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  • Writer's pictureRyan M Armstrong

Available Now! Book of Job in Wonderland

I'm excited to announce the release of my first book, The Book of Job in Wonderland: Making (Non)Sense of Job's Mediators (Oxford University Press, 2024)! directly from OUP or from Amazon, and you can see a preview on Google Books. To anyone in the Oklahoma area, Full Circle Bookstore is hosting me for a book launch and signing on October 19, 3pm! OSU's Professor Edward Jones will be in conversation with me about the work. Dr. Jones is a prolific scholar of John Milton and teaches Bible as Literature. We'll talk about biblical and British literature and take questions from the audience. Come by and meet me and my family!


Please consider including a book review in your journal, podcast, or even for Amazon and Goodreads! You can request a journal/podcast review copy here. I truly hope this book inspires dialogue about the book of Job, comparative literature, theology, and language. Please let me know in the "Contact" section on the homepage if my book leaves an impact on you. I've found comfort in the book of Job while writing this book, and I'd love to know when it connects with others.


My book focuses primarily on the theme of mediation in the book of Job. This has long fascinated me, along with most readers of Job throughout history. Job famously calls for an adjudicator who can stand between him and God so he's not terrified when he presents his case to the Almighty (Job 9:32-33) and declares that his redeemer lives (19:25). Rabbis, theologians, and artists have been curious about this, but I started asking about other forms of mediation in the book. The book opens with Job mediating for his children--and it doesn't work. But it closes with him successfully mediating for his friends. Along the way, he accuses his friends of being terrible mediators, even citing Levitical laws against them! (For more on this, see my post at OUPblog). Elihu, a 4th friend who comes out of nowhere, performs a long, 2-chapter poem about being Job's mediator (chs. 32-33). After all this talk about mediation, the un-mediation stands out during God and Job's final dialogue (chs. 38-42).


Along the way, I took notice of parallels with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (MacMillan, 1865). The tales of both Job and Alice are told within frame tales, where an ordinary day goes topsy-turvy, and they return to ordinary life at the end. Within the frame tales are a series of debates about language, logic, and justice. Both contain poems with word coinages and wordplays. And both culminate in an epic trial that makes them rethink their most basic beliefs. The King of Hearts acts like the friends: He's supposed to be an objective mediator for the Trial of the Knave of Hearts, but he only sides with the Queen because she's so scary. Wonderland's Gryphon acts like Elihu by defending the Queen during an interlude of comic relief. Job's description of God sounds like Wonderland's Queen of Hearts, who is eagerly looking for an excuse to punish (Job 9:30-31). The Queen and God are both depicted as "thunderstorms."


I always try to read the Bible in conversation with history's interpreters. The commentary attributed to the Medieval commentator Rashbam influenced my understanding of the friends' mediation. 18th-century Christian minister Albert Schultens got me thinking about a new interpretation of God's dialogue with Job, but it didn't really click until I combined it with an interpretation attributed to the 12th-century Jewish rabbi, Joseph Kara. Artists are sometimes more in tune with the disappearance of God than Bible scholars. William Blake's famous paintings show God completely separate from Job, then brings the divine and human realms together inch-by-inch until Job and God are face to face.


I look forward to having many conversations as this book opens new dialogue! To everyone reading this: Thank you for being part of my journey through Uz and Wonderland!

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