The Sanctimonious Veil of Myth

“Why? Because Job protests his innocence to the end. If his ‘friends’ had succeeded in reducing him to silence, the persecutors’ belief in the scapegoat’s guilt would have been unanimous. This belief would have prevailed so totally that every future account of the affair would have been given by people sharing it. We would have only one perspective, that of the friends. In other words, we would have a myth. That is all a myth is — an absolute faith in the victim’s total power of evil that liberates the persecutors from reciprocal recriminations . . . The myth is Job’s story told entirely by the persecutors. The Dialogues of Job are an Oedipus story in which the victim refuses to add his voice to those of his persecutors. Oedipus is a successful scapegoat, because he is never recognized as such. Job is a failed scapegoat. He derails the mythology that is meant to envelop him . . .” (Girard, Job, pp. 34-35).