The Jobean Apophatic and the Symphonic Unknowability of the World

This chapter addresses the early modern understanding of the Book of Job as a text enmeshed in, indeed at the centre of, how creation might be reckoned. Job was the chaotic and raucous twin of Genesis, a text that described in its whirlwind theophany what happened at the origins of the universe, not as the orderly sequential unfolding of events, but rather an anti-creation narrative; not what happened, but the insufficiency of humans to grasp its complexity. It attends to the presence of the metaleptic in Job—the connective chains in which logic, both God’s and Job’s, unfurled. As such, the book of Job served as a testament and model of the unintelligible, the apophatic and the symphonic unknowability of the world. The chapter addresses the breadth of early modern reference to Job, the numerous ‘paraphrases’ and prose renderings of its ‘argument’, its place in creation narratives, not least Lucy Hutchinson’s, and the annotative and commentary tradition attending to how the book’s turbulent poetics systematically undoes any human logic, and which produces a thoroughgoing nescience.