Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 1:xlix.
The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together. What we have, then, in the Five Books is a work assembled by many hands, reflecting several different viewpoints, and representing literary activity that spanned several centuries. The redacted whole nevertheless creates some sense of continuity and development, and it allows itself to be read as a forward-moving process through time and theme from book to book, yielding an overarching literary structure we can call, in the singular version of the title, the Torah. The Torah exhibits seams, fissures, and inner tensions that cannot be ignored, but it has also been artfully assembled through the ancient editorial process to cohere strongly as the foundational text of Israelite life and the cornerstone of the biblical canon.
The Amateur Exegete 
“The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together.“
Exactly. In the Ancient Near East, the practice of appropriating, re-working, and incorporating existing material into newer works was neither scandalous nor all that rare–particularly with regard to lengthy texts conveying narratives of historical, political, cultural, or religious importance to the learned minds doing the redacting at a given point in time. Jeffrey Tigay’s The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic provides a case study of this phenomenon, for which we have a good deal of extant, contemporaneous evidence.
And of course we see the composite approach playing out even between different texts within the Hebrew Bible itself. Perhaps most conspicuously, the books of Chronicles incorporate not just general information but also specific, verbatim statements and passages from Kings and elsewhere. This form of literary recycling occurred with some frequency in antiquity, and displayed more than a little skill.
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I’ve not read Tigay’s work. I may need to grab a copy.
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Hi Ben, I know I’ve been persistent and I apologize, but I really wanted to hear your opinion on this possible weakness in Kloppenborg’s argument: that the “evil” in Job is not the same kind of “evil” to which James refers.
In Job — within the conceptual framework of the Ancient Near East — raʿâ refers primarily to external calamity or experiential suffering, not a moral category. James, however, is dealing with an internal moral temptation. Wouldn’t mixing these categories be anachronistic and create a false contradiction? Wouldn’t this be a case of illegitimate totality transfer?
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I think that James is reacting to a common understanding about God that presented him as one who tempts people to do evil, no doubt as some kind of test. Perhaps he has heard someone say, “I am being tempted by God” (James 1:13) or he is inventing the language on the basis of interaction with those in his community or in reading certain ancient Jewish texts. James offers a departure from this view, something to which Kloppenborg (though not he alone) draws attention.
As already noted in another comment, many ancient Jewish texts provided a way to lay at God’s feet temptation. Job is an excellent example of this because God, via the satan, is trying to cause Job to commit sin. Job is described by the book’s author/redactor as a morally blameless person (Job 1:1), and so the issue at hand is whether Job would be willing to curse God should all the blessings he has received, including his children and his health, be taken away. Would he, in the words of Job’s wife, retain his integrity? It turns out, yes. But this, to me, is clearly an example of God tempting someone to do evil, e.g., curse God. And that is something James denies.
Now, I’m not saying that James rejects Job because he clearly finds in him an example of great patience (James 5:11). It is possible that the author of James in his reading of Job had turned the satan into Satan, the demon par excellence, and so could divorce God from what happened to Job by appealing to a secondary, independent agent who was in all things nefarious. That’s reception history, of course, and not authorial intent (for what it’s worth). Job’s satan is not the figure from later Jewish and Christian history. But by the time James wrote his letter the figure of Satan had already been developed.
Moreover, as Dale Allison points out in his commentary on James, vv. 13-15 seem to be offering a response to a misunderstanding of v. 12. “If temptation is a blessing (v. 12), then God, it would seem, must do evil that good may come” (p. 237). Allison then points to various texts that could easily accommodate such a view. “For James, the inference is faulty,” Allison concludes (p. 238). He explains that in post-exilic Judaism there was a tendency “to disassociate God altogether from all evil” (p. 237).
James, then, is reacting, rightly or wrongly, to certain interpretations of texts in his tradition. It would be lovely if he explained himself better, especially as it pertains to Job, but he doesn’t. But on a fair reading of Job, it seems clear he disagrees with what the text implies, namely that God does tempt people to do evil. Whether we are speaking of “outside calamity” or “internal moral temptation” is, in my mind, irrelevant. One is tempted to do something, not merely stew over it, a point James makes in vv. 14-15. That is, it is the outcome that matters. One can turn temptation into a vehicle for endurance (James 1:2-4) or turn into an occasion to sin (James 1:14-15). What James denies is that is God who is the fountainhead of temptation.
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I am not sure I understood you correctly, but the impression I got is that you take Job to mean that God deliberately wanted Job to sin as the ultimate goal when you say “God does tempt people to do evil.” Please correct me if I am mistaken, but if that is what you mean, it seems excessive to me and goes beyond what the text actually says. God’s objective was not to make Job sin, but to see whether he would remain faithful.
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Appreciate what you are saying, but I think that when James (or whoever wrote the epistle) discusses “temptations” or “trials”, he is referring to situations that could potentially result in a person committing sin regardless of the result. James probably would not have questioned that God wants people to avoid evil but is instead taking issue with the idea that God could have been the agent behind or the cause of situations that might incline people to sin in the first place.
Even if Job was being tested to affirm his righteousness, for James, it seems he was still being put in a situation where his “sinful” human nature could manifest itself by acting wrongfully (as long as the author of the epistle has the same view as someone like Paul that there is innate sinful desire in each person). For the biblical authors generally, a “trial” or “test” seems to require an external circumstance that might incite a person with their sinful nature to do wrong (although the person can presumably overcome it based on something like character or volition). However, without the trial or test occurring, there would be one less cause for a person to sin in a situation or it would seem less likely for them to be able to add additional sin to their record (figuratively speaking), so there seems to be underlying tension between the notion of God’s wish for people to not sin and providing them with situations where they would be likely to do wrong.
While the prologue of Job has the Satan’s suggestion that Job might behave wrongfully if he was faced with calamity as the initial prompt for the events that follow, Job 42:11 ultimately attributes the cause of the test to God (even if through the intermediary.)
After thinking about it, I wonder if one of two motivations might be behind the line of thought in James 1 if he trying to dispute certain ideas or implications in the Old Testament:
1. James wanted to affirm that Job did right in not explicitly blaming God or cursing when presented with calamity, but took issue with the implication in the conclusion to the earlier book that God really was finally responsible for what happened and Job simply wasn’t supposed to react negatively to this fact. He wanted the protagonist of the story to be serve as a Christian model but felt the need to assure believers that they didn’t have to merely ignore God’s role in temptation because he wasn’t responsible for their trials to begin with.
2. The stated motivation for the test of Job in the original account was that God (at the Satan’s suggestion) wanted to know how Job would behave when presented with an adverse situation in the form of calamity, loss of family, etc. James and later authors might have affirmed God’s omniscience would have rendered Job’s testing pointless if he already knew how he would behave in a given situation or how anyone else would react. He needed a new reason for trials and tests in the lives of righteous believers: to build character or “endurance.”
Again, this is just my perspective and apologies if I misunderstood your post or Ben’s. In the above view, the contradiction between certain Old Testament passages (like Job) and James would be more implied or result from differing perspectives than explicitly stated as such. (I looked over James 1 and might add to this post later on.)
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