Samuel ibn Tibbon (c. 1160-c. 1232) was the first significant Jewish philosopher after Maimonides to comment on the Book of Job. On Satan in Job 1-2, Robert Eisen notes that:
There is one matter regarding Maimonides’
views on Satan about which Ibn Tibbon is quite explicit, and that is a
disagreement he has with Maimonides on an exegetical point. As we saw in the
previous chapter, Maimonides attempts to explain why it is that initially Satan
is depicted as presenting himself to God only after the divine beings have done
so, while in his second arrival Satan is described as accompanying them.
According to my interpretation, Maimonides attributes the different descriptions
to the dual function of privation, which, on the one hand, does not have God as
its agent but, on the other hand, plays an important role in the perpetuation
of the natural world. Ibn Tibbon finds numerous faults with Maimonides’ reading
and solves the problem in a different manner.
According to Ibn Tibbon, the
difference between the two descriptions of Satan is meant to distinguish
between those evils that afflict the righteous person’s belongings and
children, on the one hand, and those that afflict his own body, on the other.
In Ibn Tibbon’s thinking, the question of why the righteous suffer simply does
not arise with the loss of children or belongings, for such losses can be
account for by explanations having little to do with a righteous person’s
conduct. Thus, Job’s children die because of their own sins, not his, while Job’s
livestock perish because of chance occurrence. And if Job suffered as a result
of these misfortunes, his suffering has no real meaning here. Where the
suffering of the righteous does become a problem is when the righteous individual
himself is afflicted with bodily illness, for here the evil affects his very
person. Therefore, it is this latter sort of evil which the Book of Job is
concerned. For this reason, according to Ibn Tibbon, Satan is described as
arriving separately from the divine beings the first time he appears. At this
point in the story, he afflicts only Job’s children and possessions, and his
separate arrival symbolizes that these sorts of evils are not the main concern
of the book. However, in the second instance Satan beings illness upon Hob
himself, and therefore he is described as accompanying the divine beings in
order to symbolize that the evil affecting Job’s body is the prime concern of
the story. In short, while Maimonides interprets the different descriptions of
Satan’s arrival as relating directly to philosophical matters, Ibn Tibbon sees
it more as a literary device designed to alert the reader to that which
constitutes the central problem of the story. (Robert Eisen, The Book of Job
in Medieval Jewish Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 82-83)
In the note for the above, Robert Eisen comments that:
In his reinterpretation of Satan’s
two arrivals, Ibn Tibbon has also managed to justify why Job’s children die, a philosophical
problem that Maimonides ignores. As just noted, they die because of their own
sins. Ibn Tibbon never specifies what their sins consisted of, but he may have
had in mind their regular feasts of eating and drinking mentioned in Job 1:4. (Ibid.,
262 n. 15)
