Painting the Word ㉓ William Blake — When the Morning Stars Sang Together and the Job Engravings

Beneath the outstretched arms of angels arranged in a great arc, a crowd of human and heavenly figures lifts its voice as a single gesture. Sun and stars are not background scenery here but presences standing among the singers themselves. This is no scene of judgment or suffering — it is creation itself breaking into a chorus of joy. This installment of Painting the Word moves past the Rococo and into Romanticism, turning to William Blake.

Who Was Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) was born in London and spent his life as an engraver, poet, and painter, developing an idiosyncratic visual language shaped less by formal training at the Royal Academy than by his apprenticeship as an engraver and by the mystical traditions of Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme. Of all sixty-six books of Scripture, Job is the only one Blake illustrated as a complete cycle. Around 1821 he completed a set of watercolors for the collector Thomas Butts, and between 1823 and 1826, with the engraver John Linnell as patron, he reworked them into a cycle of twenty-one copper engravings, Illustrations of the Book of Job. He died the following year, in 1827, not long after finishing the project. For Blake, Job was never merely a subject for illustration — it was the biblical text that let him concentrate, in its most compressed form, the struggle that occupied his whole career: the conflict between religion as an outward, dead “Letter” and the living “Spirit” hidden beneath it.

The Text — Job 38:4-7

When the Morning Stars Sang Together illustrates God’s questioning of Job about the mysteries of creation.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand… while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7)

Reading the Painting — Humans and Angels Joined in a Single Circle

William Blake, When the Morning Stars Sang Together, plate 14 of Illustrations of the Book of Job, c. 1825, engraving. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons, PD-old-100-expired, artist died 1827).

At the bottom of the plate, Job, his wife, and his three friends clasp hands or raise their arms, gazing upward; above them a company of angels, arms flung wide, forms a great arc. Figures riding the sun and crescent moon fill either side of this circle, and the stars appear not as isolated points but woven into the gestures of the singing figures themselves. In place of perspectival depth or dramatic chiaroscuro, Blake flattens the whole scene into something close to a heraldic emblem, built from the clean contour lines and symmetrical composition characteristic of his engraving practice. The heart of the image is this: Job, still in the midst of his suffering, is shown witnessing a scene in which humanity and the angelic host, without distinction, join a single chorus before the mystery of creation he could never have understood on his own.

Theological Reading — A Spirit That Exceeds the Letter

The literary scholar and theologian Christopher Rowland, in his 2010 study Blake and the Bible, treats the entire Job cycle as the most fully realized expression of Blake’s own biblical hermeneutic. On Rowland’s account, Blake spent his career setting the “Letter” — a legalistic, punitive image of God, religion as external authority — against the “Spirit,” the divine presence living and moving within human imagination, and the Job cycle traces this very opposition resolving itself across Job’s own journey. At the cycle’s opening, Job is bound to a literal, legalistic faith, one that reads his friends’ condemnations and his own suffering through a strict calculus of sin and punishment; but as the plates progress, God’s voice answers Job not with explanation but by showing him the sheer, unaccountable mystery of creation — the morning stars’ song, Leviathan, Behemoth — and Job’s faith turns from condemnation toward awe and imaginative participation. On Rowland’s reading, the way When the Morning Stars Sang Together places humans and angels within a single unbroken circle marks the visual high point of exactly this turn — the moment at which, having passed beyond a merely literal image of God, the human being is received as a participant in the very joy of divine creation.

Coming Next

The next installment turns to Blake Part 2, examining how his prophetic mythology — Jerusalem, Milton, and the rest — reworks Scripture into its own visionary cosmos.

Works Cited

English-language

• Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) — includes two chapters devoted to the biblical hermeneutics of Blake’s Job engravings, and remains the standard account of Blake’s Letter-versus-Spirit framework as a whole

The image above is a public-domain (PD-old-100-expired) scan hosted on Wikimedia Commons. The work listed above is a real, verifiable scholarly publication. No Korean-language academic study specifically addressing this painting could be reliably verified for this installment, so that section has been omitted.

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