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Dr Jack Kahn's book, a product of 25 years of study and meditation around his subject, has been recently written in collaboration with Hester Solomon. It could be felt as a challenge to those analytical psychologists who are inclined to accept Jung's ‘Answer to Job’ as a turning-point in the study of the cultural psycho-history of the West.
Kahn's aim differs however. It is to marshal the evidence that the Book of Job can be taken as the case history of a kind of Everyman who, consequent upon personal calamity and loss, falls into a psychiatric crisis combining depressive, paranoid and obsessional features. The disturbance transforms into a ‘creative illness’ of the sort described by Ellenberger. Job recovers within and through a kind of group therapy inaugurated by his comforters. With the three older ones, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, the mutual confrontation becomes acrimonious—rigidly deadlocked around a tight sin/calamity equation. This opens the way for the young Elihu to bring to the group a certain looseness and originality that foreshadows the new understanding of himself and Jahweh that Job will gain through the ‘whirlwind’ (A.V.) or ‘tempest’ (New English Version) p. 134. This enables Job's obsessional and moralistic cramp to give way to a more religious sense of the power and the beauty, the destructiveness and the creativity of Jahweh as the origin, among all else, of the behemoth or crocodile so poetically celebrated in Job 40, pp. 15-34. In Kahn's terms, therefore, the Epilogue, Job 42, 1-6, describes how Job has gained a new immediate experience of God that reduces his pride and presumptiousness, fosters in him a sense of humility and awe before his destiny and mortality and issues into a new relation to the feminine, Job 42, p. 15.
Both Kahn and Jung make the assumption, much disputed on literary and theological grounds, that the Prologue and the Epilogue are both integral to the poem as a whole and, in doing so, for all their differences, lend such an