ABSTRACT
Saadiah Gaon headed the Talmudic academy of Sura, relocated by his time to the Abbasid metropolis of Baghdad. Such knowledge would trivialize Job's sufferings and undercut the moral significance of his refusal to renounce his integrity. The structure offers additional temptations to evade or downplay the central problem. In particular, and unlike many a cursory reader, Saadiah does not stop at the prose frame tale that embeds the higher register of the book's poetic dialogue. Dissatisfied by his would-be comforters readiness to blame the victim, Job calls them framers of falsehood, quick to exonerate God by denying their friend's innocence. According to Saadiah, God's munificence by a kind of moral necessarity extends to recompense in the hereafter, not just in deference to rabbinic precedent but to flesh out and complete the argument for divine justice that he finds in Elihu's speeches as a spokesman for all monotheists.
