The Goad of God/the Mode of the Mob

Reading Rene Girard’s Job: The Victim of His People, Part 1

The Error of a Social Vision of God

“The three friends could not believe as they do in the culpability of Job and all previous scapegoats without believing equally in an absolute justice that always triumphs in the world. The two are one and the same. All those whom the whole community perceives to be guilty are in fact punished.” —Rene Girard, Job: The Victim of His People (p. 122).

Girard’s take on the book of Job is that the prologue and the epilogue are there to disguise the book’s meaning: that it is about the scapegoating of an innocent by the community, or mob. This is predicated on that mob’s idea of a persecuting God who values the things of men to the degree that he rewards virtue and punishes evil in worldly or visible terms.

This is why Job’s “friends” must insist on Job’s guilt. Because, were he innocent, their entire worldview—and along with it, the god at its center—would collapse.

The book of Job shows the error of a human (social) vision of God that runs through the Old Testament, one that is even present at times in the New Testament, including James’ conventionally erroneous idea of “the patience of Job” (James, 5:11).¹