On Hamlet, The Book of Job, and My Possible Status as the Anti-Christ

Antichrist Twins?

I turned 16 years old on 06-06-06.  My twin sister and I were on a trip through Europe following our Sophomore year of High School with a group of classmates, and the agenda on our birthday just happened to consist of a visit to Dachau, a concentration camp outside of Munich.  The camp included a barracks area, a crematorium and gas chamber, and an area in the barracks reserved for medical experiments.  Dachau is perhaps most famous for the wrought iron gate that read Arbeit Mach Frei, which translates to "work makes you free".  It was recently stolen and has not been recovered (although it has been replaced).  The story of this birthday has become one of those bits of trivia that I relate to strangers, usually accompanied by a joke that I might be the antichrist.  While I don't actually believe this, it has given the number 666 a certain significance in my life.  I notice when it comes up.  I pay particular attention to the 666th page of a book or a shiver runs up my spine when the cash register rings up a total of $6.66.

A Random Page

This morning, I woke up around 6:15 am and couldn't get back to sleep.  My phone was dead and I didn't have a book to read.  I wandered into the living room, where a King James bible was sitting on the counter.  I am not a religious person, but I believe in spirituality and I believe in a higher power.  Having been exposed to particular hypocrisies in religion, however, I largely shied away from any organised kind of spirituality. I decided to let the Bible fall open at random and see if I could glean some significance from it.  I wonder how many thousands of people do this everyday.  It's not something I've done before, however.  I settled myself on the couch and let it fall open.

The Book of Job

It fell to the Book of Job.  I started at the top of the page and began reading:

Then Satan answered the Lord and said, Doth Job fear God for naught?

I read this conversation between God and Satan and was struck by the civility of it.  There was an actual exchange occurring that I found extremely interesting, and it was not particularly contentious.  In great storytelling, there is always an interesting relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist.  They understand each other in a way that is fascinating, and find each other to be worthy opponents: Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Peter Pan and Captian Hook, Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, the list goes on.  These characters possess a particular understanding of each other that only they are capable of grasping due to the nature of their relationship.  The exchange between God and Satan in the Book of Job, at the risk of sounding sacrilegious, struck me for the first time in this way.  On my random page, Satan challenges God because Job is the most upright of all men, but he is also the richest and luckiest.  Satan takes issue with this, and suggests that anyone in such a position would worship God.  So God says,

Behold all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.

Basically, he says take everything he has but don't harm Job himself.  So Satan kills all of his livestock, destroys all of his property and kills his 10 children in a fire.

Then Job arose and rent his mantle, and shaved his head and fell down upon the ground and worshipped and said, "Naked came I out of mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of God.  In all this, Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.

At this point, I began to recognize the profundidty of what I was reading, in particular reference to myself and my own beliefs.  Satan comes back before God again after this, and God asks him a second time,

From whence comest though?  And Satan answered the Lord and said, "From going to and fro in the Earth and from walking up and down in it."

This was always Satan's answer, and it absolutely thrilled me.  This is the Rolling Stone's Satan, Bob Dylan's Satan.  This Satan is a poet, someone with swagger, someone tempting. This is a Satan I understand.  God basically says that Satan has taken everything from Job and he's still upright and hasn't sinned.  So Satan counters,

Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.  But put forth thine hand now and touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse thee to thy face.  And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand, but save his life.

So Satan gives the man boils from head to toe, leaving the poor guy with nothing apart from the fact that he is alive.  At this point, I wanted to start the story from the beginning.  The Book of Job started on the previous page.  I read the eight verses I hadn't yet and turned the page.  That was when I realized that my random page was 666.  This was literally the only page the Bible could fall open to that would have any significance for me whatsoever.  I couldn't help but smile.

Conversation at a Temple

I'd never read the Book of Job.  All I knew was that Job endured suffering untold, and a recent conversation floated up in my memory.  I had gone to a temple outside of Siem Reap, Cambodia.  It was relatively small (compared to Angkor Wat and other temples in the area) and almost totally empty.  It was surrounded by a peaceful mote.  I found myself a nice tree branch across the mote and sat down to observe the temple.  I put my headphones in and played Tom Waits' "Bend Down the Branches".

After a while, a fellow traveller came over and sat down and we had a conversation.  He'd recently completed a retreat at a Buddhist monastery and come away from the experience with a deep respect for Buddhist philosophy.  I share this respect, but there's one aspect of it that just doesn't ring true for me and that is the idea that the greatest pursuit of human life is to rid ourselves of suffering.  This is accomplished by achieving an absence of desire; not that we can't desire things necessarily, but that our peace shouldn't be disturbed by the outcome of our pursuit of those desires.  It seems to me, though, that humans are meant to suffer.  Why else would we be imaginations trapped in incapable bodies?  Why else would we be human?  

The greatest moments of profundity in my life have been the result of suffering.  These are moments I return to for inspiration and understanding, the moments in which I felt the most alive and aware and fragile.  I sometimes replay moments I received tragic news in my head just to remember the feeling of dancing with insanity, of being at once totally in control and totally powerless.  In these moments, you are transported to the opening of a long dark tunnel you have no choice but to enter.  You know that you'll never be the same person again, and you have no idea when or where you will emerge.  It's terrifying in an existential way.  You can also refuse to change, and literally go insane.  To me, these are the moments where I understood paradox, where I contained multitudes, where I had an absolute relationship with the divine.

This conversation came back to me this morning as I read about Job and his suffering. If there was anything in the Bible that could give me pause, it was a story about suffering on page 666 with a Devil I can have sympathy for and a hero whose existential monologuing brings Hamlet to mind.

Job and Hamlet: Two Peas in a Pod

Chapter 6 of Job read to me like Hamlet's famous "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy.  For one thing, the Book of Job is poetry, and the King James version could easily pass as Shakespeare.  He begins saying,

2 Oh that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! 3 For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up. 4 For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me. 5 Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass? or loweth the ox over his fodder? 6 Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt? or is there any taste in the white of an egg? 7 The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat. 8 Oh that I might have my request; and that God would grant me the thing that I long for!

The thing that Job longs for is death.  Hamlet is not quite as decided in his own soliloquy, but I find the parallels impossible to ignore, particularly in the chosen language itself.

To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-- No more--and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.

Here, Hamlet is yearning for the same release that Job yearns for.  The 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' could easily be applied to Job himself where "the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison thereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves against me." These terrors are the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to".

Job's test is to avoid sin when faced with all of the suffering that Satan himself can throw his way.  The ultimate sin in this case, in my humble and completely unqualified opinion, is suicide.

Hamlet goes on to say:

To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life.

Calamity of so long life.  This again echoes Job who laments that his grief and his "calamity" cannot be weighed together in the balance with his grief.  Both Hamlet and Job are lamenting the length of life, and the suffering that must be endured therein.