The Book of Job redefines righteousness for a debased world

Andy Oram
October 23, 2024

Job has appealed to thinkers throughout the centuries, because his world is our world. In the first two chapters of the Book of Job, he loses everything in a few sentences: all his wealth, all his family, and his own bodily well-being. The rapid sequence may seem superificially to be grotesquely exaggerated, but it is reality. The same thing happened to millions in the Shoah (holocaust). And it’s happening in battle zones and disaster scenes all over the world today.

How many people have lost their homes and families to holocaust-like fires or epic storms like the one that took Job’s children? How many watch their regions crisscrossed by marauding warlords like those who took Job’s wealth? How many have lost family members to random shootings? How many are diagnosed with cancers and incurable degenerative diseases at least as bad as those plaguing Job?

The Book of Job asks how to remain righteous in a world given over to violence and inhumanity. The book is radical, because it discusses not only Job’s reaction to his woes but his reaction to social norms. A week after his calamities begin, Job—ostracized from society and weakened by disease—is forced to fight the pressures of friends to make a false confession of sin.

The theodicy of Job’s friends

One could ask what kind of friends believe that it’s comforting to bombard a sick person with demands to admit he is guilty. The answer is that to the people of that time and place—and indeed to most people today—the belief that suffering was caused by sin is comfort. Repeatedly, in all times and places, people look through their memory for some transgression that could explain why they have an illness, a sudden death in the family, or a financial failure. And like a policeman determined to stop a driver, they usually find a reason. There’s always something wrong. Thus, this obsession maintains its hold.

This doctrine of theodicy appears, for instance, throughout the Talmud, whether the sages are discussing Biblical stories, contemporary catastrophies such as the destruction of the Temples, or personal life events. They preserve the obstinate doctrine of Job’s friends.

In the minds of all these people, the belief that sin caused catastrophe is comforting because the alternative is to feel that the universe has no purpose. That admission would leave them with the classic existencial crisis of having no reason to do anything.

It would have been so easy for Job to fall back to his culture's naive equation of sin and punishment, to say: Yes, I guess you’re right. I guess I commited some sin that I forgot about.

But Job has a purpose: to be righteous. And he sticks to it. He fights back against his three friends, along with the arrogant, footloose young know-it-all Elihu who later joins them. Job knows that he has behaved properly, whereas the four others are feeding him false narratives. In effect, he knows, they are trying to make him admit that his righteousness is not righteous. He has to stand up not only for his own reputation, but for the very integrity of righteousness.

What is the righteousness of Job? He fed, clothed, and championed those without power—the widow, orphan, the blind, the poor, the stranger—and fought their oppressors (verse 29:17). The value of all this is questioned by the dismissive friends.

Ultimately, Job wins God’s favor and is vindicated, because he maintains his faith. But faith in what?

It’s hard to argue that Job maintained faith in God. No, he excoriated God repeatedly and insisted that God was violating the precepts of righteousness. “Is it good to you to be an oppressor…and look approvingly on the advice of the wicked?” (verse 10:3) “He pours contempt upon the good-hearted.” (verse 12:21) “Why do the evil live and grow in power?” (verse 21:7) “God’s justice is missing from me.” (verse 27:2)

Rather, Job is vindicated because he maintained faith in righteousness.

Redefining righteousness

During the reign of corruption, mendacity, unjustice, devastation, and evil, we can’t expect to hold on to anything except our own ability to act righteously. Job is the model. His act of resistance in the face of his friends’ demands is a righteous act in itself.

But if we no longer look to God or to the behavior of the world around us for guidance, how do we even define righteousness?

Once we see Job’s truth, no longer can texts tell us what is right. Texts never sufficed as a reliable authority in any case: There were always too many, and they were too vague and contradictory.

We know that different communities in different ages defined right and wrong differently. Often, righteousness consists in opposing what your community insists on.

But one trait can determine, almost always, the distinction between righteousness and wrongdoing: Those who are in the wrong know they are wrong and reveal that by covering up their behavior. They act in the depths of the night, bury the bodies, cover up evidence, censor the news, and show extreme discomfort when forced to discuss their behavior or its impacts.

Two lessons

Job teaches two lessons. First, that one can hold fast to righteousness when war, corruption, mendacity, and evil reign all around. But second, that one can hope for the restoration of righteousness. That is the outcome expressed metaphorically by the end, when a generous restitution is made to Job—and perhaps even more when God validates his viewpoint.

Many readers judge God’s sudden restoration of Job’s material and family status at the end of the book to be simplistic, even insensate. They find this ending to undermine and trivialize the enduring dignity of Job’s steadfast righteousness, and even cite evidence that the happy conclusion was penned by a different author from the book's poetic core. One can excuse the conclusion by supposing that it wasn’t done for Job—who already rests content from his encounter with God—but for his friends and even for the reader, who remaining stubborn in their theodicy need a tangible demonstration of God’s acceptance of Job.

In any case, Job will never have the happiness he started with, because he knows now that conditions can change without a moment’s notice. That, too, is the price of righteousness.

Related commentary: D'var torah for the Akedah

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