The Book of Job in Form

The Book of Job in Form presents to the reader a platform for a personal and intensive encounter with a great work of art. Its bilingual centre offers the text in Hebrew and English, and shows the forty poems in their original form, in 412 strophes and 165 stanzas. The commentary points out how these proportions and the remarkable precision of the poet (who counted syllables on all text levels) affect the thematics of the book, so that the portrait of the hero can be redrawn; his stubbornly defended integrity meets vindication and his last words, generally misunderstood, require a positive understanding. The poetry and its slim framework in prose are a unified composition which deserves a synchronic approach.

Jan Fokkelman, Ph.D. (1973), Leiden University, now retired, taught Hebrew and Aramaic between 1963 and 2001, and wrote two tetralogies: on the Books of Samuel and on Psalms + Job.