oa Het gelijk van Job

In the course of history, many Old Testament books underwent revision before reaching their final form and, eventually, being canonized. For the most part, these transformations and interpolations are too subtleto be detected clearly. Sometimes, however, these revisions are larger and quite obvious, and invite the critical question: does the final version of a book represent the best text? This is not simply a question of literary or linguistic analysis; it is also one as to why the revision was made at all. This applies to the Book of Job. In the later chapters of this book the structure of the original debate becomes rather disproportional. Two large interpolations turn the book from a classic wisdom dispute into a kind of extended theodicy: the monologue(s) of Elihu (Job 32-37) and most probably the following ‘answer(s) from the storm’ (Job 38-39, 40:10-41:25). The latter passages seem to constitutea compilation of fragments from a once-separate wisdom poem, a kind of bestiary devoted to natural phenomena and the animal world. I claim that detecting the different theological layers and revisions in Job may help us to reconstruct the form and nature of the original wisdom debate.