Job wakes up and is visited by a young man named Elihu, who starts to reveal to him the truth of the real divine message: faith does not come from one’s actions or adherence to a set of laws but rather flows from the heart in the form of love of the divine. Once Job starts down this path, true God visits him – the God who created and organized the universe. Finally, Jesus comes to Job, bringing about the final conversion and redemption. Job, now a lover of the Son and the Father, sees his good fortunes restored.

Blake’s re-interpretation of the book of Job is rooted in a post-Reformation, Romantic context. The connection to radical Protestantism is clear – nothing matters for Job other than his openness to divine love. It is a love that can only come from within – from deep in the spiritual heart of the person – and cannot be legislated from outside. The choice is a dream as the catalyst for this transformation is important. Job’s dream is loaded with fear, anxiety, and emotion. Whereas the earlier scenes show Job making a rational defense of his piety, the dream allows his non-rational, emotive, intuitive senses to take over. It is only here – freed from the strictures of reason – that Job can perceive the basic truth that leads to redemption – that the Hebrew God, the God of the Mosaic Law, is a false God. As such, Blake is taking issue with rational conceptions of faith, with religious orientations bound up with reason and logic and experienced through prescribed traditions and laws. Faith for Blake’s Job is intuitive, deeply personal, spontaneous, and emotional – key Romantic notions of the nature of the individual and his connection to the metaphysical realm.

Blake’s Romantic spirituality leads him to reposition the dream sequence in his re-imagining of the book of Job to the center of the narrative. In the original story the dream is no more than a fairly insignificant detail, a part of Job’s lament in the first part of the story. Job says in 7:14-15, “You frighten me with dreams, and terrify me with visions till I prefer strangulation, death, to my wasted frame.” This single line, coming at the beginning of the story, which was meant in the original to provide color or description of Job’s suffering, for Blake comes to play a central role in marking the transition point from one set of beliefs to another, from a life of sin to a life of redemption, from guilt to grace. Only in the religious context of Romanticism, with its focus on “selfhood” and the depths of the “individual” – a concept known as “individuality” as opposed to Enlightenment “individualism” – could such a re-imagining of Job’s dream be possible.