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Wisdom and the Book of Job
What follows are some thoughts from a recently completed re-reading of the Book of Job.
To set the stage: Job tells the story of a righteous man who endures incredible suffering, all under the sovereign oversight of Almighty God. The narrative follows a series of long poetic dialogs between Job and the friends who have come to mourn with him and comfort him, all concerning the nature of man and his relationship to God. Job’s friends argue that Job must have sinned greatly to have merited such punishment from God. Job counters that he has lived a just life, and that the miseries visited upon him are unjust. Ultimately, Job is vindicated and restored by God, but in the telling, it is made clear to Job that he is not owed an answer or justification by God. Rather Job comes to recognize that the Lord’s power and authority are beyond human accountability.
Having previously read this particular book several times, I must admit that earlier efforts were pretty shallow. I didn’t really enjoy the subject. Quite frankly, the deeper message of a loving and all-knowing Lord who would allow unspeakable suffering and affliction towards an innocent person confused and confounded me. However, the passage of time and the gaining of a bit of maturity has revealed a number of new insights from this particular book of Scripture. I’d like to share two of them here.
From Chapter 15, verses 17, 25 and 26.* Eliphaz, one of Job’s friends, is speaking:
The wicked man writhes in pain all his days…
Because he has stretched out his hand against God
…and defies the Almighty,
running stubbornly against him
…with a thickly bossed shield
I read this and immediately thought, “Wow; that reads an awful lot like a reference to classical Hellenic (Greek) hoplite battle. Where did that come from?”
Why is this significant? Because the Hellenes, contemporaries of the Hebrew at the time story of Job was being definitively transferred from oral to written form, fought in a unique, disciplined, and distinctively Greek method. Their ground combat was characterized not by the wild, disorganized milieu of a mob of single warriors all fighting hand-to-hand that we tend to imagine. Rather, it was the tightly disciplined and ordered phalanx of soldiers who achieved victory by pushing their enemies off the field by the weight of their hoplon shields. Thus, the image emerges of a wicked man striving against God by attempting to push him off of the field, or rather, out of his life, so as to remain master of his own little piece of ground. The image is both contemporary within the context of the time it was written, yet timeless in its broader application to the human condition. Even if one does not believe in the existence of a higher power, don’t all people perceive their lives at times to be a struggle against greater adversity?
Further on, the author of Job makes a number of references to natural phenomena, stating that, the Lord “binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not split open under them.” (Job 26:8) And later, Elihu observes that,
For (God) draws up the drops of water;
…They distill his mist in rain (Job 36:27)
And,
By the breath of God ice is given,
…And the broad waters are frozen fast.
He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
…The clouds scatter his lightning. (Job 37:10-11)
Isn’t it a little remarkable that an ancient Jewish writer, most likely living in Persia at the time, would be able to describe the subtleties of the natural water cycle in all its physical phases — solid, liquid, gas — so elegantly? It becomes even more of a mental “kick-in-the-pants” when one considers that the story of Job is set in a much earlier era, the time of Abraham, and located in Northern Arabia. The story of Job had come down through ages of oral tradition from the earliest days of the Hebrew nation before being committed to written form. Familiarity with frozen seas (Glaciers? Icebergs?) and the cycle of water from earth to sky was so well known that the author could put these words into the mouths of his characters with the expectation that his readers and listeners would understand. Whether or not one ascribes these natural processes to the design of a creator or not, how can one not see the beauty and wonderment of such phenomena?
These are just two examples of the wisdom embedded through this marvelous ancient piece of literature. By my reckoning, Job was written down in the form that it has come down to modern readers around 750 BC. This would make it a contemporary of Homer’s Iliad. I suggest that both works are literary masterpieces, but each of them paints very different pictures of Mankind’s relationship with the divine and the natural world. In Job, one can see how even in the face of unjust suffering, one might retain dignity and honor. Job gives us an appreciation for that broader world, sky, and stars that makes us feel infinitely small and incomprehensibly big at the same time.
* All quotations are from the English Standard Version.
Published in Group Writing
The story of Job is fiction, so attributing any actions to G-d, or permission by G-d to a non existent Satan is futile. Everyone is free to interpret the story to their own satisfaction.
Piqued, I looked up what Catholic tradition holds on this.
I am a Jew not a Catholic, the story is in the Hebrew Bible, the Sages’ have deemed the story fiction but left in in the Bible to teach us some valuable lessons. Our Biblical canon closed about 444 B.C. and is arranged with the Torah first, the first 5 books; then comes the Prophets from Joshua through Malachi; and last are the Writings or the stories. Job is included in this last group and the writings are not considered Divinely inspired.
The Catholics have a number of books in their Bible that our Sages left out because either it hadn’t happened yet (Maccabees 165 B.C.) or because they were Greek additions. (apocryphal) and suggested of Greek mythology. Commentators and tradition does not make it so.
No only that, @mramy‘s point about the fungibility of children is at odds with the Torah and the Prophets. Job’s comforters have become a byword because of the perennial nature of the flawed arguments they propound, not because of their historicity.
As to @saintaugustine‘s point about Satan, isn’t that an example of one of the differences between Judaism and Christianity? The idea of Satan as an independent actor is much more limited in Judaism. Properly, the satan is an agent of divine justice, more or less a prosecutor with broad investigatory powers including going undercover as a provocateur for whom some degree of entrapment is legitimate.
The idea is also that, as is the wont of prosecutors and police agents throughout history, the satan can become overidentified with his role… but the ultimate Judge isn’t going to be fooled by a prosecutor who tries to burke exculpatory evidence. The satan much later gets conflated with the Angel of Death, and malevolent motives are ascribed to personified death as well.
Where Judaism and Christianity agree is that family, possessions, and so on are gifts from G-d. And let’s not forget: Whatever the flaws of Job’s friends thinking may have been, they hung it there with him; that is surely another lesson to be learned from this didactic text.
Yes, Satan does it. No, G-d doesn’t do it. Yes, G-d lets Satan do it.
Many of us are not clear why. G-d’s insecurity is a terrible answer. If this is the best we can think of, it’s a clue that we don’t know what’s going on.
If need be, I suppose I can address why G-d lets it happen. For the moment, on to other comments!
No, they aren’t, and no things aren’t fine in the end, and I didn’t say they were. I did say Job is vindicated in the end–and rich. But I’d rather keep my kids than get rich.
The Lord of the Rings is fiction, but that doesn’t make it futile to attribute actions to the Valar or to Galadriel.
Within the story, the actions are attributed to Satan. That’s just a fact of the literature. What we do with that in our own lives–yes, I suppose this could be said to be up to us.
I dig. But does anyone actually say that Job’s loss of children is ok just because he got new ones? This seems to me to be a conflict between a quirky interpretation of Job and the Torah and Prophets–not a conflict between Job and the Torah and Prophets.
Ah! Are you saying that even as a remark on the literature Satan is, when interpreted Judaistically, working for G-d?
For the record, conflating Satan with the Angel of Death doesn’t sound a bit like Christianity to me. But the idea of Satan as “an agent of divine justice” rather than an enemy of G-d and his people–yes, that does sound like a difference from Christian theology.
I dig.
I’ll just observe that very few people when pursued by agents of justice view it philosophically and objectively instead of taking it personally.
I also need to add that life is messy and people are messy. And that (as anyone who has read I. B. Singer knows) there was a widespread Jewish belief in demons and demonic forces.
In very broad strokes, the less educated have been more prone to such beliefs… but there are persistent (and in at least one case in the modern era witnessed and attested) reports of exorcism by rabbinic authorities. Maimonides internalized Aristotle and tried to formulate a myth-free Judaism… but there was a decided reaction from scholars, some quite formidable, who found Maimonides’ austerity at odds with their own experience and proclivities.
Gershom Scholem, the scholar who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism as an academic discipline. Robert Alter (again!) wrote a new foreword to Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in which he describes Scholem’s conception of his field of study:
Not unexpectedly, since both Maimonides’ approach and that of the Kabbalists are attempts to describe and categorize how an infinite and omnipotent G-d could create a material and constrained world, neither approach, framed by necessity as they are in human terms, is problem free.
But yes, the normative concept is basically as I described it.
One formulation of the way the Lurianic Kabbalah views creation is that in some manner describable only through flawed metaphor, G-d “withdrew” to “make room” for something else to appear to have an independent existence. Another way this “withdrawal” is described is “concealment.”
If the unpleasant (in the case of our transgressions) or even the pleasant ones (in the case of our doing what G-d wants us to do) consequences of our actions were not deferred, we would (in the case of many of our transgressions) not survive to learn and do teshuvah. Most of us must diligently work on ourselves to have any trace of a visceral (intellectual knowledge is cheap and easy in this domain) sense of the true nature of the consequences of our actions.
But if doing the wrong thing weren’t tempting, didn’t seem to be of equal weight with doing the right thing, we wouldn’t really have free choice. (Let’s see… a meal of poisonous nasty smelling filth on this cafeteria tray, on that one pizza and ice cream guaranteed by the Maker to be not only delicious, but the healthiest thing we’ve ever eaten. Tough choice, right?)