 Rather than yielding a fixation on the past that would lead only to a form of victimization, Job’s experience points the way to a transformative turn, a change in comprehension ultimately irreducible to religiosity. At the bottom of this change of mind is a new reliance on one’s own understanding of reason, the result of the dialogical encounter with the unfathomable from which hope arises as a messianic promise. It can arise precisely because messianic hope is not bound to the past; it is dependent, instead, on the way we work through it. Job is not given any explanation for his suffering by God; it remains inexplicable, but he learns to recognize that the unfathomable only determines him through how he responds to it. He acknowledges that