Job: the victim of his people
Rene Girard
Stanford, 1987
223.106 G518j
excerpt:
Job's Lapses
For a leader of the people a good death is not to die as a scapegoat, but to be venerated even in death. For the powerful of this world, the men on whom is focused the envious mimesis of a thousand rivals, the theme of untarnished prestige and the participation of many people in the funeral ceremonies is too important not to indicate their fear of ending up as 'wicked men'.
Job thought he was destined for a good death; he believed in retribution as long as he believed in the loyalty of his admirers, but he believed in it no longer. It is not surprising that Job, rejected by his people, should fight the idea of any equivalence between popular favour and the real merits of an individual. According to the new Job, the Wicked benefits from the advantages automatically reserved for the Righteous through a complete and unbroken system of victimization:
But who is there then to accuse him to his
face for his deeds,
and pay him back for what he has done,
When he is on his way to his burial,
when men are watching at his grave.
The clods of the valley are laid gently on
him,
and a whole procession walks behind him. (21:31-3)
...Evil reveals its intractable character in this world only when the scapegoat mechanism is challenged and destroyed.
-p.136-137
Evolution of Ritual
In some monarchies, even in recent times, the king was actually sacrificed. There is no reason to doubt this fact on the pretext that in other monarchies the sacrifice was more apparent than real: in this case, either another victim was sacrificed in place of the king or there was only a pretence of sacrificing the king.
In Babylon and elsewhere, something else took place that is singularly reminiscent of Job's experience. Once a year the king was humiliated, insulted and abused by the crowd - even beaten. There seemed to be no question of killing him, even symbolically. In still other monarchies, all real violence is excluded. There is not even a pretense of persecuting or killing the king, but vestiges of the symbolism of victims frequently remain. Finally, there are existing monarchies free of the symbolism of victims. The monarch's sovereignty is never interrupted or challenged, even by a faint memory of the scapegoating process. This is the monarchy of modern times. (Admittedly, real revolutions occur that replace the old rituals. Thus we have a return of the generative mechanism, a return which is inevitably fruitless in our world.)