Michael Legaspi Unpacks Differing Interpretations of the Book of Job at Mahindra Center Talk

Michael C. Legaspi, an associate professor of Old Testament at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, discussed differing interpretations of the Book of Job in the seventeenth century at a talk hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Tuesday.

Historians have studied the Book of Job — a story following a wealthy man who faces trials with his possessions and family in order to test his faith — to understand how people made sense of suffering and tragedy through religion.

Legaspi graduated with a Bachelors in Near East History from John Hopkins University in 1995 and received his Ph.D. in the Hebrew Bible from Harvard University in 2006. He has taught theology at Craig State University, Penn State University, and Philips Academy. He has authored several books, including The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, which received the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2011.

The lecture, held in Robinson Hall, focused largely on the well-known interpretation from philosopher Hugo Grotius, who related Job’s steadfastness to stoic thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca in his book Annotationes in Vetus Testamentum.

Legaspi suggested that Grotius’s emphasis on historical and philological interpretation of Job’s story was connected to his broader effort to promote unity between Catholics and Protestants.

Grotius’s secular commentary was less an aversion to theology and more an attempt to not cover potentially contentious, divisive topics that may divide the two denominations.

Legaspi went on to detail some of the theorists who opposed Grotius’s interpretation, one of which was Abraham Calovius, a Lutheran theologian who authored 57 different rebuttals attacking Grotius’s ideas in the 17th century.

During the talk, Gabriel Parlin, a Ph.D. candidate on Harvard’s Committee on the Study of Religion, questioned whether avoiding theological interpretation could itself distort the Book of Job, asking whether it was possible for scholars to acknowledge theological concerns without adopting a particular religious position.

“A reading of Job that seeks only to minimize the presence of theology is itself unhistorical and anachronistic,” he argued.

Legaspi said that Grotius’s approach sometimes departed even from interpretations shared by Catholic and Protestant scholars.

“What is odd is that Grotius, the advocate for unity, should miss the chance to affirm and then reinforce Christian consensus where it exists,” he said.

In an interview after the event, Legaspi connected Grotius’s biblical scholarship to the development of modern culture. He added that studying earlier biblical scholars helps contemporary scholars understand their own relationship to religious tradition and their place in culture and society.

“Part of the growth and the development of modern culture is this complex negotiation with its own religious inheritance,” he said.