What is most important in the book of Job is, not the murderous conformity of the multitude, but the final audacity of the hero himself, whom we see hesitate at length, vacillate, then finally take hold of the mimetic contagion and defeat it. In doing this, Job not only resists totalitarian contagion but wrests the deity out of the process of persecution to envision him as the God of victims, not of persecutors. This is what Job means when he affirms, “As for me, I know that my Defender lives” (19:25).
