470 Philippe Guillaume – Michael Schunck restoration is seen as rewarding his piety rather than compensating his losses. Once the Prologue is recognized as depicting a foolish divine act, the holocausts of the Epilogue can be appreciated as a key element of the strategy to cope with folly. In the heavens, holocausts may pacify YHWH’s dangerous potentialities. On earth, they protect the wise men from accusations of impiety since tenets of wisdom including the possibility of divine folly are likely to appear as outright impiety to less enlightened minds. For folly is no divine prerogative; human folly is just as devastating. Imagine Job’s predicament if his friends had been judges in a religious court. Holocausts are thus the nexus of social mores and divine law. Whatever they actually do in heaven, holocausts are a safe, orthodox and socially accepted ceremony for the reintegration of all actors into conventional standards of behaviour. Finally, the holocausts comfort Job’s position as intercessor by underlining the distance between his righteousness and that of the audience, since it is not Job but his friends who are asked to offer them. What better sense of closure can be expected? (53) 7. Folly versus Theodicy Taking the Epilogue seriously invalidates claims that the Book of Job is an anthology of a variety of perspectives which does not resolve the tensions among them (54). Rather than merely restoring Job to his previous position, the end elevates Job to the traditional role of intercessor he holds in Ezekiel 14. Job’s wealth is compensated while his physical ailments continue, creating a potential for identification for fellow sufferers. YHWH’s potential folly renders Job’s intercession vital. Although the single occurrence of divine folly is safely tucked away in the long verse 8, it integrates divine folly as one of YHWH’s attributes in order to account for the persistence of evil in the world (55). Human wisdom needs divine folly to account for misfortunes that do not fit the pattern (53) SPIECKERMANN, “Satanisierung”, sets the end of the book at verse 7 has to consider that the book closes with unresolved ambivalence precisely because he misses the mention of folly at verse 8. (54) As claimed by Y. HOFFMANN, A Blemished Perfection. The Book of Job in Context (JSOTSS 213; Sheffield 1996) 109-114. (55) M. SNEED, “‘White Trash’ Wisdom: Proverbs 9 Deconstructed”, JHS 7 (2007) available at demon- strates how Lady Folly enables the very existence of Lady Wisdom.