ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the prevalence of the deity surveillance metaphor throughout the book of Job and the ways this contributed to Job’s symbolic protest against his friends’ ideas concerning retribution. It analyses the way that traditional forms are sarcastically reworked by Job in order to undermine the lack of empathy embedded within them. It also focuses on the role of irony in illness narratives and its role in deconstructing the space between what is said and what is left unsaid. The chapter discusses the use of Job’s body when discussing the question of suffering and how it raises epistemological questions through pitting traditional ‘wisdom’ against individual bodily experience. The comic and tragic nature of Job’s speech was noted, such as in the over-inflated comparison of himself with creatures of primordial chaos or the transition of the depiction of the deity from traditional forms as ‘guardian’ to ‘obsessive guard’ in Job’s language.
