One of the many, if rare, joys of teaching for a living is a phenomenon I have come to call the “lecturer’s lightning.” It is that glorious and wholly unbidden moment when, in the course of expounding some text for the umpteenth time, a sudden thunderbolt of insight descends, and an all-too-familiar intellectual landscape is abruptly bathed in a revelatory glow. Such moments are, I confess, a tad discombobulating for all concerned. Students tend to glance over in alarm when their professor arrests himself mid-flow, stares in grateful wonder at some distant horizon visible to him alone, and emits a restrained yet involuntary yelp of joy. Yet the momentary embarrassment of this occasion pales beside the quiet exhilaration of the thing itself.
I was visited by just such a bolt this past week while teaching the book of Job. Even for those exceedingly familiar with this work, its power to perturb, bewilder, and ensorcell its readers never flags. Job’s preternaturally perfect piety; the infamous wager struck between God and Satan; the cascade of catastrophes; Job’s unspeakable suffering; the three friends, who slide imperceptibly from comforters into accusers; Job’s dogged insistence that he has been grievously wronged; God’s whirlwind of (rather opaque) revelations; the deeply ambiguous ending. Even for those of us who have read, taught, and written at length about this labyrinthine text, it demands renewed attention, and no small steeling of the nerves, at every fresh visit. On this occasion, however, the lightning struck precisely when I least expected it, as I was glossing the lines of perhaps the most maligned figure in the entire book: Job’s wife.