The scene in illustration 11 of Blake’s Job is divided into three parts. In the middle of the scene, Job lies sleeping. He is not comfortably asleep, but is being afflicted by nightmares come from above and below. Below Job is the pit of hell. Demons reach up and grasp his sleeping body, threatening to pull him down into the fiery abyss of eternal damnation and suffering. The demonic beings are hideous creatures with scaly flesh, long fingers, and brutish faces. They carry chains – symbolic of confinement and torture. Such a scene of hell and damnation is to be expected. What is unexpected is what is happening above Job’s head. 

Above Job, a man swoops down wrapped in a serpent. The man is an odd mix – recognizable both as the God who sat on the throne in illustration 1 and as a demonic character – a false God. Around him, ribbons of light or jagged lightning bolts cut through the sky. Looming above the figure is a stone tablet inscribed with Hebrew letters – a clear reference to the commandments or covenant given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, a covenant that forms the basis of the Hebrew Law and the Jewish faith.

In the dream, Job is able to perceive all three realms of existence – the demonic realm, the human or material realm, and the higher realm – though it is here that his ability to comprehend limited. Job holds his hands up to fend off the snake, snarled demon-god. He is clearly more concerned with what is happening above his head than below his bed. The demons from the depth are much less threatening than what he is seeing above him.

Blake’s dream scene is full of emotion and symbolism.  Job experiences utter terror here – a type of terror or agony he is not able to experience in his waking life, even under the most severe emotional and physical stress. Only in the dream can Job achieve such a state of terror – a state that allows for or even provokes his eventual enlightenment and redemption.

Symbols pervade the scene. The serpent wrapped around the false-god indicates his demonic nature – evoking the notion of the great deceiver from the scene in the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. The flying man also has a cloven hoof instead of a normal human foot, indicating to the viewer that this “god” is the devil in disguise. The imagine of the cloven hoof also calls to mind a favorite Protestant method of caricaturing the Catholic Pope – depicting the pope as a devil in disguise by revealing a cloven hoof beneath papal finery. The dark sky and stormy weather indicate that this “god” is not friendly and is certainly not coming in peace. Finally, the tablets above the flying devil-god refer to the Hebrew Bible – and in the watercolor versions of the illustration this is perfectly clear that these are God’s commandments. The “god” has one finger pointed to the Hebrew law and the other pointed into the hellish inferno.