ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the body in the book of Job and the connection between the main character’s body and the social world. It specifically addresses the matter of social status and the ways in which ideas about the social order are symbolically structured around bodies and their boundaries. The chapter highlights Job’s defiance in response to his friends as expressed not only through melodramatic metaphors of deity attack and deity surveillance but also through his challenge to their versions of Yahwism which abound with theorising but lack compassion. The chapter discusses the comical and tragic aspects of the breakdown of Job’s social universe and the full-blown hyperbole embedded within Job’s calamitous language.
