Not Lamb of God but Old Scape Goat: Job as Gospel Parody in Shemot Rabbah

This article argues that the Job scapegoat parable preserved in ySotah and Bereshit Rabbah, develops into subtle parody of Christian supersessionism that reaches its zenith in the medieval Shemot Rabbah. Shemot Rabbah transforms a terseallusion into an expansive narrative in which God offers Job, as a sacrificial goat to divert Samael’s accusations of idolatry to enable the parting of the Sea. By foregrounding a righteous Job’s own protest that God “hands me over to the evildoer” and makes him “a target for (the sake) of His people,” Shemot Rabbah reconfigures patristic reception of Christian typology: Job becomes not a prefiguration of a Christ-like universal redeemer but a scapegoat whose suffering benefits Jews alone. The Midrash thereby inverts the Gospel motifs of the Agnus Dei in John and the roles of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25. Read against the Christian exegetic and visual environments of late antique and early medieval Palestine (e.g., Phillip the Presbyter), the rabbinic parable emerges as a parodic reorientation of Jewish-Christian imagery that asserts Jewish particularism while paralleling growing Christian particularism.