Friday, December 31, 2021

Samuel ibn Tibbon (c. 1160-c. 1232) on the Two Arrivals of Satan in the Book of Job and the Deaths of Job's Children

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)

 

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