Job's First-Person Knowledge Claims and the Epistemology of Religious Disagreement

In the book of Job, there are nine texts where the character of Job is depicted as using the words »I know« (Heb. ידעתי ). Job is moreover the only character constructed as making first-person knowledge claims of a very specific kind. The texts in question, however, are somewhat randomly distributed throughout the dialogues, appearing in contexts with variable contents and occur alongside numerous other configurations of the same verb in the words of both Job and other characters. This state of affairs partly explains why the associated religious language has up to now not been isolated and analysed from a comparative religious-epistemological perspective. Consequently, the original contribution of this article involves adopting the idiom of analytic epistemology of religion with the aim of clarifying some of the concepts that Job's claims to know have in common with current research on the epistemology of religious disagreement.