JOB, NRSV HEBREW BIBLE

A friend of mine has recently been considering some of the implications and ramifications of the story in the Book of Job.

In his considerations, he says that he may not be remembering the Book of Job correctly from his Bible School years. I don't know whether he is or not because from the stories I've been told by my wife and my mother-in-law, the stories told in Bible School or Sunday school or Christian schools are often warped and twisted and serve the needs of brainwashing a group rather than teaching the Bible. But because I believed that Bible Schools are often twisted, my friend's line of thought made me revisit the Book of Job (New Revised Standard Version & Complete Tanach with Rashi's commentary).

It was nothing like I remembered it.

It's not a story about Job and his relationship to the Hebrew God as much as it's a story of the relationship of his three friends to Job and to God. His three friends don't comfort Job but instead lambast Job for being impatient and for daring to question why God has let evil happen to him. They also pretend to ascribe understanding of how God thinks or would respond. And that is the focus of the narrative, not God-Satan-Job.

The whole narrative structure of the story is kind of complicated, and took me a while to parse, but I'm glad I did. The actual response from God is a little koan-like, hell it's a lot koan-like, in its elusiveness; and quite "Why do you keep thinking you can understand me?" Tao-like if the Tao talked back to people. The short story that frames the main dialogues (the story with Satan or The Adversary) is very folk-taleish and really doesn't seem like the main theme of the story at all, just a way of setting the stage, yet I'll bet that the framed story is the main thrust of many a Bible class.

(Just as an exercise, I sought out a Baptist ministry sermon on Job. Unsurprisingly, the four messages this minister gets from Job are 1. Satan's aim is to destroy our joy in God, 2. God aims to magnify his worth in the lives of his people, 3. God grants to Satan limited power to cause pain, and 4. Satan's work is ultimately the work of God. Three of the four messages that this minister gets out of this story are about Satan [insert fire and brimstone here].)

I should stop being surprised that the messages in the Jewish and Christian holy books are often as thoughtful as those in Eastern texts, certainly more thoughtful than I remember them to be.

JOB, NRSV HEBREW BIBLE:
The enigma of the suffering of the righteous and the good fortune of the wicked was one addressed by Israelite literature, both in the psalms and in other wisdom texts. Although not prominent in the book of Proverbs, it emerges more strongly in the later wisdom books of Ecclesiastes and Sirach. Several Psalms also address aspects of these issues (Ps 37; 39; 49; 73), but they do not exhibit the radical protest and questioning that one finds in the book of Job.

Distinctive to the book of Job is the way it situates these issues. The book is neither a treatise on innocent suffering, as often supposed, nor an apology for God's justice in the face of inexplicable human suffering. Rather, the principal theological issue that the book raises is, ironically, the question posed by the adversary in the divine council (see 1.9): Will mortals be religious ('fear God') apart from rewards and punishment? As the dialogue develops, however, the questions of divine justice that torture Job's mind are not satisfactorily met by the arguments of the friends. Job himself seeks to imagine a way in which he might go to trial with God for a vindication of his righteousness and perhaps an acknowledgment from God of God's mistreatment of Job (9.2-35; 13.13-28; 16.18-22; 19.23-27; 23.1-7; 31.35-37). Yet when God answers Job, it is neither as the friends have imagined God would speak nor as Job had hoped God would answer him. The meaning and significance of the divine speeches continue to be among the most debated issues of the book. Some interpret the speeches as a repudiation of a human's right to question God. Others understand them as a necessary correction to Job's too limited understanding of the nature of the cosmos as a place where all suffering can be reduced to legal categories of guilt or innocence. All agree that the extraordinary beauty of the poetry is part of its meaning. Perhaps the very elusiveness of the divine speeches implies that no answer from God to Job's questions can satisfy the human intellect. But as is known by anyone, that is not true to our experience as humans. We yearn for a response to the problem of evil, and continue to in part because the book of Job provided no answer for us. Yet the ending suggest that there is a resolution to be found in the depths of a pious life lived before a mysterious God.