The key to Job’s dream in illustration 11 is the figure of the demonic god flying above the sleeping Job. We have established that this is no true god but rather an impostor, disguised as god but really a devil. It is even more complex than that. This false God is not simply an ordinary devil in disguise – for why would the devil be drawing Job’s attention to the Mosaic Law, the foundation of Judeo-Christian monotheism?

We need to look for clues in the rest of Blake’s Job cycle for what might be going on here. The key piece of evidence about the nature of this God comes in illustration 2, in which the Accuser (the Satan) is appealing to God to test Job’s faith. In the etched copy of Blake’s Job series, we see the Hebrew words for “King Yahweh” or “King Jehovah” above the image. This is important, for Blake is clearly indicating that the God who sets his minion Satan upon Job is specifically the Old Testament God. This is no surprise, of course, because the book of Job is an Old Testament book and Job an Old Testament figure. What is surprising is that Job realizes through his dream that this God on high – this King Yahweh or King Jehovah – is actually not the almighty source of Good in the world. He is a vengeful, capricious, demonic force, who is interested only in a strict upholding of his oppressive laws and nothing else. Obey the law, he tells Job in the dream, or burn in hell. The stage is now set for Job to differentiate between the demonic Old Testament God and a benevolent God and his son and co-equal Jesus, who do not oppress through the Law but rewards through the spirit. Following his dream vision, Job realizes that before he had adhered to the law – the faith in the letter – but had not embraced the spirit of faith, an unmediated love of the divine. Job, in Blake’s re-invention, can now be successfully converted from an Old Testament dogmatist into a Christian, a process that required the probing of Job’s internal spiritual core.