The Impact of Job among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages

FAIN: FB-52963-07

Choon-Leong Seow
Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, NJ 08540-6819)

This interdisciplinary project examines the hermeneutical afterlife of the legend of Job in medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The study is diachronic inasmuch as it pays attention to interpretive trajectories in each tradition and synchronic insofar as it concentrates on simultaneous but varied interpretations of the Joban tale clustered around certain social-historical contexts. It aims to contribute to the wider methodological discussion among scholars of reception history and will have implications and offer caveats for contemporary inter-religious conversations about the suffering of the innocent and violence perpetrated in the name of faith.