625 ELH 76 (2009) 625–660 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press JOB’S COMPLAINT IN PARADISE REGAINED BY VICTORIA KAHN In the whole Old Testament there is not one figure one approaches with so much confidence and frank-heartedness and trustfulness as Job, just because everything about him is so human, because he lies upon the confines of poetry. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition All readers of Paradise Regained know that the poem is modeled in part on the book of Job, the book Milton described as a “brief epic” in The Reason of Church Government. 1 Just as Job begins with a prologue in which God permits the trials of Job, moves to a central dialogue between Job and his comforters, and concludes with an epilogue in which everything is restored to Job, so Paradise Regained begins with a discussion between God and the angel Gabriel in which God permits Satan’s temptations of Jesus, moves to a central dialogue between Jesus and Satan, and concludes with the angels singing and Jesus returning home from the wilderness. Just so we won’t miss the parallel, in the discussion between God and Gabriel, God snidely remarks of Satan, [L]et him tempt and now assay His utmost subtlety, because he boasts And vaunts of his great cunning to that throng Of his Apostasy; he might have learnt Less overweening, since he failed in Job, Whose constant perseverance overcame Whate’er his cruel malice could invent. 2 In the rest of the poem, Jesus is compared four more times to Job, who is continuously described as a “just man” of “constant persever- ance,” who bore his wrongs with “saintly patience” (PR, 3.93–95). 3 This emphasis is consistent with the reading of Job in the New Testament Epistle of James, where James refers to “the patience of Job,” in a passage that Christians read as foreshadowing the suffering of Christ. 4 For all these reasons, the Son of Paradise Regained is regularly in- terpreted as the antitype of Job, heroically and patiently suffering his