The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job (review)

604 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER 1992 Saadia Ben Joseph AI-Fayyumi. The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentaryon the BookofJob. Translated by L. E. Goodman. Yale Judaica Series, Volume XXV. New Haven: Yale University Press, ~988. Pp. xvii + 481. Cloth, $75.oo. The Yale Judaica Series has long had an excellent reputation for presenting quality translations of classicJudaica to an English-speaking audience. Volume I of this series was Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefi and Opinions, the first major work of Jewish philosophy written in the Middle Ages. The tenth-century Saadia Ben Joseph AI-Fayyumi, known as a Gaon (head of the Rabbinical Academy in Iraq), was a seminal thinker, known for his philosophy, philology, legal opinions, calendrical studies, exegesis, grammar , and polemics. It was only fitting, therefore, that the Yale Judaica Series begin with his principal philosophical composition. Volume XXV of the series is devoted to Saadia's Translation and Commentaryon theBook ofJob. This work is especially.difficult to transpose into English, since it requires a translation of a translation (Saadia's Arabic version of the Hebrew original) as well as a commentary based upon that translation. In this volume, Lenn E. Goodman has faithfully rendered Saadia's Arabic into a pellucid, idiomatic English, composed a comprehensive introduction, and added valuable notes. He has, thereby, performed a yeoman's job in maintaining the high level established by his predecessors in this series. Saadia's Commenta~ onJob was the first in a series ofJewish philosophical interpretations of this enigmatic biblical masterpiece, a tradition followed by such important thinkers as Maimonides and Gersonides. ~The Commentary is a product not only of the Jewish tradition, but also, to a great extent, of Saadia's Islamic environment; and its theodicy derives much from the Kalam and from Islamic teachings concerning Job and his sufferings. A successful presentation of this work in English requires a translator who is perfectly comfortable with the Jewish and Islamic cultural milieus, is quite sensitive to nuances of language and semantics, both in Hebrew and Arabic, and is conversant with the philosophical and theological issues involved in theodicy. Lenn Goodman combines all of these qualities, making for a very effective English rendering of Saadia's composition, while at the same time placing it within an appropriate intellectual framework. Despite the obvious strengths of Goodman's exposition of Saadia's translation of and commentary to Job, some reservations persist. This book is overrich in some places and impoverished in others. Thus, Goodman often lets his fertile mind run wild, adducing illustrative material to Saadia's work not only from compositions Saadia may have known (Jewish, Greek, or Islamic), but also from such diverse authors as Hume, Kant, Copernicus, Marsilio Ficino, and AIonso de la Vera Cruz, a sixteenth-century jurist who wrote about the rights of New World Indians. In addition, Goodman often engages in gratuitous editorializing. Thus, he claims that if, in relation to the almah passage of Is. 7:14, Christians had adopted "Saadia's method of using proof-texts to 1Goodman often refers to both authors; other important philosophical commentaries on Job, those of Yefet ben Eli the Karaite (tenth century) and Joseph Ibn Kaspi (early fourteenth century) are unjustifiably ignored. aOOK REVIEWS 605 establish the semantic parameters, endless confusion might have been forestalled" (297) . Is the Christian doctrine of virgin birth really dependent upon faulty semantics? Goodman further opines that Job should not be faulted for owning slaves, nor Saadia for being insensitive to that fact, because neither the author of Job nor Saadia "holds Job responsible for social offenses lying beyond the horizon of social consciousness accessible to a conscientious householder of Job's day" (164). One almost expects to be told that the suffering of Job was patently unfair despite his cruelty to animals, as evidenced by his offering them as sacrifices. Goodman's overwhelming erudition is evident on every page; the reader may have been better served by a small dose of selfrestraint ." If Goodman is overgenerous in his search for parallels and illustrative materials, he is quite sparse when it comes to textual information. The reader is informed only by a hint in the Preface...