotion in the town” and “does not hear a driver’s shout,” (Job 39:7), making a connection between laughter and freedom from human dominance. God’s account of the wild ox shows a hint of His rage against the exploitation of others’ labor: “Will you leave your heavy work to him?” (Job 39:11).

Keller sees in God’s adoration of the wild beasts a resistance to “a hardening theological anthropomorphism that… was already tending to reduce nonhuman nature to a background effect.”[3] While I certainly agree with this ecological reading of God’s speech, I think the ‘hardening theological anthropomorphism’ that she perceives reflects the hardening social order within the human community itself. The wild animals are like the “sons with no name” that Job scorns; they are simply a further step removed from the social order by being more nameless than nameless people.

The whirlwind speech culminates with the Leviathan, the great sea-monster beast of Hebrew mythology and seemingly God’s favorite creature. He goes on and on boasting of the Leviathan’s strength: “Its heart is as hard as stone, as hard as the lower millstone.When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves.Though the sword reaches it, it does not avail, nor does the spear, the dart, or the javelin.It counts iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood.The arrow cannot make it flee; slingstones, for it, are turned to chaff” (Job 41:24-28).

There’s something peculiar about this Leviathan. Carol Newsom picks up on a double-meaning in three Hebrew words in Job 41:12.[4] This verse can either be translated: “I will not keep silence concerning its limbs, or its mighty strength, or its splendid frame” or “Did I not silence his boastings, his mighty word, and his persuasive case?” Whose boastings, mighty word, and persuasive case has God silenced in his speech? Job, or we could say humanity in general. The greatest monster of all is humanity. Everything that God has to say about the terror of the Leviathan is true about what human civilization has done to creation.

If I’m going out on a limb to say this, then Thomas Hobbes went out on the same limb when he used the name Leviathan (which he said he got from the book of Job) for his treatise about humanity’s desperate need for civilization and the social contract. Hobbes is actually on the opposite side of the argument as God. Hobbes’ negative view of nature as a wild force to be subdued and conquered by civilization is a key cornerstone of the Enlightenment philosophy that created the phenomenon of “whiteness” in our world. Before Europe gave itself the moral duty of civilizing the world, they may have fought wars with people from other nations with different colored skin, but they didn’t see them as sub-human animals to be used for slavery. Before the Enlightenment, people had nationalities but they didn’t have races. The racial way of talking about humanity is a product of dividing the world between the civilized “whites” and uncivilized “blacks.” It was Europe’s quest to build Hobbes’ Leviathan that resulted in the colonialism, slavery, and empire of the past half-millennium.