The poetry between Job and his friends is just a nice distraction. The really interesting innovation in Job occurs in the prologue, divine speeches, and epilogue. For while Job protests against divine retribution as much as one can, he ultimately keeps within the system upheld by his friends. That’s why he’s still looking for a Redeemer in the god who is tormenting him. He doesn’t seriously consider any other option. For all its facade of dissent, Job 3-31 is, in the main, an argument carried out within the system of divine retribution, in the well-worn mode of other ancient Near Eastern conversations.
But compare satan’s point in Job 1:9-11 and 2:3-6. The satan is challenging the very system of divine retribution itself. Do people serve God for reward, or only for God’s own sake (for no reason at all)? Now this is true innovation. And then the divine speeches refuse to give any reason for obeying God. The ground for obeying God is moved to a whole new level. Retribution is not the whole story, and it isn’t the most important principle of divine ethics anymore. Now, this is interesting! It removes God’s actions from any possible human scrutiny, asks the question Job did not ask (and was ignorant of; 9:17 is still dominated by expectations that divine retribution is the norm), and makes the protests of Chs. 3-31 beside the point. Protest against God requires at least some guaranteed grounds of his ethical actions, but once he is free of any knowable principle for action, protest is futile – Job can only keep silent and withdraw. Divine retribution can be used to justify almost anything as ‘good’, from the fall of a proud man to the holocaust of an entire people. But the transcendence of God lets him do absolutely anything he wants. And with any such totalising move, this results in an endless supply of suppressed voices to recover. Submission to the discipline of absolute authority is so exciting to think about! The prose and the authoritative divine speeches provides the really interesting departure and development within the book of Job.
It’s now gone 5:00 a.m. I should really stop thinking about Job when I’m in bed (proof-text: 4:12-16).
The Dunedin School 
Yes, quite, and this adds an interesting angle to Job 40:8. In asking “Would you impugn my justice? Would you condemn me that you may be right?” Yahweh may be saying one of the following: 1) I am just; how dare you impugn my justice! 2) Do you really think I am unjust? (playing for time with a rhetorical question in case Job realises Yahweh knows he was right all along – he is unjust) 3) Why are you charging me with injustice when it was you, not I, that was on trial? or, more interestingly, 4) Would you impugn my justice? Don’t you realise this isn’t a question of justice at all?
The truly interesting move made in Job 1:6-12; 2:1-6; 40:8 is the removal of the moral order. Yahweh doesn’t necessarily act unjustly. Rather, he acts outside the moral order altogether. The whole question of justice is irrelevant to Yahweh, not least because the idea of justice unduly limits the creator of the universe.
I can hear echoes of Ticciati again here.
However, after making this move, something else could happen. The Accuser could ask a question that casts into doubt Yahweh’s trust in his own existence …
I think (1) and some sort of rhetorical ploy (a power play – something along the lines of ‘how dare you condemn Me!?!’, forcing Job’s acquiescence) have a good deal of support following the arrogance of the entire divine speech, 40:2, 40:4-5, and 40:7.
I’ve gone off deliberate polysemy, today. The poetic sections, where you might expect polysemy to be employed, play strictly within the worldview of retribution. They play, and they’re beautiful, but they’re hardly innovative. It’s not polysemy, it’s the awkward composition history that causes people to search for meaning – the result of turning an aNE retribution conversation into a Hellenistic/philosophical speculation about God’s transcendence by adding prologue, epilogue, divine speeches, with Elihu’s speech as glue.
Historical criticism is what’s needed, not Bakhtin.
Can’t they work together? For me one of the weaknesses of Zuckerman’s book is his relentless historical criticism (which is also its strength, since it offers a cogent account of the genesis of a composite text), and one of the strengths of Newsom’s is its relentless engagement with theory (which is also its weakness, since it leads to an inconsistent use of redaction criticism).
Polysemy does work within the worldview of retribution, but that hardly means it lacks innovation. Take Job 9:2-3 as an example: how to draw on two separate domains (wisdom and law) simultaneously, both of which are wedded to retribution. That makes the text rich. I don’t see at all why polysemy and a rich composition history can’t exist in the same text.
Yes, you’re right, both are really needed together.
A problem I have is that many of the Theory methods were worked out in relation to texts written in quite different contexts (especially single authors, unified works or artistic wholes, a less supine and respectful relation to received tradition, etc – all problematic generalisations), but when they are applied to the biblical texts, the theories are are not reworked for the particularities of those texts. So the application of Theory comes in too late. E.g. Milne notes the impossibility of simply applying Propp’s method (worked out in respect of Slavic fairy tales) to the Hebrew Bible. So here, polysemy should be investigated alongside composition history. It’s when some people assume a final form on the assumption of a modern text looking something like the texts studied in Beardsley’s Intentional Fallacy that I want to tell them, ‘take a step back, and ask if the polysemy you’re finding is just a result of uneven composition history.’ It might not be, but it’s artificial just to explain any biblical text as though it was the Romantic vision of a unified artistic whole (or, its opposite, a deliberately postmodern text that challenges those modern texts).
There is a complex dynamic at work in Job. Yahweh’s “answer” to Job implies that divine power justifies any divine action. In the prologue it is also God who provokes the Satan’s sense of abrogating his duty as accuser in failing to find any imperfection in Job. The prolonged dialogs, at least in my case, persuade the reader that Job has indeed been wronged by an arbitrary act on the part of Yahweh. Polysemy aside, the fingers seem to be pointing at the guilty party from chapter 1!
I think you’re right, Steve. Yet also, does the wager act as ad absurdum in the overall structure of the book – i.e., if God’s reasons for ‘ethical’ actions are as incomprehensible as a bet with his accusing angel, then who are we to question any of his actions? This of course buries the particular concept of the injustice (the wager) in favour of the Idea (God’s unexaminable actions). I confess this idea is part of something I wrote about here, if you’re interested.