Adelia Prado’s miserere and the book of Job:

an intertextual approach

Abstract

^{This article brings together literature and theology in an effort to read the biblical repertoire as literature and in literature. Literary art is a theological place in the Bible itself and in the entire poetic tradition impacted by it. Thus, in addition to a historical-critical exegesis, a poetic reading of the Book of Job is carried out, based on the narrative and lyrical resources of the text taken in its entirety, as proposed by Moshe Greenberg. The Book of Job thus considered emerges as a composite of narration and poetry, in which the rupture between genres also represents a disruption and a confrontation between two sapiential theologies: a palatial and traditional wisdom, based on a notion of cosmic and legal immutability, according to which good ones are rewarded and the bad ones punished; a wisdom in crisis, which is indignant at the reality of the suffering of the innocent. Then, the intertextual relationship of the lyricism of the Book of Job in the poems of Miserere, by Adélia Prado, is evaluated. In this work, the poetess from Minas Gerais finds in the profound poet of the Book of Job the foundation for her theopoetics in search of meaning for the experience of human suffering.}