I Only Am Escaped
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I ONLY AM ESCAPED In Job 1, after God had permitted Satan to test Job’s faith (v. 12), a series of catastrophes befell Job: his oxen and asses were stolen and their keepers slain by Arabs (vv. 14–15); his sheep and shepherds were consumed by lightning (v. 16); his camels were stolen and the servants tending them killed by Chaldeans (v. 17); and, finally, in a terrible climax, his seven sons and three daughters died when the house in which they were feasting collapsed in a storm (vv. 18–19). All of these calamities, alternately caused by human violence and natural phenomena, were reported to Job by four sole survivors in rapid succession (“While he was yet speaking, there came also another … ”), each concluding his item of “news” with the words “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (vv. 15–17, 19). The parallel structure of these reports gives this concluding sentence the function of a refrain and heightens the impression of “cruel irony” (Weiser) in the shattering sequence of events.
The Fathers suggest allegorical meanings for each of the dire messages. St. Jerome sees the house (Job 1:18) as representing the Church and the Chaldeans as symbolizing demons (Comm. in Job, 1). In St. Gregory the Great’s view, the messengers are Satan’s tools, whose words are meant to make Job believe that God is hurting him (Moralia in Iob, 2.14; cf. also Didymos the Blind, Comm. in Job).
In English literature the messengers’ refrain frequently serves to establish a narrative frame. William Blake’s The Four Zoas (3.103) and Jerusalem (chap. 2, pl. 29, lines 29, 82) offer examples. Herman Melville cites the refrain for the same rhetorical purpose in Moby-Dick (having made an earlier allusion to it in Redburn, chap. 59). As a motto for the novel’s epilogue, the sentence finally identifies Ishmael, the narrator, as the fate-ordained sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. At the same time, it reinforces many previous allusions to the book of Job and once again takes up Ahab’s notion that the evil in the world is wrought, or at least tolerated, by God.
In Archibald MacLeish’s J. B., two messengers announce the deaths of J. B.’s children. The Second Messenger repeatedly asserts, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (sc. 3, 4, and 6). He transcends his traditional role as “Job’s post” (as Carlyle termed the carriers of bad news in The French Revolution, 3.3.4) and emerges as a complex and reluctant witness:
Someone chosen by the chance of seeing,
By the accident of sight,
By stumbling on the moment of it,
Unprepared, unwarned, unready,
Thinking of nothing, of his drink, his bed,
Caught in that inextricable net,
His belly, and it happens, and he sees it …
Caught in that inextricable net
Of having witnessed, having seen …
He alone!
Howard Nemerov’s poem “I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee” suggests that a Victorian lady’s whalebone corset is a violation of nature. Its title alludes to Melville’s use of the sentence at the end of Moby-Dick, but in its new context it also exploits the sinister overtones of the words from the original source, Job, to convey feelings of impending catastrophe.
Bibliography. Pope, M. H. Job. AB (1973); Weiser, A. Das Buch Hiob. ATD 13, 4th ed. (1963).
Manfred Siebald
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
