A peace pie and Bible blegging

A peace pie and Bible blegging May 24, 2010

Consider this an early Monday open thread.

I'm told some of the current comment threads have gotten a bit tense, and while I don't know what the issue(s) of contention is/are, I'm confident it's not pie. Who doesn't like pie? Like this delicious-looking blueberry pie, for example —

BlueberryPie

— blueberry pie may be the tastiest form of conflict resolution there is.

Also, without wanting to impose any restrictions or enforced topics on this hopefully conciliatory peace-pie open thread, I do have a question for the all-knowing hive-mind of the blogosphere:

I've mentioned here once or twice before my theory that the book of Job is actually a play. The book is written in dialogue — or at least as a series of
monologues, not unusual in drama in the ancient world. After a bit of
introduction from the chorus, the players take the stage and speak in
verse until finally the story ends with a deus ex machina (heavy on the
Deus). That sure seems like a play to me.

While repeated readings of that book have increased my enthusiasm and fondness for this theory, I haven't encountered much written elsewhere to support (or refute) the idea. I did learn, thanks to Yonni Oppenheim, a theater director in New York, that the 16th-century Jewish Italian playwright Yehuda Sommo defended his own role in the theater by arguing that Job is the oldest recorded drama (and, further, that it influenced the early drama of Greece). Sommo, whom I confess I'd never heard of before, seems to be a fascinating figure, but his Dialogues on the Art of the Stage is apparently A) massive, B) not readily available in English translation, and C) not a work that has had great influence on the subsequent centuries of study of the book of Job (unless we count Archibald MacLeish as a biblical scholar).

So, if anyone can point me toward any other arguments for or against this reading of Job, I'd be grateful. Thanks.


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