Karen Feldman

For more than two millennia, the Book of Job has stirred moral provocation in its readers. As God begins to doubt the genuineness of Job’s piety, Job loses his health, wealth, children, and status. The figure of Job has long stood for the virtues of faith and obedience, but also for guilt, punishment, reward, and human frailty. While many interpretations seek to justify God’s role in suffering, others take an anti-theodicial approach – rejecting the idea that suffering must be made meaningful or morally justified. Immanuel Kant highlights Job’s sincerity over divine justice, and centuries later Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Jaspers likewise read the text as resisting theological consolation. More recent readings cast Job as a social allegory of scapegoating, a critique of capitalism, a feminist parable, or a psychological drama. How is it possible that interpreters draw such wildly different morals from the same story? In this talk, Karen Feldman looks to the diverse interpretations of the Book of Job to illuminate the formation of moral opinions and the imposition of moral lenses upon stories of hardship and suffering.

Karen Feldman is Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. At the Academy, Feldman is working on a book project entitled “The Rhetoric of Moralizing: On Affect, Epistemology, and ‘Knowing Better.’” The project considers the rhetorical, epistemic, and affective dimensions of moralizing, which she describes as “an appeal to right principles and the certainty of one’s own judgment, couched in a typically high-handed affective mode.”

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