JOB & JERUSALEM

Illustrations to the Book of Job

Linnell Set
Image 17

Now my Eye seeth thee

Job 42
[1] Then Job answered the LORD, and said,
[2] I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.
[3] Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
[4] Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
[5] I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.
[6] Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. 

 

From Larry Clayton's Ram Horn'd with Gold, Chapter 6 - Bible 

Job and Jerusalem

       If Ezekiel and Revelation are the most symbolic books of the Bible, Job is the most poetic and indirect. It's significance lies not in its theological statements, but in the questions it raises. The primary question is how or why does a good and all powerful God permit untold suffering to his most faithful servant. The gospel of course provides the definitive answer, but an answer grasped and accepted only by those committed to it as final truth.

      

The modern prophet, C.G.Jung, in his Answer to Job, made some comments about God (the Hebrew God consciousness) very reminiscent of those which fill Blake's earlier prophecies. By the time Blake got around to his recreation of Job he had less interest in commenting on God than in retelling the old, old story. Job, the most indirect book of the Bible, proved an ideal vehicle for this, Blake's last and plainest statement of the truth of his life.

      

The biblical Job is presented as a good man whom God allows the devil to torment. Blake presents him as a moral but self-centered and self-righteous man. He prays for his children, but what about other people's children? Is he praying for God to favor his children over others? In no uncertain terms, writing in another work, Blake let us know what he thought of that kind of goodness:

"It this thy soft Family-Love, Thy cruel Patriarchal pride, Planting thy Family alone, Destroying all the World beside?"       (Jerusalem, 27.79; Erdman 173)

      

The point is that it's okay to pray for your children, but be careful how you pray for them. If your prayer for them to be first amounts to a curse on their fellows--to be second or last--that curse will fall upon your children's heads, just as it did upon Job's. Job's self-centered prayers and his left handed charity (See Plate 5 of the Job series) won him no reward but in fact delivered him into the hands of his Selfhood (Satan).

    

Good Christians take warning: Blake's Job is the same rich man Jesus spoke about, and he fills the pews (and too often the pulpit) of our churches. Here once again, in the twilight of his life, we find Blake dissenting from conventional religion, but now, unlike some of his youthful protests, his dissent completely agrees with the earlier dissent of the Prophet of Galilee: "Many that are first shall be last."

So much of our goodness is rotten; let's face it. The image of the boil ridden man haunted Blake and appears frequently in his prophecies. In his hands it became a vivid symbol of the general fallenness of man. Job's boils represent the physical misery of the fallen state of nature. Blake's Job, like the O.T. Job, represents Man. His adventures are a paradigm of the destiny of Man: he falls, but he is redeemed.

      

The importance of Job for the biblical writer as well as for our poet is to make us poignantly aware once again that we're not okay until we have experienced grace. Job's goodness got him nowhere, but his faith opened him to redemption.

     

Now look at Job's God; he resembles Job. Once again Blake reminds us that man's God is an image, a construct of his mind. In the beginning Job saw God as a solid moralist like himself. In the dark night his God turned bad, but in the end gave way to a new and better image. The whole thing foreshadows Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

      

If we could learn that our experience of God comes only through our image of him, then we would be less prone to attempt (wickedly) to impose our God on others. Then we might experience a loving rather than a coercive God, and the others, not feeling compelled, might be attracted, like Job's friends are in the end. Blake's Job is a beautiful series of pictures, a perfect wedding of exquisite art and lofty faith, Blake at his plainest and best.

  In 'Jerusalem', his most mature poem, Blake's basic technique is to superimpose bodily the biblical scene, the biblical story, the biblical truth upon the history and geography of England, and of the rest of the world as well. Understood in its literal sense 'Jerusalem', like the book of Revelation, is grotesque in the extreme. The reader will turn away in despair or derision unless he succeeds in going beyond the literal meaning and learns to see through rather than with the eye.

      

In reality the biblical truth is just as relevant to 18th Century England as it is to first century (or any century) Palestine. The same spiritual events continue to unfold today that Ezekiel, John and the others saw and described in their day. The same choices are to be made by 18th Century Britons (or 20th Century Americans!) as were made by first (or any) century Palestinians, and these choices have the same consequences. Truth is spiritual and timeless; the passing scene is only a shadow of the eternal reality.

Blake's grotesque juxtaposition of Canaan with England may conceivably shock the reader into an understanding of these profound truths. When this happens, the Bible suddenly takes on new and gripping significance. It's no longer about all those events way back in the past; it's about the stories unfolded in this morning's newspaper. Blake's ability to live in the eternal, his visionary capability enabled him to see with vivid clarity the immediate relevance of scripture--personally, socially, and politically.

      

His young friends called him Interpreter because he taught them to see it also. If we read his work with aroused and concentrated attention, we, too, may see how scripture relates to us--with immeasurable enrichment to our spirits.

Jerusalem, Plate 70, (E 224) 
"The Starry Heavens all were fled from the mighty limbs of Albion
PLATE 71
And above Albions Land was seen the Heavenly Canaan
As the Substance is to the Shadow: and above Albions Twelve Sons
Were seen Jerusalems Sons: and all the Twelve Tribes spreading
Over Albion. As the Soul is to the Body, so Jerusalems Sons,
Are to the Sons of Albion: and Jerusalem is Albions Emanation"    

Jerusalem, Plate 84, (E 343)
"Thus sang the Daughters in lamentation, uniting into One
With Rahab as she turnd the iron Spindle of destruction.    
Terrified at the Sons of Albion they took the Falshood which
Gwendolen hid in her left hand. it grew &, grew till it
PLATE 85
Became a Space & an Allegory around the Winding Worm
They namd it Canaan & built for it a tender Moon
Los smild with joy thinking on Enitharmon & he brought
Reuben from his twelvefold wandrings & led him into it
Planting the Seeds of the Twelve Tribes & Moses & David
And gave a Time & Revolution to the Space Six Thousand Years
He calld it Divine Analogy, for in Beulah the Feminine
Emanations Create Space. the Masculine Create Time, & plant
The Seeds of beauty in the Space: listning to their lamentation"

Jerusalem, Plate 91, (E 252)
"So Los terrified cries: trembling & weeping & howling! Beholding 
PLATE 92           
What do I see? The Briton Saxon Roman Norman amalgamating
In my Furnaces into One Nation the English: & taking refuge
In the Loins of Albion. The Canaanite united with the fugitive
Hebrew, whom she divided into Twelve, & sold into Egypt
Then scatterd the Egyptian & Hebrew to the four Winds!       
This sinful Nation Created in our Furnaces & Looms is Albion

So Los spoke."

Annotations to Watson, (E 614)
"There is a vast difference between an accident brought
on by a mans own carelessness & a destruction from the designs of
another.  The Earthquakes
at Lisbon &c were the Natural result of Sin.  but the destruction
of the Canaanites by Joshua was the Unnatural design of wicked
men   To Extirpate a nation by means of another nation is as
wicked as to destroy an individual by means of another individual
which God considers (in the Bible) as Murder & commands that it
shall not be done"