Review of Seow, Job 1-21

MARGINALIA: The Book of Job’s Past, Present, and Future Consequences – By Davis Hankins. Davis Hankins on C.L. Seow’s Job 1-21: Interpretation and Commentary. Excerpt:

Beyond Joban studies, Seow’s work unsettles the traditional commentary genre and opens vast interpretive possibilities for rereading our great books in light of the caches of evidence that interpreters have long treated according to what could be characterized as a usefulness paradigm. That is, the present text and interpreter make use of the past only to the extent that the past is useful to present concerns. What is not useful is suitable only for the archive. The uniqueness of Seow’s approach might be described in terms of its emergentist paradigm: the present is nothing more than an emergence out of the possibilities past consequences have opened.

More than simply a breath of fresh air for our shared humanistic inquiry, such work is also potentially quite urgent at this moment when the humanities are threatened on many different fronts, including by the ubiquitous demand for demonstrable usefulness. Where is the demonstrable usefulness of the humanities more clearly evident than in the history of consequences? This history reveals not only the usefulness of the humanities, but also how the humanities have shaped what counts as useful, an impact often overlooked in such discussions. While this history largely remains to be written, Seow’s significant contribution will hopefully and surely compel us to continue writing it.

I take the point and am largely sympathetic to it, although I think a good bit of the current trendy call for the humanities to be "useful" is corrosive and needs to be resisted. (Related thoughts here, here, and here.) But that is not to detract from the value of what sounds like a marvelous book.