This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Andy Oram
11 September 2000
For many years I have stubbornly been seeking an answer to the mysteries in the book of Job. Why would God let a taunt from an evil spirit launch him on a course of destruction against his most beloved human being? Why did so many have to die to make a point? And why wasn’t Job rewarded for challenging God, as were Abraham and Moses?
But like Job himself, I feel now I that have pushed my questions too far. While I’ve discovered a new understanding of the book, it makes me identify with Job’s lament, "Why is light given to one in misery?"
Coming to the book of Job, after reading a thousand pages of Torah, prophets, and wisdom literature, a reader is forced to look directly at the question that most of the Bible touches on only occasionally and briefly: why is there suffering and injustice in the world?
I find the key to the answer in what Job has gained and lost during the course of the book. His position at the end is very different from the way he is viewed in everyday, vulgar opinion. Job’s loss is his confidence that the world has meaning; his only gain is a knowledge that he cannot second-guess God.
Let us start with the most superficial of observations (one I already made as a child, and heard from other people as well): that to modern moralists it cannot seem to be proper justice, nor to modern parents true restoration, to give Job new sons and daughters to replace those whom God killed.
Contemplation of this contradiction leads us straight to the tragedy of Job, and that of all creatures. How could any reader think that the original author of the story took so lightly the loss of Job’s earlier family? How could we assume, or believe the author would assume, that the insuperably moral Job to get over their loss? (Moreover, what about the servants who lost their lives?)
Clearly Job remains a broken man, suffering from survivor guilt like so many Holocaust victims, a man whose material gains at the end of the book probably worked just as effectively as his memories to keep him in pain and grief.
If there is any weakness in the book of Job, it is the appearance of Satan at the beginning, which makes the whole tale seem like the working out of a silly schoolboy dare. As a moral statement this beginning was quite bold, for it underlies the theme of capriciousness that God acknowledges at the end—and makes God’s plan look positively cruel. But the plot device risks diverting readers from the philosophical point of the book. Job was tried not to satisfy the curiosity of a meddling spirit, but to show Job himself how worthless he was. For God, it was not enough to have a righteous Job, he must also have a humbled one.
At the end of the book, the author takes another risky step by restoring Job’s material position. The common reader assumes that this restoration means God is merciful and righteousness is rewarded. This type of reader is lulled by the reassurances at the end to soften or explain away God’s speech to Job. But such messages are irrelevant and totally out of place in the story. The author uses the superficial restoration of wealth to underscore that nothing can ameliorate the awe one feels at God’s power, once one’s eyes have been opened.
What is left to Job, and the reader, is God’s speech. After thirty-five chapters where Job and his friends flail around seeking meaning in his predicament, God vouchsafes a direct comment—but he says nothing that has not already been said by the men themselves! He taunts Job, and leaves the impression that we can neither understand nor intervene in the workings of Heaven. Job’s new fortune, far from repairing all the damage, just highlights how impossible it is ever to recover from such a vision once a person fully comes to it.
It is hard to live one’s life if, like Job, we face what God explicitly says. Not only can we not change God, we cannot even question him. “This far shall you come, and no farther.”
The full statement of God, if allowed to remain unveiled, makes Job the most depressing book in the biblical canon. It is far more cynical than Ecclesiastes, even if the latter book is stripped of the positive statements tacked on at the end. Job, read this way, leaves any person of faith wondering how to continue in that faith.
So where is Job when the book wraps up? He simply returns at the end of the book to the precarious condition he had at the start. He had flocks and family before; he has them again now. Within days he could lose everything before; within days he could lose them all again. And he must have known very well how unsafe he was, even better than the average person knows it today. (I was set back an entire year or more, for instance, by a random auto accident a few years ago; other people have had their lives shattered by an illness or a job loss.) He may have lived a rich, long life without further physical tribulations, but he could never cease to “despise” himself and “repent in dust and ashes.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.