[As it is our practice, we are featuring only the FOREWORD and the INTRODUCTION, enough to give the curious the push and the shove to purchase your personal copy of this book. This is a christian perspective on the Book of Job; it treats the book not as a true story about a literal/historical figure, but as a literary piece that tackles the difficult problem of why bad things happen to good people.
It is our presumption that few visitors to this website have neither patience nor time to read our lonnnnggggg articles and this is one of them; we could chop them up into a series which we do to some, but the trend of thought is interrupted when we do that and some don’t bother to go to the sequels. So for those who might give up, here’s the concluding statement of this book which is our way of encouraging you to persevere and read this whole post but better yet, get a copy and read the book recommended here:
- For readers who do not believe in God, the moral is that true religious belief does not, and cannot, mean believing what is not only false but what also goes against the very evidence that is in front of our faces.
- For readers who do believe in God, the warning is even more severe. We cannot—we must not—ever think that we are the guardians of God’s reputation.
- We must speak the truth, even if it seems damaging to our beliefs. If God’s ultimate values include truth, then we cannot base our faith in God on something that is false. Learning the truth can only ultimately bring us closer to God, no matter how far away from us God may seem in that moment when we learn a new truth.
- God will have the truth, and God will not accept anything less than whatever truth we can perceive, and we cannot run counter to that reality.
Encouraged? Hopefully so, get started and remember not to forget reading JOB in the Ketuvim portion of the TNK, the Hebrew Scriptures.—Admin1]
Image from shareaverse.wordpress.com
Translation & Annotation by Donald Kraus, Foreword by Dr. Marc Brettler
Jewish Lights Publishing: For People of All Faiths, All Backgrounds
[Downloadable as ebook/kindlebook from amazon.com]
FOREWORD [reformatted for post]
Job’s name in Hebrew may be aptly translated as “Where is the (heavenly) father?” and no other biblical book deals so powerfully with the problem of suffering of the righteous individual in a theistic world. The majority of the book, composed of about 39 of the most difficult but beautiful chapters of Hebrew poetry of the Bible, is structured in dialogue form: dialogues between Job and his three friends; responses to Job by the mysterious Elihu; and two concluding chapters between Job and God, where, quite surprisingly, Job has the last word. Yet these are not dialogues in the sense that we are familiar with; Job does not respond to the content of his friends; speeches, nor do God and Job address each other’s claims in a straightforward way. Perhaps the poet of Job means to suggest that there is no simple, straightforward answer to the profound questions that the book raises.
The majestic poetry is surrounded by a 2-chapter prose introduction and a brief 11-verse conclusion (42:7-17). The prose presents a simply but disturbing theology: All of Job’s tribulations are the result of God talking too much. Twice God says to the Provoker (or Adversary; Hebrew ha-satan), a member of the divine council,
Have you laid heart to my servant Job?
He has no equal in the world, downright upright,
holding me in awe, turning from evil (1:8, 2:3).
This conversation provokes the Adversary, who asks and gains permission to harm Job’s property and family, and eventually Job himself. In the final chapter, Job is restored; his property is doubled, and a “new” set of children, including three most beautiful daughters are born to him. Indeed, a very loose translation of the book’s last two verses would be:
And Job lived happily ever after.
Indeed. This prose suggests that there may be “blips” in the system of divine retribution, but the person who is patient will ultimately be rewarded properly in this world. These blips are significant—the theology here is not that the righteous always prosper and the wicked are always punished, but that this is ultimately the case. And the exceptions have reasons: God’s heavenly court is run better than its human counterpart, but is not run perfectly.
The book of Job is considered, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, a wisdom book, the product of a group of ancient Israelite sages. Yet the world goes awry when God does not listen to wisdom advice such as Proverbs 17:28,
Even fools who keep silent are considered wise;
when they close their lips, they are deemed intelligent.
After all, the text suggests that had God not engaged the Provoker, showing off how righteous God’s “servant” Job was, none of these catastrophes would have befallen him.
The poetical center will not have any of this simple argument. Job and his friends present certain main arguments. Job insists that the righteous do suffer and that God abuses God’s great power. The friends argue the opposite—only the wicked suffer, and God uses the divine power beneficently. (It is quite striking that no one in the book argues that God is not powerful and in control of the world.) After three cycles of speeches, where they each adduce their personal experiences and perceptions, they are all worn out, and we expect God to respond to Job’s insistent demand:
Let the Mighty One answer!
Let God issue the indictment,
this opposing counsel! (31:35)
But instead we get Elihu. Elihu present significant interpretive problems, and many modern biblical scholars excise his speeches, claiming they are secondary. He can’t shut up, is very wordy, and presents himself as full of gas:
For I am full of words;
the wind within me distresses me
(32:18, author’s translation).
To make matters worse, the following speeches of God from the storm pick up on the vocabulary and ideas that Elihu expresses. Does Elihu thus foreshadow God or undermine God’s speeches?
The language of the divine speeches is exquisite, and much more clear than the very difficult poetry elsewhere in the book. They are among the most beautiful in the Bible, but they never directly address Job’s situation.
- The first, in chapters 38-39, is composed of tens of rhetorical questions that focus on God’s power. They thus address a shared premise of Job and his friends—that God is powerful—but do not clearly note whether this power is always used for good or not, the issue that Job and his friends debated.
- The second speech (40:6-41:26) is even more puzzling—its main focus is two creatures: Behemoth, a mythologized hippopotamus, and Leviathan, a mythologized crocodile. How do they relate to the main themes of the book? Does God indeed answer Job’s questions and beasts—and if so, what does this answer mean?—or is God merely interested in bullying Job into submission? Scholars are deeply divided over these issues.
Perhaps Job’s final words may provide some insight into the book and its ultimate meaning. But here, too, we run into an interpretive difficulty. Is Job capitulating, as suggested in most translations, including the NRSV’s:
Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes (42:6),
—-or has, for example, contemporary scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell properly captured the nuance of the Hebrew:
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust?
Perhaps the material in Job has been organized to suggest that there is no easy, obvious answer to life’s most difficult questions, and this is what has made Job such a popular book. Professional Bible scholars and others, such as the ancient Greek work “The Testament of Job,” William Blake in his remarkable drawings, and Archibald MacLeish in his play JB, have attempted to offer compelling interpretations. No one has yet succeeded, but the book, through its engaging style and important message, continues to help generation after generation address the “simple” question asked in Jeremiah 12:1,
Why does the way of the guilty prosper?
Job also shows that even though recent times may be the first to have evoked very large-scale human killing, we must remember the life of every single human individual, for that is the level on which Job offers its powerful, though ambiguous, message.
Dr. Marc Brettler, Brandeis University
INTRODUCTION
The Book of Job, a theological and spiritual masterpiece as well as a classic of world literature, is a poetical expression of the human effort to understand why we suffer. Job, a righteous and innocent man, becomes the victim of a plot between God and a heavenly being who tests human integrity—a plot that, as it develops, becomes little more than a cruel joke. As a result, Job loses everything he has, even his children, and finally his health; he thereby becomes an exemplar of undeserved suffering. Throughout most of the book he sits despairing among the ashes of his former life, visited by no one but his “comforters,” who only make things worse by trying to persuade him that his misfortune must make sense. That is why the book of Job is so compelling in our own day. More than any other biblical text, Job wrestles with the difficulties of the human condition, the inexplicable nature of the good or evil that can befall anyone, and the inevitable question, “Why?”
After a brief, even perfunctory, opening to set the scene and create the situation, the unknown poet who created this literary classic unleashes the power of expressive language to give shape to humanity’s deepest sorrows. In chapter upon chapter, with explosive imagery, dismissing the feeble, petulant, moralizing arguments from his friends, Job curses his conception and birth, his suffering, his friends for blaming him for his sorrow—he demands answers from them and, ultimately, justice from God. He describes, and perhaps mourns, the difficulty of finding wisdom in the world we know. Finally, except for a long interruption from the character Elihu (which may have been added later by someone other than the original author), Job, by the power of his speech and his unanswerable questions, silences the friends and sits quietly by himself.
God does then speak to Job—but does not answer Job’s questions or even allude to Job’s accusations. God provides no explanation at all. Instead, in poetry at least equal to the passion of Job’s outbursts, God describes a universe so deeply mysterious and so far beyond human comprehension that Job could not possibly understand an answer even if it were given to him. The God of these speeches thunders profoundly and sarcastically hurls questions back at Job’s questions, moving the entire debate onto another level—not “Why did this happen? What did I do to deserve this?” but “What kind of a world is this? Does it even have a meaning that I can understand?”
For those who believe in God, the questions that Job raises (including the books’ refusal to answer any questions) can be both a connection with and a separation from the divine realm. Meaning and existence seem split apart, and that split calls into question not only God’s goodness but also the rational expectation that God’s creation will ultimately make sense.
For those who do not believe in God, Job’s questions are the ultimate challenge both to the universe and to our unbelief. They challenge the universe by laying bare the fact of meaningless existence, and they test our lack of belief because the very terms of the challenge presume a meaning these questions then deny. It does not good to scream out for fairness in a world where the words “fair” and “foul” may have no meaning, or to cry out for justice when there is no being with the power or authority to establish a standard of right or wrong. And it provides no satisfaction to deny God’s existence and then to be furiously angry with God for not existing.
The book of Job, thus, is the kind of masterpiece that leaves us with discontent rather than contentment and with more questions than answers. For many present-day readers, it is also a difficult book to read and appreciate. There are several reasons for this, and so it is important to begin with some examination of what the book of Job is, why it may be difficult, and how we can prepare to overcome the barriers that it puts in our way.
What is the Book of Job?
In the Hebrew Bible, Job is included in a section known as “the Writings” (Hebrew Ketuvim), the third part of the Bible (the first part, Genesis through Deuteronomy, is the Torah or “Teaching,” and the second, Nevi’im or “Prophets,” includes not only what modern translations treat as the prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, but also the historical narratives contained in Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings). The Writings are a very diverse group, including (among other books) Chronicles, Daniel, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Placing Job in this mixed assortment does not, unfortunately, give us much help in deciding what kind of literature it is. It is generally grouped with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the category of “wisdom” literature, and that can help us in determining some of its possible claims. But there is nothing else in the Bible quite like Job, and therefore it is necessary to look outside the collection of biblical literature to make a decision about how we will approach the book.
Except for brief narratives at the beginning and the end of the book, Job is entirely made up of speeches. One character speaks, another responds, and so on through a bit more than 38 chapters. If it is a play, however, it is a rather unsatisfactory one because it lacks dramatic action. In the section of speeches, no one does anything; in fact, hardly anyone even moves. Lack of action is only part of the difficulty; there is also no character development. The argument moves from issue to issue, but none of the speakers seems to change in any way. Drama, in fact, is entirely confined to argument.
A better analogy for Job is the ancient literary form known as the diatribe. In our language, “diatribe” usually means an attack or a denunciation. In the ancient Near East, however, as well as in the classical world of Greece and Rome, “diatribe” meant a discourse or an argument among various participants. It served as one of the means by which a philosophical examination of an issue would be presented and took the form of a dialogue between two or more speakers, one of whom would be the author’s mouthpiece, and the other or others the proponents of views that the author was determined to refute. Job seems to be a writing of this type. That is why the presentation of the situation in the opening chapters is there mostly to provide the basis for the dueling speeches that follow, and the speeches serve as an explication of alternative ways of understanding (or failing to understand) the problem of human suffering. The friends offer conventional understandings of the meaning of suffering, and Job rejects these. Thus the issue is argued out, in a form that, as it came into sue around the Mediterranean world, may have been the foundation of the dialogues of Plato.
Being aware of the type of literature that the book of Job represents will save us from having expectations that it was not designed to meet. It is not a realistic narrative, and is not meant to persuade the reader that the events in it actually took place. It does not show any psychological character development such as we would see in a Greek tragedy, nor does it narrate exciting events (other than the disasters in the opening scenes) in the manner of the Homeric epics. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the presentation of clashing viewpoints.
When and Where was Job Written?
Job is “set” in what seems to be the time of the patriarchs, a time when there were owners of large herds and agricultural estates—perhaps around 2000 BCE or so—and when human life was believed to be considerably longer than the 70 or so years in the normal span (Job, already an adult with grown children, lives 140 years after the events and speeches in the book). So the story looks back to an idealized but indefinite past. Could it have been written during the time in which it is set? Almost certainly not. Job’s language and its approach to the problem of the suffering of the innocent indicate that it is likely written much later, during the Persian period, which lasted roughly from the mid-530s BCE to the mid-330s BCE—from the time beginning when Cyrus of Persia allowed the return of the exiled Israelites to their land to the time of the conquests of Alexander, and the Hellenization of the Mediterranean world, in the late 4th century BCE. The language of Job contains word borrowed from other, related languages (which is one of the reasons it is difficult to interpret) and seems to deal with ideas that were prevalent in the wider world of the ancient Near East during that time. But any attempt to specify a date for the writing of Job is guesswork and can only be approximate.
As with the date of composition, so the place where Job was written is unknown and probably unknowable. The book sets its narrative outside of Israel, in the land of Uz, and though it is written in Hebrew, some of the characters have Hebrew names and the God of the book is clearly identified with the God found in the rest of the Hebrew Bible—the creator, the source of righteousness, the epitome of strength, and so on—it is not concerned with many of the central biblical texts. It is at least possible that the author lived outside Israel or had spent time elsewhere, but nothing is known of the writer’s identity and the text gives no clues.
What is the Relationship between Job and Other “Wisdom” Writings in the Hebrew Bible?
The wisdom writings of the Bible—Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, plus some of the psalms, such as Psalm 119—stand in a tradition of literature that is found elsewhere in the ancient Near East. In the Bible, the wisdom writings have certain common features, such as their lack of emphasis on God’s covenant with Israel, the Temple, and the Exodus, for instance, and in the case of Proverbs, a countervailing weight on the importance of right behavior for the good life. Ecclesiastes and Job, unlike Proverbs, deny any connection between right behavior and prosperity or honor.
As contemporary readers, we must remind ourselves that at the time these books were written, there was no belief in the afterlife in which the injustices of the world would be put to rights. Ancient Israelite religion had no heaven to which human beings would be admitted; heaven was the dwelling place of God and of God’s assistants, the “sons of God” or heavenly beings who were charged with carrying out God’s will. But heaven was not a realm in which human beings, or their souls or resurrected bodies, would ever live. The only “afterlife” in the early biblical texts is a shadowy place as Sheol, which resembles more closely the Greek idea of Hades, the abode of the dead. It is significant that in both Hades and Sheol, the inhabitants are regarded as “dead.” They can speak under certain circumstances (usually occult or forbidden ones), and they have some sort of wraithlike existence, but they are not really alive. The inhabitants of Sheol, among other things, cannot praise God. There is no such thing as an “immortal soul” in early biblical literature—nothing about a human being is immortal, because the only immortal being is God.
This conviction—that when we are dead, we are dead, with no opportunity for further redress either of our goodness that went unrewarded or of our wickedness that went unpunished—lies at the heart of the arguments in the main part of the book of Job. It throws the entire burden of “virtue rewarded, vice punished” on what happens during a person’s human life. This is the reason for the urgency of the arguments and for the position of the book of Proverbs that virtue will be rewarded with happiness, prosperity, and honor.
For us today, this view seems naive in the extreme, but that is probably a superficial reading of the wisdom teaching in Proverbs. It understands that all other things being equal, a life of temperance, moderation, care for others, and uprightness of life will result in better health, better relationships with others, and a happier existence. Of course, in life all other things never are equal, and those who live ethically can end up in dire situations through no fault of their own. Still, this form of wisdom holds that the virtuous would still be better off than if they had lived a life of irresponsibiilty and dissipation.
Furthermore, whether life is fair or not, if we are wise we will live as if the reward of virtue is God’s blessing on us. This is partly because we need to keep “in training” with our behavior. Just as scientists maintain that “chance favors the prepared mind,” meaning that we can take advantage of a lucky break only if we recognize it when it comes, so for life as a whole, we can act ethically in difficult situations only if we have practiced ethically in general. It is also because, in the scheme of thought represented by the book of Proverbs, we honor our commitment to God by our right actions, whatever the consequences might be.
The Argument in the Book of Job
How does the book of Job hold together? One way to understand it is as follows. The prose framework describing Job’s downfall and final restitution, with its simple scheme of virtue and reward, represents how we wish the universe would work and how it should exemplify God’s justice. Job’s anger—and ours, in the case of our own suffering—when virtue is not in fact rewarded is witness to our sense that the universe should play fair, whether it actually does so or not. The demand for fairness is itself an indication: it speaks to our faith that something like fairness in fact exists and is a standard that can be appealed to.
But the book of Job does not present this argument in a straightforward fashion, and that is a part of its artistry. The opening story, with its cartoonish characters—the pious Job, the shallow and boastful God, and the devious Adversary or Provoker—is only the first of a series of viewpoints to which we as readers are invited to subscribe, only to have the ground pulled out from under us. Job’s curse in chapter 3, in which he claims not only the day he was born but also the night on which he was conceived, leads to the absurd conclusion that he would have been better off if he had never existed. In what sense anyone can be said to be “better off” if there is no person there to experience this “better” state is left unsaid.
Then come the arguments of the friends. Repetitively, monotonously, they ring the variations on their favorite themes: God does indeed reward the pious and punish the wicked. Maybe not right away, and maybe not in any way that you can see, but rest assured the wicked do not ultimately triumph, and the righteous do. And along with that argument comes the corollary: If you are suffering—and this goes for Job and for the members of his family—you must have done something wrong. Maybe it’s not obvious, and maybe you don’t even know what it is you’ve done wrong, but if God sends this suffering, then you must deserve it somehow.
Job’s responses to these linked assertions basically amount to “You think so? Look around you!” Can you honestly say, Job asks over and over, that the wicked are invariably brought to justice and the righteous always triumph? If you’ll only pay attention to reality, you’ll see case after case in which wicked people live full lives, surrounded by family and friends, enjoying their ill-gotten gains, and when they finally die, they are accompanied to their graves by crowds of mourners and well-wishers. And as for the triumph of the righteous, once again all that is needed is a little dose of reality. Plenty of people die alone, in poverty, having never experienced all the joys of life, even though they have lived upright and moral lives. They have been as virtuous as you could wish, and they have gotten nothing for it. Job also describes his own life: his charitable deeds, his piety, his rendering of judgments in the civic life of his town, the respect in which all around him would hold him, and the deference that they would pay him. In all of this, Job maintains, there was proof that he was, in fact, leading the life that God had meant him to lead, and he was remaining faithful to the teachings of his religious tradition.
Job’s responses, as repetitive as the arguments of the friends in their own way, illustrate another aspect of the artistry of the book. One of the facts of suffering—whether it is physical suffering, pain, nagging discomfort, or debility of a person’s physical being, or whether it is mental distress, depression, obsession, betrayal, grief, or unrequited love—is the tendency of the mind to return, again and again, to the fact of pain. To be in pain, in fact, is to be forced to think of pain over and over again. That is one of the painful aspects, so to speak, of pain itself. It is obvious even in relatively minor physical ailments like muscle pain: if the pain is at all severe, it tends to drive out any other thoughts. So much the more is it the case with severe pain, with depression or obsession, and with deep remorse or disappointment. Try as we might, we cannot escape the thought of the torment we are in. Our mind continually returns to the sorrow, the painful thought, or whatever the distress consists of.
This is reflected in the structure of Job’s arguments. Over and over again, the same topics are raised and knocked down. In this sense, the book represents not an argument among several human beings, but the mental process that can take place when a person tries to come to terms with a painful situation: “Did I do something wrong?” “Is this my fault?” “Did I deserve this?” “Could I have prevented this?” No matter how many times we review the evidence—and whether the situation was partly our fault or whether we have been stricken “out of the blue” seems to make no difference—the questions arise again and again.
This is part of the “realism” of the text: the reality of Job does not reside in the characters or the situation, both of which are presented in a conventional manner, but in the representation in a literary form of the mental carousel on which most thinking human beings have found themselves at one time or another.
The Wisdom Poem
. . . “Wisdom—where is it found?”—the poem implicitly compares the enormous efforts and risks that human beings will undertake to find precious gems or metals with our lack of effort in seeking after wisdom. Without saying so directly, the poem argues that wisdom is far more valuable than gold or gems, and so it criticizes the human reluctance to expend even a fraction of our time or energy on attaining wisdom, as compared with our strenuous efforts to seek wealth.
Without any connection to the argument that has gone before—and with no very clear connection to the parts of the book that follow—the wisdom poem nevertheless introduces a perspective that we as its readers are being subtly urged to keep in mind. “What are you willing to do to become wise? Look at the risks people take to find gems or gold—are you willing to take any risk at all to gain the valuable prize of wisdom?” Such a question does not answer the problem of suffering but looks at it from a different perspective. “What if, through suffering, you can gain insight that you might obtain in no other way? Would it be worth it? Underground the miner braves darkness and danger, even risks death, in the hope of material reward—are you also willing to risk pain and suffering in a quest for deeper insight and knowledge?”
The poem does not answer the question, because it is not a question that can be answered in the abstract. It is an existential question that can only be answered in the context of an individual, lived human life. And, by its very nature, it may well be answerable only at the end of life—or not at all. “Was it worth it?” is a very different question from “Will it be worth it?” And in any case we may never know.
[S6K: The Elihu speeches are discussed here as questionable, a “misfit thematically” and judged to be poetically inferior to the speeches of Job and his friends, of God, and of the wisdom poem in chapter 28. ]
The only structural significance of the Elihu material, in fact, is that it provides a transition between arguments about affirming or denying a moral order in the universe to those about the grandeur of creation and the awe-inspiring majesty of God that form the core of the final chapters, the speeches that God makes at the climax of the book. But in what might be an ironic statement about the quality of Elihu’s arguments, he backs into this point, raising it only as it develops out of his previous assertion that God judges and punishes the wicked. “God can do anything,” Elihu argues, in effect. “Look! God even creates thunderstorms!” And, in a passage typical of his style, Elihu spends the entirety of chapter 37 elaborating on the image of the thunderstorm, repeating the word “voice” five times. In a final burst of argument, Elihu maintains once more that God is far beyond human understanding, and our only choice is to stand before God in awe, because even the height of human wisdom is as nothing to God. And then Elihu vanishes, never to be mentioned again.
God’s Speeches from the Storm
In his speeches Elihu brought up the thunderstorm as if to validate that point, the poem presents God as speaking from amid the storm. But unlike Elihu or Job’s friends, God does not argue about the rightness or wrongness of a moral order in creation. Instead, God bases the entirety of the argument on the awe-inspiring nature of creation itself, and the complexity and power of its operations.
From the opening question, “Who is this?” (38:2) to the sarcastic catalogue beginning, “Where were you when I formed the Earth?” (38:4), to the closing line that Leviathan, such a powerful part of creation that he is subject to God but to nothing else, is “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), God’s speeches relentlessly press one point:
“You can’t possibly have an answer from me because it would be utterly beyond your comprehension.”
It would be fair to summarize these speeches as saying, “it’s a God thing—you couldn’t understand.” The effect of this could be to leave the impression that God is dodging the question. The piling up of instance upon instance of the wonders of creation, however, along with God’s questions to Job probing the limits of his experience in the whole reach of creation, and the final introduction of Behemoth and Leviathan—those marvels of creation who are untamable and incomprehensible, and who express the utter mysteriousness of reality itself—instead serve to move the entire conversation onto another level. The wisdom poem of chapter 28 implies an existential question:
“How much are you willing to undergo in order to gain wisdom?”
Elihu asks explicitly,
“How long can you possibly put yourself on the same footing as God?”
God’s argument takes this point from Elihu and makes it a final terminus for the whole discussion. What is the use of asking whether this whole operation has a point or of asking for the meaning of creation? If there is such a meaning, if there is any point to all of this—if the question even has a meaning that you can grasp—you are simply not among the group that could understand the answer, if in fact there is an answer. Only God can ask the question, not merely because only God can answer it, but also because only God could understand whatever answer there might be.
Problems with the Form of the Book of Job
Problem 1: HOW DOES THE PROSE FRAME STORY FIT WITH THE POETICAL SECTIONS?
The prose framework tells the story, in the manner of a folktale, of a very righteous man who is the subject, unknown to himself, of what amounts to a bet between God and a heavenly being called “the Satan,” the accuser, the opponent. Thought greatly provoked—he loses wealth, children, and health—this Job character does not offer any criticism of the suffering to which he has been subjected and defends God’s provision of good and evil. In the end, as Job holds steadfast, God rewards him with another family and more possessions than he had lost, including new children to replace the ones who had been killed in the beginning section.
It is clear that the prose frame establishes, once and for all, that Job is not a historical narrative but a tale told to make a point. Any suggestion that the story is actually true would involve its readers in trying to defend and explain a god who is morally monstrous, evil, shallow, and obtuse. The offense is not lessened—in fact, it is compounded—by the concluding section, in which the tale essentially presents the gift of new children as compensation for the loss of children in chapter 1. Such an ending verges on the grotesque.
Problem 2: HOW IS THE CHARACTER OF JOB PRESENTED IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE BOOK?
Job himself is a different character in the frame and in the dialogue. In the frame, he is pious and submissive, saying very little; in the dialogue, he is irreverent and assertive, with plenty to say. Thus the Job of the dialogue is a much more appealing character than the Job of the prose frame.
The question is whether the prose portions were part of the original composition—written by the author of the dialogue in a “folklore” style in order to set the scene, or perhaps an actual folktale that was simply taken over by the author—or whether it was added by a later and perhaps imperceptive editor to the poetical dialogue. This kind of supplemental editing is not unusual in the different books of the Bible as they were handed down, compiled, and collected through the centuries. It is not possible to come to a final determination about this, but the prose tale does serve some functions: it establishes a situation, provides a moral framework, raises the issues to be discussed, and in general situates the poetical dialogue in an account that helps it make sense.
Problem 3: HOW IS THE CHARACTER OF GOD PRESENTED IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE BOOK?
God, too, is a different character in the prose frame and in the poetical dialogue. It is impossible to identify the God of chapters 38-41 with the empty and foolish character of the prose frame. The God who in chapter 1 asks the Satan, in effect, “Don’t you think my worshiper Job is terrific?”—like some proud parent with a wallet full of photographs—is simply not the same as the one who thunders, “Where were you when I formed Earth?” (38:4).
Problem 4: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SATAN CHARACTER?
The Satan is prominent in the first two chapters, setting the whole story in motion, but then disappears, never to be seen or heard from again.
Problem 5: HOW ARE THE PARTS OF THE POETICAL DIALOGUES MEANT TO CONNECT?
Chapter 28, which is Job’s speech on the difficulty of finding wisdom, does not seem connected to any of the material before or after it. Elihu’s speeches, chapters 32-37, do have a connection to the preceding dialogue, but nothing that follows them seems attached to them. Furthermore, no other character, including God, mentions Elihu or his arguments
Problems Arising from Defects in Transmission
In addition to these five problems with Job as a poetical composition, there are places where the biblical text itself may be damaged. Some problems that seem to have arisen from its transmission—copying errors, missing text, and so on—are treated in the comments.
Problem 1: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE THIRD POETICAL DIALOGUE?
As the outline of Job indicated, the third dialogue is defective, containing no speech by Zophar and therefore no reply from Job. In addition, Bildad’s speech in this cycle is very short (only 6 verses) and seems to have lost some of its text.
Problem 2: IS JOB INCONSISTENT?
Throughout the dialogues, Job maintains that he has not been treated justly and that, in fact, the world does not show any moral order or any way of rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Yet in chapter 26, Job seems to change his position: he is praising God, exalting God’s power, and maintaining that our knowledge of God is merely knowledge of the very edges of God’s being. In chapter 27, after restating at the beginning his conviction that he has done nothing wrong, Job continues in a very different way, maintaining that the wicked are indeed punished at the hands of God. It may be that this speech, in fact, contains no only Job’s words but also those originally written for one of the friends.
Does the Book of Job have a Theological Point?
Some of the difficulties in the text of Job—omissions, additions and insertions, disorganization, and possible rewritings—seem to be the result of discomfort on the part of the various copyists and editors who had a part in shaping the book into the final form we have before us today. They may have had problems with the arguments, imagery, piety, and language of the poetry itself. Some passages may have been tampered with because these scribes and editors found them blasphemous or insufficiently respectful of God. But in another sense, we can ask the question as well. Is the book of Job really a theological argument that grapples with the problem of suffering and evil in a world created by God? To look at this question is to recognize that we must ask another question first: What would the world look like if it conformed to the religious beliefs of Job’s friends, and to the implicit beliefs of Job himself as they are revealed in his protests against what is actually happening to him?
The critique of the world as it stands—and the furious, though futile, defense of moral order that is waged by Job’s friends—implies a vision of how the world should work. That vision essentially says that if you worship God (and not any other power or any idol); if you are charitable with whatever wealth you may possess or earn; if you raise your children to be respectful and pious themselves; if you side with the poor and oppressed, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless—if you live in this way, you will be rewarded (or should be) with long life, prosperity, a happy family, and social honors and deference. We can leave aside the objection that if everyone were moral and therefore prosperous, there would be no oppressed or poor people to whom we could be charitable. The point of the vision is not to describe what would happen, but what ought to happen. Instead, we can ask ourselves: Well, if the world worked that way, what would it mean?
It would mean, among other things, that a guaranteed way to gain a long life, a happy family, and wealth for yourself and your offspring is to act in certain ways. Acting charitably and relieving distress would, in essence, be a sure way to gain prosperity. For at least some of us, therefore, helping the hungry and homeless wouldn’t be something we do because it is ethical and right, but because it would make us rich, happy, and long-lived. The danger of a universe like that, set up to reward virtuous behavior a matter of self-interest rather than of character. In other words, we would act virtuously not because virtue is good in itself and we should practice it no matter what the consequences, but because virtue would result in a good external to itself.
Ultimately, then, the critique of the book of Job, though it starts out by saying that life is unfair, turns into a much deeper critique—one that asks why we want life to be fair. Do we value fairness for its own sake? Or do we want fairness to result in something else that we value more, which is wealth, happiness, and a long life?
The theological point of the book of Job, therefore, if it can be said to have a theology, is to make us aware of the impossibility of creating a moral universe that at one and the same time would bring us to desire goodness for its own sake and reward us extrinsically for being good. this is the book of Job’s unique moral insight. Acting justly and generously can, of course, end up benefiting the person who acts as well as those who benefit from such behavior. But it cannot invariably do so without the unintended consequence that we will act in virtuous ways for the sake of rewards that have nothing to do with virtue Even God cannot square that circle.
The End of It
The final chapter of Job seems to undercut everything that has gone before. After all those chapters of argument, cursing, refuation, and blame—“Life is fair!” versus “Life is not fair!”—God ends up rewarding Job with twice the possessions and all of the family that he ahd before.
Has the book, therefore, fumbled its very point, the very reason it seems to have been written? Has it made the point that we must not expect virtue to lead inevitably to prosperity, only to turn around and provide an ending to the story that implies exactly the opposite?
It would seem that the book of Job has knocked down its main point in just this way. But that is not all there is to ti. Job is not being rewarded for his good deeds before calamity struck, but for something else. That something else is his refusal to blind himself to reality, and to lie about what he knew to be true, simply to protect what he thought of as God’s good reputation. this is what Job’s comforters have done, and it lies behind God’s denunciation of them as having spoken untruthfully about God’s self. In a final ironic twist, the friends themselves are judged harshly and are only rescued by the prayer of a virtuous man:
“My servant Job will pray for you; I will countenance his prayer and not treat you according to your folly; because you have not spoken rightly about me, as my servant Job has” (42:8).
This is exactly the situation described by Eliphaz in his final speech in chapter 22. So the final lesson which God leaves the friends, and us, is the exhortation “Don’t tell lies about me! Even if you think my reputation is at stake, speak the truth!”
God rebukes Job in the speeches in chapters 38-41. But the essence of the rebuke is that Job has asked for answers that he cannot possibly understand. Nevertheless, given the light that he has, Job has remained faithful to the light and has not attempted to blind himself to the limited truth that he is able to see. Therefore Job is better off than his friends, and Job’s seeming blasphemy is more pleasing to God than the friends’ conventional piety.
For readers who do not believe in God, the moral is that true religious belief does not, and cannot, mean believing what is not only false but what also goes against the very evidence that is in front of our faces. For readers who do believe in God, the warning is even more severe. We cannot—we must not—ever think that we are the guardians of God’s reputation. We must speak the truth, even if it seems damaging to our beliefs. If God’s ultimate values include truth, then we cannot base our faith in God on something that is false. Learning the truth can only ultimately bring us closer to God, no matter how far away from us God may seem in that moment when we learn a new truth. God will have the truth, and God will not accept anything less than whatever truth we can perceive, and we cannot run counter to that reality.
Except for brief responses to God, this is the end:
“Job’s words cease.”