The Book of
Job is an extremely interesting and curious
theodicy in the
Bible.
The setup is perhaps the most interesting part: there is a man named
Job in the land of
Uz, and he is very rich, extremely
righteous, and quite
holy. One day, "the sons of
God came to present themselves before the
Lord, and
Satan also came among them."
God proceeds to boast to
Satan that there is nobody in the world as great and upright as
Job, and then
Satan gets permission to "test" him. The rest of the book is mainly about how
Satan and
God inflict misfortunes on
Job, how
Job deals with it, and, ultimately, how he confronts
God about all of this.
It is very important to note that this is probably
not the
Satan we all immediately think of. This is one of the only references to him in the
Old Testament, and he appears to be more of a direct servant of
God than the
Satan of
New Testament fame. He very explicitly asks permission of
God to test
Job, and
God grants it; He even comes along for the ride. It is a very distinct possiblity that the
Satan in this case is somekind of
angel or other servant who acts very literally as The
Adversary of man in that he tempts them to determine if they are truly loyal to
God.
The story goes as follows (this is a very abbreviated summary, so please forgive the inaccuracies): all of
Job's children, livestock, and fortunate are destroyed. His wife leaves him, and he is horribly afflicted with sores and other bodily ailments. Some friends come to comfort him, which mostly entails asking and discussing what he may have done wrong, but all the while he claims that he is
righteous and didn't do anything. He grumbles a lot, but never curses
God, but finally calls
God to task and demands an answer for why this happened.
God's answer is basically, "You're a
mortal. I can create big and scary animals; can YOU? You have no idea what's actually going on. You can't see the
divine plan, and
shit just kind of happens sometimes." For sticking with
God and not cursing him,
God rewards
Job by giving back all that he had and more (more and better children, more and better wives, more and better livestock, etc. As if that somehow makes up for the
suffering and
pain of seeing your kids die).
The book of
Job is also extremely interesting in that it is really a few other, probably more ancient stories grafted together, much the same way as the story of
Noah. Parts of the book were written at different times by different people, sometimes hundreds of years apart. In fact, in the original,
Job probably wasn't reimbursed and rewarded in the end. The addition of the reward actually kind of defeated the whole point of the book, which was essentially:
- shit sometimes happens that we can't understand
- you just have to kind of take it
- bad things sometimes happen to good people for no reason
- you might not get rewarded for your faith
- God can make crocodiles and hippopotami (I am serious)
It's fairly good, although kind of depressing if you try to take it seriously. It is extremely
poetic, and, at times, kind of confusing because of its hybrid nature: I have read and heard of people struggling to piece together the truly
strange and
inexplicable portions of the book. For example, there is this one bit where a bunch of Jobs friends come to "comfort" him, and in the middle of their comforting, this one guy comes out of nowhere and starts offering strange and poetic pieces of
wisdom. Was this fellow sent down by God? Is this fellow God, and is he trying to aid Job? Isn't this breaking the rules of God's wager with Satan? Wild.
Some have claimed that The Book of Job was one of the first places in
Judaism where the idea of Faith in addition to Good Works was required for righteousness: Job is chastized for trying to second guess God (he had no
Faith) and this is a
sin despite his very
Good Works.
I recall an extremely interesting treatment of the Book of Job in some
short story I read a while ago. Regretably, I cannot remember the author, but the crux of the author's idea was this: Prior to Job, according to this author, God needed to offer mankind a reason for His doings, lest he lose their faith and become thought of among the
forces of nature or the meaningless, arbitrary
gods. God did these things to Job and inspired the book of Job so that He could be freed from having to ever offer an explanation to mankind for any of His deeds.
H. G. Wells, of all people, also had a very brief story dealing with The Book of Job. In it, a very accountant-like Satan has a conversation with God. During the course of the story, Satan does some quick calculations, and figures that, judging from the number of
progeny God was said to have given Job as a reward, there must be a little bit of Job in all of us by now.
Judging from
life, I suspect this to be true;
if not in blood, in spirit.