Safire Views Cry of Job as Inspiration : Books: Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s new work depicts the essence of Jobanism as the refusal to accept injustice from any source.

Job’s cry to God for justice is a challenge to authority that can inspire political dissidents everywhere, William Safire says in a new book about the biblical account exploring the nature of faith amid human suffering.

In the Book of Job, according to Safire, one can compare the relationship between God and human beings to the relationship between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and governments upholding racial discrimination; to the relationship between prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky and the former Soviet Union, and to the relationships between Kurdish leader Mulla Mustapha al-Barzani and the governments of the Middle East and West that betrayed him.

“The relation of man and God is a metaphor for the relation of the governed and the governing,” Safire said in a recent interview. “I come at it politically.”

In his latest book, “The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist writes that the essence of Jobanism is “to refuse to accept injustice from any source--family, culture, nation or God--and to press inquiry into inequity beyond what others accept as the limits of the knowable.”

In the biblical book, Job endures great suffering in what is essentially a test of a good man. But after an at times angry dialogue with God in which the divine reveals some sense of the cosmic responsibility needed to maintain order and grant human freedom, Job accepts his fate: “Now my eyes see you, therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Safire’s book, published by Random House, brings the divine to the level of human politics. In his view, gone are many of the great transcendent questions raised for millenniums by the Book of Job about the mystery of human suffering.

What’s left is politics, an approach for which Safire makes no apologies.

What Safire draws from Job’s bold willingness to challenge God’s justice is an intriguing set of guidelines for dissidents.

Maintain your Joban ways of being outraged by injustice and determined to right “Authority’s wrongs” is Safire’s first guideline for those in his club of Joban dissidents, which has included people from Malcolm X to Andrei Sakharov.

Another guideline followed by Joban dissidents: Beware consensus and its attendant movement toward the lowest common denominator of moral actions.

On the other side are suggestions, such as not to let disputes with authority grow into challenges of its legitimacy and to play God for a day, that stress the need for moral restraint in dissent.

“Though it sounds as hopeless as Job calling on God to judge God severely, the effective dissident demands that government force government to redress the wrongs of government,” Safire writes.

For example, he said, those who fought communism and racial discrimination worked within the system.

“In that terrible box, they refused to go along. That is what indeed broke down the barriers of communism and indeed broke down the barriers to civil rights,” he said.

In Safire’s political reading of Job, the biblical book sanctifies defiance of unjust authority, enshrines dissent and demands moral self-reliance.

“If the Book of Job reaches across 2 1/2 millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignorance and to fall into error, and it is better--more righteous in the eyes of God--for them to react by questioning rather than accepting,” Safire wrote.

“Confronted with inexplicable injustice, it is better to be irate than resigned.”