Unravelling the Book of Job
The Book of Job deals with one of the great mysteries of human life: why do good people suffer, and why does God not answer our prayers. As it presently appears in our bibles, the book presents a great contradiction about the nature of God. First we have a preamble written in prose. This is followed by a poem of great beauty and deep meaning. The book ends with a return to prose. Two very different images of God appear. But read on, and see what I mean. Jim Gerwing.
It must have been a slow day in heaven. Maybe both God and Satan were a little bored. So they went to the local coffee shop to chat. After the preliminary expressions of greetings they began to play a game of one-up-man-ship.
“Hey, Satan my friend, have you seen my boy Job down there? Look what a fine man he is. Great wealth, a wonderful wife and kids, a new house and three vintage cars. And he hasn’t done a bit of wrong in his whole life.”
“Granted,” says Satan. “But maybe he is so good because you have protected him from everything that could go wrong. What would happen to him if we took all that away? Let’s make a wager here. I’ll give you five to one odds that if we took it all away he wouldn’t be so smugly pious.”
“I’ll take you up on that because I trust that Job will hang on to his goodness.”
In the next few weeks, Job lost his job, his wife berated him endlessly, his kids took to drugs, his cars all broke down on the same day. His house burned down. Job couldn’t understand how all this could happen so fast. But he didn’t waver in his trust that things would get better soon enough as long as he resisted the temptation to kill his wife, put his kids in jail, cheat on his taxes, or anything unjust to right his ship.
“See,” God smirked at Satan when they had coffee the next time. “My boy Job is doing all right.”
“Okay,” said Satan. “But so far we haven’t touched him. He is still healthy, gets enough to eat and drink, and hasn’t felt anything horrible in himself. Let’s see if he will hang on if we strike him personally.”
“I agree, but on one condition. We can’t go so far as to put him to death.”
“Done.”
And the next day Job fell ill. Not just ill. He broke out in ugly sores all over his body. He stunk so badly that his wife drove him out of the house and he ended up on the street. Everybody shunned him except a few people who felt sorry for him and flipped him a few coins or some scraps of food.
So begins the book of Job, an exposition on the problem of why the innocent suffer. After this beginning, the book breaks into a long and beautifully crafted poem, bringing in three “comforters” to argue with Job in three dialogues, each one devoted to different arguments trying to convince Job to admit that he must have done something wrong to deserve such punishment. Even his wife dares him to kill himself. Job remains obdurate, stubbornly insisting that God is dealing with him unfairly, even daring God to take the defensive role in court to justify his ill-treatment. A fourth person attempts to intervene, a young man who is convinced that the old guys were off base, and gives them all a lengthy lesson is wisdom, still insisting that Job must confess his sins in order to restore his fortunes. Job continues his laments, refusing to admit that he had done any wrongs to deserve what had happened to him.
Then God speaks to Job. Far from attempting to justify whatever misfortunes Job is experiencing, God scolds Job for not understanding even the simple things in nature, so how could he attempt to grasp the meaning of human suffering. This is the part of prayer that too many are missing: listening to God speak to them.
The poem ends with the simple response from Job. He is so very sorry for mouthing off on things he does not understand. His final stance is to accept his position in the dust and ashes.
The present book of Job then goes back to the argument between God and Satan. God restores Job’s fortunes to double what he had before. And therein lies the problem with this book. The preamble and the conclusion completely destroy the whole argument of the poem. The poem is clear. We simply do not understand why life is like it is. It is not fair. Good people suffer untold misery. Bad people often prosper. It just doesn’t make any sense. God does not interfere with any of it. No amount of human prayer, suffering, sacrifice, changes what happens.
The preamble creates an image of God that is disgusting. God is willing to visit horrible misfortunes on someone to win an argument with Satan. God and Satan can pull strings to create any situation at will, for no good reason.
That image of God is what prompts people to pray for cures, for winning games, for making big bucks in the lottery, for safety, for rain, for sunshine. That also prompts people to make sacrifices to appease God’s anger. That is the theory behind the sacrificial death of Jesus to atone for the sins of the world. That is why heaven had to be invented: to even the scales of justice that were unbalanced during one’s life.
The book of Job raises a number of issues that cry out for explanation. Who wrote the book of Job? Obviously two very different characters, one who could not agree with the poem’s thesis that what happens in life is just life happening. The poem sees God as not interfering in any way with the natural progression of events. The writer of the first and last sections provide a whole different argument: that God is in charge and can change anything at will. God is just, keeps things level. Job is good and stays the course, so God must reward him. The preamble and the epilogue to the poem make that case.
We can conclude that two writers were involved if we study the style of the two parts. The preamble and the epilogue are written in rather ordinary prose. The rest is high poetry, from a different pen, from a different attitude, from a different time and place.
Whoever it was that edited the book of Job as we have it put the two contradictory stories together, letting us struggle with the problem. So which part is the inspired word of God? Our task in life is to explore the boundaries of wisdom in this book, to manage our lives in the quagmire of doubt and delusion, to make sense of what is often meaningless. And, like the Job of the poem, we may find that we have to remain in our state of ignorance, satisfied that we will never know the whole story even while we struggle with the difficulties of taking life as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Bad things do happen to good people and to bad people, and we will never know how it will all come out in the end. We carry on as best we can with the hand that is dealt us. We can pray, and we ought to pray, for relief. But we understand that prayer does not change God. It changes us, our attitude, our way of dealing with what we cannot fully understand.