16 MICHAEL V. FOX blessed and godforsaken” and associate God with the creatures of “the fearful beyond” 52. Yet few of the creatures in the Theophany are frightening, and as for those that are, such as the lion, God is “associ- ated” with them in Ps 104,21 and elsewhere. In the Theophany, the threat posed by Behemoth and Leviathan has been deliberately toned down. In fact, the Theophany does the opposite of what Newsom says. It describes much order and little chaos, and it claims that blessing is found even well outside civilization, not that it is absent within it. The three features of the Theophany that Newsom lists in no way show its worldview to be incompatible with that of Psalm 104. God does describe a moral order, even without addressing the question of justice directly. The creation and maintenance of a beau- tiful and well-functioning universe is a moral act, one whose traces Job can see, just as we can see the traces of the Big Bang in mi- crowave radiation. An Egyptian, I think, would have understood this moral order as Maʽat, which is both a well-ordered cosmos and a moral order, one in which aesthetics testify to ethics. IX. The Theophany The world God describes is good, and (by extension) mankind is well provided for, but what about justice? First of all, nothing God says implies the absence of retribution. In fact, YHWH does say that the wicked are punished. The result clause in 38,13 shows why God summons the dawn: “so as to seize the skirts of the earth, that the wicked may be shaken out of it”. Verse 14 is unclear, but the result in v. 15 is “that light be withheld from the wicked and the arrogant arm be broken”. Since v. 13 is something that YHWH actually and regularly does, the result clause too must mark an actual deed. Also, in 40,9-13 YHWH challenges Job to punish the wicked. According to Tsevat, “God and Job know that he [Job] cannot possibly do these things; it is not in the plan, not in the plan for the wicked to be punished” 53. But this reading runs contrary to the logic of the other rhetorical chal- lenges, which adduce acts that Job does not do but that God can and usually does perform 54. And since God can and does command the NEWSOM, Book of Job, 245. 52 TSEVAT, “Meaning”, 99. 53 The exception is Job 40,25-31, where the questions do refer to something 54 © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati