Ancient Medical Knowledge & the Textualized Body of Job
THESIS #2 — Ancient Medical Knowledge and the Textualized Body of Job
by Ingrid Lilly
The text of Job reflects an ancient therapeutic, apotropaic project drawing on diverse kinds of medical knowledge: the exorcist’s knowledge of symptomatic signs and agencies of affliction, the physician’s knowledge of “natural” bodies and therapies, and the physiognomist’s knowledge of bodily omina and personal fate.
A summary appears below — see my full essay as presented in March, 2024.
“The human body was an important canvas for the ancient divination artist. Signs on the human body, sounds, utterances, and behaviours featured diversely in the extant omen literature. The boundaries between physiognomy and the registration of symptoms are blurred to a great extent.”
~Klaus Wagensonner, “If His Chin Is Constantly Slack…”
The more I read the book of Job,* the more I am convinced that the figure of Job does not repent — he is not a sapiential model of trust or faith in God. Rather, the figure of Job is a model of observational, medical, physiognomic wisdom who outsmarts and escapes God with the unwitting help of his “physician-friends.” I say unwitting because Job must actually escape a double bind — that is, Job is subject to two actors who drive his fate, both a God of brutal attack and untrustworthy scribes, qua friends, who would scathingly memorialize him in the eternal life of inscription.
*Of note, I recently prepared the study notes for the Book of Job in the Westminster Study Bible
The first bind is a well-known and famous litigation theme in the book of Job, that God is Job’s active assailant, that God is a compromised, criminal judge of Job’s case. But what has (to my knowledge) never been discussed is the depth to which this theme owes to both ancient diagnostic and physiognomic knowledge. God’s attack is a classic medical etiology of affliction, and God’s gaze and judgment is a classic framing of both medical and physiognomic interpretation. These ancient body discourses have never been fully brought to bear on our understanding of the “litigation” theme.
The second bind is not well-known. I cannot at this moment recall reading any scholarship that traces the book’s verbs of inscription, its drama of scribal technologies and materials, nor its main character’s terrified dread of a sullied, virtual afterlife. (If I have missed someone’s scholarship on this, I would like to know about it!) If we understand ancient afterlives to depend on ancestral commemoration and corporeal practices by children, and Job’s children have all been killed — Job represents the quintessentially anxious subject whose metamorphosis into a virtual, textualized body ensures eternal life — as long as he can outsmart the agents of inscription.
“Who has hardened into a god and remained uninjured? Who erodes the mountains? They do not know what transforms/transcribes them with its blazing nostril.”
Job 9:4–5
See my full essay as presented in March, 2024.
Image Credit(s)
Crinoid Fossil. Photograph from the British Geological Survey.