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Abstract
The Book of Job is often viewed as a story of unnecessary and undeserved suffering. A man who is “blameless” in the eyes of God is put through senseless anguish and misery simply because God and the Adversary have a wager. It is a story of a whimsical God who does not understand or care about human beings and their sufferings, and of an insignificant and yet defiant being who epitomizes human dignity and fortitude. This and other similar accounts make God villainous and human sufferings mysterious and incomprehensible. This article seeks to cast these issues in a different light by exploring some of the key terms in the Prologue and the speeches of God in the Theophany. The exploration ends with some reflections on Job in the Epilogue of the Book.
Notes
The author of this article is neither Jewish nor a Job scholar. He is neither familiar with the languages with which the book is written nor with the vast and rich literary and theological traditions behind the story. The article is a merely personal reflection on the book as a tribute to a mentor who first led him onto this journey. Of the three major sections in the Book of Job, the Prologue, the Dialogue, and the Epilogue, this article focuses on the first and the last, commonly referred to as the “frame story,” with the addition of the “theophany.” This means that the Dialogue, the middle portion of the book, where the debates between Job and his friends occur, is not considered in the article. The immediate reason for this decision is that the article has a limited scope. It is simply impossible to address the book as a whole without turning the article itself into a book, which is not the intention of the author. Furthermore, the decision is motivated by the apparent disconnect between the Dialogue and the rest of the book. The frequent complaint that God's speeches in the theophany are not clearly related to the previous debates between Job and his friends is a clear sign of this disconnect. One may point to the authenticity or integrity of the text as the source for this disconnect or look elsewhere possible causes. One possibility is that the Dialogue centers on a set of issues or questions, such as “why good people suffer” that are in some ways self-contained. In other words, these issues are so fundamental to human beings and so universal in all human societies that they can be raised independently of Job. Two conclusions may be drawn from this possibility. First, because of this self-contained nature, the Dialogue merits its own examination; second, although the questions may be raised independently of Job, the answers may not. In other words, the particular context in Job in which the questions are raised helps determine a set of answers that are vastly different from those if the questions are raised in a different context.
All quotations from the Hebrew Bible are from the New King James version with the exception of replacing “Satan” with the “Adversary.” Other alterations will be noted in the appropriate places.
All etymological analyses of Hebrew words are from The Blue Letter Bible, http://www.blueletterbible.org/.
Genesis 1:31.
Notice the absence of the qualifier “in his generation” as in the description of Noah.
By Job's own admission, he is a powerful member of the community.
God says to the Adversary: “And still he (Job) holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause” (Job 2:3).
Genesis 3:7.
Ibid., 3:21.
Genesis 20:6.
Job 39:16.
Genesis 25:23.
Ibid., 25:29–34.
Ibid., 27:1–38.
Ibid., 31:38.
Ibid., 29:22–28.
Ibid., 29:31–30:24.
Ibid., 30:10.
For even though God first made the promise of “a great nation” to Abraham, he waited for three generations (Abraham, Isaac, and finally Jacob) to finally make it a reality. Had Jacob been a different person, God might have waited even longer.
As mentioned in the Preface, the middle portion of the book is omitted in this article.
Genesis 8:20.
Ibid., 8:21.
Genesis 9:20–21.
Ibid., 9:22–25.
Job 39:15.
Ibid., 39:30.
Genesis 1:26–28.
Job 39:7.
Ibid.
Ibid., 39:10.
For ancient tribes that domesticated and used ostriches as if they were horses, see Robert Sacks, The Book of Job with Commentary: A Translation for Our Time (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 1999), 308.
Job 39:5–6.
Ibid., 38:39–41.
One example is in Marvin H. Pope's Job (The Anchor Bible) (Anchor Bible, 1965), 15:329–32.
Job 41:34.
For different translations and the reason for the adopting the current one, see Albert Barnes, Notes, Critical, Illustrative, and Practical, on the Book of Job, with a New Translation and an Introductory Dissertation (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857), 2:284, ft. 6.
Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), xxi.
Genesis 18:22–32.
In this sense, not only is Job correct but also his friends in their concerns about human justice and their defense of God. The problem with them, as many others have pointed out, is that they try to “fence in” God with their narrow human perspectives. In so doing, they remain in their limited views of justice and never rise above that. In this sense, not only does God not appear before them but he cannot.
Genesis 32:28, italics added.
This is the focus of the next chapter.
For example, Isaiah 27:1.
Many scholars have also identified the Leviathan with Satan. See, for example, Robert Sutherland, Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2006), 100, and Christopher Wordsworth ed., The Holy Bible, In the Authorized Version (London: Rivingtons, 1868), 4, pt. 1, 98. The article, though, approaches this issue from a slightly different angle.
Job 41:34.