From early on, I was intrigued — and puzzled — by the book of Job. Questions abounded. How did such a simple, folkloric framework get paired with such a deep, reflective dialogue? How did such a startling and candid exploration of the human condition get chosen for the Hebrew canon? Does the picture of God in either the framework or the Voice in the Whirlwind support or defy the conventional Hebrew (or Christian) concepts of divine power and compassion? How does Elihu relate to the three “friends” of Job? Does Job really say, “I know that my Redeemer lives,” and, if so, what does he mean?

Even as an undergraduate I envisioned the experience of Job as the basis of a play in modern dress, but I couldn’t get a handle on it and had to give up. Archibald MacLeish beat me to it with the Broadway production of J.B. (q.v.). I saw it once with Christopher Plummer and Raymond Massey, one of the first Broadway plays I got to experience.

As an English teacher in high school and college, I sought opportunities to explore Job as a literary text and the source of literary allusions and adaptations. The Voice out of the Whirlwind: The Book of Job, edited by Ralph E. Hone (Chandler, 1960) provided a collection of materials for analysis, including the book in the King James translation, commentary, sermons, some literary interpretations of Job, Robert Frost’s Masque of Reason (a dramatic interpretation), and eight reviews of J. B. by critics and theologians. However, it was not until I discovered the Job of William Blake, his quotations, his illustrations, his unified work, that I began to see some of what lay behind the power of the poetry and the majesty of the vision. My commentary on Blake’s work is one of my publications with which I am most pleased. (See “Text and Design in Illustrations of the Book of Job,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, edited by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant, Princeton U, 1970.) I will not repeat those comments in this review, at least not in any detail.

Damon traces the history of the poet’s interest in Job:

“Blake’s early and prolonged interest in the trials of Job is proved by a variety of drawings, paintings, engravings, quotations, and comments, starting about 1785. . . . About 1820 he made for Thomas Butts the first set of water colors illustrating the entire book. In 1821 he made a second set for John Linnell, and then a third smaller set for one of Linnell’s pupils. The engravings, which are reproduced [in this volume] in full scale, were then commissioned by Linnell. They are dated March 8, 1825.” Blake died August 12, 1827.

Though I have had the privilege of seeing Blake’s engravings more than once, the reproductions in Blake’s Job (Brown U, 1966) are remarkably authentic. S. Foster Damon’s introduction and commentary are interesting, often illuminating, sometimes provocative. Damon traces the history of the poet’s interest in Job:

“Blake’s early and prolonged interest in the trials of Job is proved by a variety of drawings, paintings, engravings, quotations, and comments, starting about 1785. . . . About 1820 he made for Thomas Butts the first set of water colors illustrating the entire book. In 1821 he made a second set for John Linnell, and then a third smaller set for one of Linnell’s pupils. The engravings, which are reproduced [in this volume] in full scale, were then commissioned by Linnell. They are dated March 8, 1825.” Blake died xxxx, working to the very last on his illustrations to Dante. One might think of his Job as a culminating production for him, a final realization of his vision, his ultimate triumph.

Blake’s reading and rendering of Job, Damon reminds us, is parallel to his account of the sufferings of Albion in The Four Zoas, indeed also of inner tensions he felt in himself, in the England of his day, in all humankind. “In fact, the whole drama is enacted in Job’s soul,” Damon explains. “His wife is part of him, his inspiration, his feminine aspect (which Blake called an Emanation), who shares his errors. His children are his creations, his deeds, his joys. The accusing friends are also part of him, as they speak for his submerged sense of guilt. His devil is the Accuser within him, and even his God is his own creation, his own ideal, made in his image, his Selfhood, and not the true God at all.”

In other words, Job has created a god in a conventional, human image: authoritarian, legalistic, judgmental, overbearing, vengeful, macho, insensitive to his creative genius and to his feminine side. As Damon points out. Blake instructs us in his first illustration that we should read the book of Job not as literal history or biography, but as a spiritual vision. He uses scriptural references to accomplish this: “The Letter killeth, The Spirit giveth Life” (II Corinthians 3.6) “It is Spiritually Discerned” (I Corinthians 2.14). In all twenty-one plates the illustrations are bordered with intricate designs, each enclosing scriptures both from the book of Job and from other sources in both testaments.

However, it is the illustrations that I will focus on in this review. Four of them provide anchor points for understanding the movement of his narrative: plates 1, 2, 11, and 21. The first are family portraits before and after the sufferings; pl. 11 depicts Job at the nadir of his experience; and pl. 2 marks the defining point of the trial, Satan’s intercession between Job and his God. What’s important in this is that Job and his God are clearly identical: one and the same. Both are ancients, bearded patriarchs; both are seated, enthroned, as it were; both are focused on the Book of the Law, as are their submissive subjects. The scriptures in the top of the frame are so spaced as to suggest the interwoven identities: “I beheld the Ancient of Days” “Hast thou considered my Servant Job” “The Angel of the Divine Presence” “I shall see God” “Thou art our Father” [Job is clearly pictured as the Father of his family, or clan] “We shall awake up . . . in thy Likeness.”

In the first family portrait, Job and his wife are seated under their Tree of Life, with their seven sons and three daughters kneeling before them. Here, also, they are focused on the Book of the Law (in Blake’s symbology, such books tended to be sinister; scrolls were more beneficent). Their musical instruments are hanging up, unused. In the background, on Job’s right hand, a temple with multiple sharp pointed spires sits in the light of a blazing sun; on his left, a stone or mountain and his shepherds’ tents sit in shadows, under a waning moon and one star. Damon calls this “the pastoral state of Innocence.” Clearly it is a family’s vespers.

In the corresponding plate at the end, Job and his whole family are standing, under the Tree of Life, playing their musical instruments. The three daughters represent the Arts: music poetry, and visual art (like Blake’s illuminated books, quite different from the heavy Book of the Law). In the background, on their right, are a new moon and two stars; no Gothic temple. To the right, is a bright rising son (a Glad New Day), with no imposing stone. Even the ram and the ewe are alert, and their lambs are beginning to wake. In the top of the framework, the scriptural references are the words to the songs they are singing, the song of Moses and the Lamb from Revelation 15.3: “Great & Marvellous are thy Works Lord God Almighty . . . Just & True are they Ways O thou King of Saints.” In small characters at the bottom engraved on a fiery altar are the words, “In burnt Offerings for Sin thou has had no pleasure.” Job has emerged from his sufferings, purged of his error, restored to a primal vision, a higher Innocence.

Plate 11 depicts the crisis: Job is prostrate (for the only time in the sequence); he is entwined in a serpent’s coils and surrounded by lightning above and flames below. His three “friends” are seen as holding him down, one approaching his head with heavy chains. Though he is attempting to avoid it. he is compelled to confront his tyrannical Selfhood, who is also his Ancient of Days with a cloven hoof. In Blake’s symbology, one must come face to face with one’s erroneous vision to be freed of it; hence, even one’s Accuser plays a positive role. “Opposition is true friendship” he has said in a proverb from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Experience must precede Higher Innocence, or one is caught in the naive, immature, unself-conscious innocence of childishness. Among the scriptures in the framework, two crucial ones are “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light & his Ministers into Ministers of Righteousness” “For I know that my Redeemer liveth . . . yet in my flesh shall I see God whom I shall see for myself . . . .”

But to concentrate solely on these four plates as structural keys is to miss the rich density of the whole sequence: for example, the horror of Satan’s destruction of the household (pl. 3), a triumphant Satan smiting Job with boils (pl. 6), the accusatory friends and complaining wife (pl. 10), the young, indignant Elihu addressing Job and his “friends” (pl. 12), the Voice out of the Whirlwind (p. 13), the glorious Morning Stars singing together (pl. 14), the recognition of Behemoth and Leviathan in their respective places (pl. 15), the redeemed Job rising in prayer, asking forgiveness of sins for his “friends” (pl. 18), and the restoration of Job’s daughters in a Palace of Art (pl 20). In all of these latter plates, Job embodies what he refers to as the Divine Image, or the Human Form Divine, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience: “Thou art a Man, God is no more / Thine own humanity learn to adore.”

Plate 14 (I think it may be the most triumphant one of all) deserves special comment, for it clearly presents one of Blake’s fourfold visions in its four quadrants. At the bottom Job, his wife, and his “friends” represent the five senses, or the Single Vision of sense perceptions. The two side quadrants represent Reason (the steeds of the sun with a male driver) and Passion (the serpents of the moon driven by a female), or Twofold and Threefold Vision. The dominant upper quadrant, an unending line of angels (the morning stars singing together), represents Imagination or Fourfold Vision. Note that we see four angels with our human vision, but we know they are Infinite in number; note, too, that this is plate 14, or the last of the second seven in a total of twenty-one.) Among other things, the framework pictures the six days of creation, with the central design, of course, standing for the bountiful harvest, the true Sabbath. One wants to shout Hallelujah! And join in the singing. ( )

From the commentary for illustration XIV: When the morning Stars sang together, & all the Sons of God shouted for joy

"The mystical ecstasy is a state of knowledge as well as emotion, but the knowledge is usually so profound as to be incommunicable afterward. Blake, however, possessed two arts with which to capture and define the wisdom obtained from such experience. The vision of the universe, which appears in this illustration, is an aspect of Job's experience with the Whirlwind.
"This universe is the fourfold soul of man: the flesh, the brain, the heart, and the imagination. Lowest is the world of flesh, wherein Job sits with his wife and friends; they are shut in by the thickest of the cloud-barriers. Above them to the left is the Greek god Apollo, who represents the intellect. The radiant sun god, drawn by the horses of instruction, endeavors perpetually to push back the clouds enclosing this world, thus enlarging it. Balancing him on the right is the moon goddess Diana, the heart. Her purity guides the dragons of passion in the night of Beulah (marriage). Highest of all is the realm of the imagination, enclosed by the thinnest of the cloud-barriers. It is separated from the others by a small space, which expands into other empty spaces, suggesting that there are worlds in the human soul as yet unknown." pg. 38

from the preface: "Publisher's Note"
"...by the time Blake produced the first complete set of watercolors illustrating the Book of Job (ca. 1818), the subject had been in his consciousness for over thirty years, and toward the end of this period he had, like Job, gone through considerable trial. After the failure of his exhibition of 1809, upon which he had pinned great hopes, the artist had sunk into a long period of almost total obscurity, neglect and indigency. It was only in 1818, when Blake made the acquaintance of the young artist John Linnell (1792-1882), that he found himself in more encouraging circumstances. Linnell introduced him to a circle of young artists named The Ancients, who paid him the attention he deserved.
"The watercolor series illustrating the Book of Job was sold ... to Thomas Butts... It was Blake's hope that people to whom Butts showed his set would order copies from Blake, but no such commissions were forthcoming.....
"...Blake's style held little appeal for the general public, which found it 'dry,' and the artist remained known only by a small circle of artists and connoisseurs until the early twentieth century." (pg. iii)

"Blake's treatment of the Book of Job should be regarded as an interpretation rather than a simple attempt at illustration. The artist depicts an internal struggle, hence the similarity between the figures of God and Job.... The symbolism by which Blake expresses his view is complex, and necessitates a full background in the artist's iconography." (pg. iv)