Malbim's Job: The Book of Job: Newly Translated and Interpreted According to the Commentary of Rabbi Meir Lebush Malbim

R. Meir Lebush Malbim composed and published his monumental commentary on ‎the Hebrew Bible between 1845 and 1870. It was the first work of its ‎kind since medieval times. Not since the likes of Rashi, Gersonides and ‎Abrabanel had a biblical commentary of comparable size and scope been written; ‎and not since the golden age of Jewish philosophy had such a far ranging Jewish ‎theology been formulated or had such a determined ‎and focused attempt been made to grapple with the challenges presented by ‎secular learning and mores to the loyalties of contemporary Jews.‎ On the narrative level, Malbim's interpretation of Job is quite straightforward; it is ‎all a matter of tests and trials. The person Job is being tested; first by prosperity ‎and then by adversity. It is, however, on other levels that Malbim's Job really ‎comes into its own. Malbim believed the Massoretic (Hebrew) text of the Book of ‎Job to be a coherent whole, that faithfully records what the book's original author, ‎Moses, actually wrote. As such, its standing in matters of moral and natural ‎philosophy must be on a par with that the Torah. Just ‎as the whole of the Oral Law is inherent in the text of the Torah, so must all the ‎wisdom of philosophy and metaphysics be present in the Book of Job, there in its ‎poetry and imagery.‎ Moreover, Malbim asserted, whereas previous commentators had failed to show ‎how the text of Job supported the philosophical affinities they had attributed to ‎Job and his friends, or how these designations helped to elucidate the text, he ‎claims to do both. Exhibiting an originality of interpretation and a love of the ‎Hebrew language that matched the Haskalah of his contemporaries, Malbim finds ‎support for all his ideas in the actual words of the Book of Job itself. Whether or ‎not his interpretation is truly the sense of Job, what Malbim produced is ‎undoubtedly a masterpiece of theology and exegesis.‎