Unlocking the Sublime Poetry of Job

Modern readers tend to think of Job as a philosophical work, a biblical version of a platonic dialogue where characters debate life’s most profound questions. But anyone who attempts to read it in Hebrew knows immediately that it is also a work of poetry—as evidenced, in part, by its rarefied vocabulary and often-confounding syntax. Robert Alter deems its author not only “the greatest of all biblical poets,” but “one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world.” He writes: