Summary: Bible - Book of Job

The GIST

Job asks the hardest question in the Bible and declines to give the answer most readers expect. Why do good people suffer? The conventional wisdom of ancient Israel held that God rewards virtue and punishes sin. The book takes a man who is, by God's own account, the most righteous person alive, strips him of everything, and then listens at great length as he and his friends argue about what it means. It is found among the Writings of the Hebrew Bible and stands first among the poetic books of the Christian Old Testament, and it belongs with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to the Bible's wisdom literature.

The form is unusual. A short story in prose opens and closes the book, and between the two halves of that story lies a long poem of speeches: Job's laments, three rounds of debate with his friends, a hymn to wisdom, the interruption of a younger man, and finally two speeches by God. The author is unknown. The language suggests a date in the Persian period, roughly 540 to 330 BCE, and although the writer was almost certainly an Israelite, the tale is set outside Israel, in the land of Uz, as if to say that the question belongs to everyone.

What It Says

The wager (chapters 1 and 2). Job is introduced as a man "perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." He is rich, with a large family. The scene shifts to heaven, where God asks the opinion of a figure called the satan, which in Hebrew means the adversary. The adversary is unimpressed, and asks the question the whole book hangs on: "Doth Job fear God for nought?" Of course Job is devout, he argues; God has made piety pay. Take away the reward and he will curse God to his face. So God permits the test. Job loses his herds, his servants and all his children. He answers by blessing the name of the Lord who gave and has taken away. A second round follows. Job's body is covered with painful sores, and he sits among the ashes. His wife tells him to "curse God, and die." He will not. Should we accept good from God, he asks her, and not accept the bad?

The reader now knows something Job will never be told: that his suffering has nothing to do with any fault of his. Everything that follows is read in that light.

The lament (chapter 3). Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to comfort him, and for seven days and nights they mourn with him. Then Job speaks, and the patient sufferer of the prologue is gone. He does not curse God. He curses his own existence: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." He longs for death, and it does not come.

The debate (chapters 4 to 27). The friends answer in turn, and Job replies to each, through three cycles. Their starting point is reasonable. God is just; suffering is the wage of sin; so Job must have done something, and should confess it and be restored. Eliphaz, who speaks first, offers a proverb about the human condition: "man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." As Job resists, the friends accuse him outright of sins he never committed. Job's contempt for them grows too. "Miserable comforters are ye all," he says.

Job's own speeches are among the most daring in Scripture. He knows he is innocent, and he shares his friends' belief that God ought to reward the righteous. So he draws the conclusion they cannot bear: that God is treating him unjustly. He accuses God of attacking him without cause and of crushing a creature he himself made. Then he widens the charge. Look at the world, he says. The wicked prosper, the poor are exploited, and nothing is done. Yet he never lets go of God. He wants a hearing, not an escape, and at moments his defiance and his faith are impossible to separate: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him." In one famous passage he even cries out, "I know that my redeemer liveth." The third cycle of the debate breaks off unfinished. Zophar never gives his last speech.

The hymn to wisdom (chapter 28). In its place stands a calm, beautiful poem that steps back from the quarrel. There is a vein for silver and a place for gold, it says, and people know how to find them. "But where shall wisdom be found?" It cannot be bought or dug up. God alone knows the way to it, and he grants it only to those who live in reverence before him.

Job's last word (chapters 29 to 31). Job sums up his case. He remembers the days when he was honored. He describes what he is now, an outcast, mocked and in pain. Then he swears a long oath of innocence, listing the principles he has lived by, his care for the poor and the needy among them, and he ends by demanding that God answer him.

Elihu (chapters 32 to 37). Someone else answers first. Elihu, a younger bystander who has not been mentioned before, bursts in angrily. He thinks Job is wrong to accuse God, who is greater than any human being, and the friends wrong as well. Suffering, he suggests, is not always punishment. It may be a way God gets a person's attention and rescues him. Nobody replies to Elihu, and many scholars think his speeches were added to the book later.

The voice from the whirlwind (chapters 38 to 41). At last God speaks, "out of the whirlwind," and what he says is not what Job asked for. He does not explain. He does not mention the wager. He does not defend his justice or respond to Job's oath. He asks questions. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." Who set the measure of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" The first speech ranges over the ordering of the universe, a catalogue of what God does and Job cannot do. Job answers briefly. The second speech turns to two formidable creatures, behemoth and leviathan, which only God can master: "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?"

Job's answer and the ending (chapter 42). Job responds for the last time. He admits he spoke of things beyond his understanding, and then says what has changed: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." In the usual reading he then repents in dust and ashes, though the Hebrew is difficult and some scholars think he withdraws nothing of what he argued. The prose story resumes. God tells Eliphaz that he and his two companions have not spoken rightly of him, as his servant Job has, and they must ask Job to pray for them. Job's health returns. His fortune is restored twice over, he has again seven sons and three daughters, and he lives to see four generations of his descendants.

Why It Matters

Job is the Bible's own argument with its simplest idea of justice. Proverbs makes confident statements about how the world works, and Job flatly contradicts them. The friends, who defend God with tidy doctrine, are the ones God rebukes. The man who rages at him is the one God says spoke rightly. Whatever else the book teaches, it gives the sufferer permission to protest, and it refuses to let onlookers explain away another person's pain.

It also answers the adversary's challenge. Job holds on to God after every reward has gone, which shows that there is such a thing as goodness for its own sake. What the book does not do is explain suffering. God's speeches change the subject from Job's case to the vastness and wildness of a creation that does not revolve around human beings, and readers have never agreed whether that is an evasion or the deepest answer available.

Traditions have read Job very differently. From the Second Temple period on he was remade as a model of patience, the picture taken up in the New Testament letter of James. Christians came to hear in his words about a redeemer a prophecy of Christ, and Augustine, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin all wrote on him. Among Jewish interpreters there were harsher judgments of Job, and Maimonides held the story to be a parable. In Islam, Job, called Ayyub, is honored as a prophet of steadfast faith. The book is read at times of mourning in Jewish practice and in services for the dead in the Catholic Church. Its influence on Western art runs from Handel's Messiah and William Blake's illustrations to Kafka's The Trial.

Who Should Read It

Read Job if you have suffered and been handed explanations that did not fit, or if you want to see how honest the Bible can be with its own difficulties. It rewards lovers of poetry, since its speeches are some of the greatest in ancient literature, and anyone drawn to the question of whether faith can survive without answers. Take the middle slowly. The arguments repeat on purpose, and their weight is part of the point.