This work offers a reading of the book of Job, one of the great classics of biblical literature, and in the process, seeks to develop a new formula for understanding how biblical texts evolve in the process of transmission.
Zuckerman presents the thesis that the book of Job was intended to parody the stereotypical righteous sufferer. In his most extended analogy, Zuckerman compares the book of Job and its fate to that of a famous Yiddish short story, "Bontshe Shvayg", another covert parody whose protagonist has come to be revered as a paradigm of innocent Jewish suffering. The history of this story is used to show how a literary text becomes separated from the intention of its author, and comes to have a quite different meaning for a specific community of readers.