Original scientific paper
Job ‒ a Victim of his People. Girard’s Interpretation of the Book of Job
Hrvoje Petrušić
orcid.org/0000-0002-9471-2273
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Split
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to outline the main features of Girard’s interpretation of the Bible in the example of the Book of Job. Of course, we will also use the author’s other fundamental works, but only to supplement and explain the theses he presents in the mentioned book. We will show the specifics of Girard’s hermeneutics and its key in order to compare the basic tenets of the author’s anthropological interpretation of biblical texts with myths as a paradigm of persecutory text. We hold that it is interesting to realize to what degree Girard remains faithful to the text trying to use it to confirm his own ideas that imitation of other people’s wishes can be the source of violence, which is carried out within collective mechanisms, then mythologically legitimized, converted into a cult, and finally, through the Bible, unmasked and, moreover, fully demythologized. We pay special attention to the theme of the scapegoat in Girard’s work, in order to bring closer the reflexive context in which he is developing his work about Job. We briefly present the author’s analysis of the relation between the truth and myth, and then move on to the main subject of the paper – interpretation of the Book of Job as a paradigm of mimetic collapse, i.e. inefficiency of mechanism of the scapegoat. The Book of Job, along with the Gospels, hides a considerable potential for unmasking those mechanisms that Girard’s generative anthropology holds to be essential in justifying and launching the various forms of violence in society.
Keywords
Girard; myth; mimetism of violence; Job; scapegoat; biblical hermeneutics
Hrčak ID:
127855
URI
Publication date:
15.7.2014.
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