Not Lamb of God but Old Scape Goat: Job as Gospel Parody in Shemot Rabbah
Keywords:
Job, parody and polemic, midrash, agnus dei, Interreligious storytelling, matthew 25, Jewish–Christian relations in Late AntiquityAbstract
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 terse allusion 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.
Published in: European Hebrew Journal, Volume 1, Issue 2 (2026)
Article Type: Research Article
Peer Review: Double-Blind Peer Review
Academic Editor: Prof. Dr. Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College / Harvard Divinity School, USA
Received: 10 June 2026 | Accepted: 14 August 2026 | Published: 17 August 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.67469/EHJ2026.1.2.5
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-5045
Corresponding author: Sivan Nir | sivan.nir@univie.ac.at; magitriad@gmail.com
Pages: 111–136
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