How Moby-Dick or, The Whale drew on Job
A documented line of influence: Herman Melville demonstrably engaged Unknown’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Job
Unknown · c. 500 BCE
BibleThe influenced
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 1851
The Age of the NovelRelevance
9/10
On Moby-Dick or, The Whale’s page
- The whole theological argument of Moby-Dick runs on Job — read it first and you'll see Ahab as the man who refuses Job's submission
- Melville explicitly equates Moby Dick with Job's Leviathan: the creature you cannot draw out with a hook, the proof that the universe will not be cross-examined
- From the opening Extracts to the Epilogue, the book frames itself around Job's question — why does the innocent suffer, and what answer does a silent God give?
On Job’s page
- Scholars call Job "the most informing single principle" of Moby-Dick's composition — the spine the whole book is built on
- Melville hands Job's Leviathan straight to Ahab: the inscrutable beast and the silent, unanswerable God become the white whale and Ahab's doomed quarrel with the universe
- His prose is soaked in scripture — 650+ biblical references, two-thirds of them Old Testament — and Job is the one he keeps coming back to