The Poetics and Politics of Theodicy

If Exodus was the paradigm of revolutionary politics in the seventeenth century, Job was the book that most resonated in the Enlightenment, a period when political, aesthetic, and religious ambitions far exceeded their real powers. Poetry emerged as a central concern at precisely the moment when these limitations were realized, both as a vehicle for recuperating the Biblical text and for imagining a certain divine and political order. Job's theodicy provided a meeting ground for an entwined poetics and politics during the Enlightenment and, this essay suggests, today as well. The Enlightenment, I suggest, illuminates that version of Biblical poetry articulated by Robert Alter, backlighting it to show some of the political implications of a poetic Bible.