The Book of Job
Léon Bonnat. Job (oil on canvas), 1880.
Bonnat-Helleu Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bayonne, France.
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Job is a good and righteous man. God is just. Yet, Job suffers terribly. Why?
That’s the perennial question, isn’t it? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and if God is a just and loving god, how could he allow good and innocent people to suffer? Any parent who loses a child; any husband or wife who loses a spouse in a senseless, violent traffic accident; any friend who watches a loved one waste away with a horrible illness, must ask: Why? And that’s the question Job poses . . . over and over again. All three of Job’s friends address it: Eliphaz, with the voice of experience; Bildad, with the voice of tradition; and Zophar, with the voice of religion. All three friends agree that suffering comes from God, that God is just; therefore, Job must be guilty. Yet, Job insists that he is innocent; therefore, God must be unjust. But none take the next step in the syllogism: suffering comes from God; God is just; Job is innocent. That alternative is unthinkable.
For those like Job who believe that life should not be arbitrary, that good should be rewarded and evil punished—that there should be justice—there is no answer to why Job suffers. Indeed, the very act of asking the question—“Why do the innocent suffer?”—displays a profound lack of understanding.
From Genesis through Esther, Scripture presents an anthropocentric world, a world in which humanity stands at the center of creation, a world which is viewed solely from humanity’s perspective: it’s all about us. But perhaps that’s not the case, at all. Perhaps we’re little more than Gerridae, “water striders,” who skim along the gossamer surface of a bubble, radiant inside and out, and death is but a pin; the universe, indifferent. Job’s questions—and his friends’ answers—expose the fragile limits of human consciousness, the restricted compass of human knowledge and the profound egoism of an anthropocentric world.
Perhaps it’s all just an illusion.
When God speaks in a great Voice from the center of a storm, he presents a vision in direct opposition to the Genesis through Esther narrative, an amoral vision of profound energy, of lightning, of thrashing seas, of monstrous creatures prowling the deep, of war horses exulting in battle, a vision shot through with profound paradoxes: a longing for the absolute darkness of death against the radiant backdrop of a chorus of morning stars, singing; of lions springing on prey, all sinew, teeth and claws, and of torn antelopes suffering and letting go, neither lion nor antelope questioning, each playing its role in the sacred game.
To believers, that’s a disturbing thought. And it’s meant to be.
Nonetheless, Job is a stunning literary tour de force:
Victor Hugo said, “Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save Job”;
Tennyson referred to the Book of Job as the “greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature”;
Virginia Woolf said, “I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out well in it”;
G. K. Chesterton believed that Job posed a question so difficult that even God could not answer it; and
Carl Jung thought that God suffered such a deep defeat with Job that he had to come to earth in human form and sacrifice himself.
My 4-lesson course on the Book of Job recognizes Job as a literary masterpiece, while it also probes the most fundamental questions of the human condition, questions with no pat answers. When God answers Job’s question about innocent suffering, God reverses the imagery we find in Job’s lament. Rather than moving from light to dark, from life to death, from suffering to oblivion, God’s speech explodes like a supernova, bursting forth in the blinding light of creation as the “morning stars sang together,” as God laid the foundations of the earth and populated the heavens, the sky, the sea, the land; as God lifted the great mountains, formed the clouds and rain, created the hills and forests; populated the earth from the tiniest creatures to Behemoth and Leviathan. It is a glorious picture of creation, both violent and serene, each creature—and nature itself—playing its role in the grand drama, the eater and the eaten, the struggle of life and death, the eternal cycle of life in all its vicissitudes.