In this context, Job’s life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is one that divides ones life into fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary’s second visit to the sons of God and the Lord. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number.
Job having a new family (some of them even have names!) and twice the wealth before does not replace the life that he had before, does not make up for lost children, but it does at least bring some joy for those next century and a half.
This centers God’s response as the sticking point. He spends four chapters responding to Job the conversations that have taken place between him and his friends. While these conversations make up the majority of the book,7 His response solely in the context of this framing device (which, we must remember, is an older folktale which has been re-cast as a framing device for the rest of the book) gives us a particular flavor of ‘God works in mysterious ways’ with more nuance than one commonly finds when that phrase is employed.
-God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do — nor indeed can — possibly understand the ways in which he works. They’re not just mysterious, they’re vast and incomprehensible. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are
+God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do — nor indeed can — possibly understand the ways in which he works. They’re not just mysterious, they’re vast and incomprehensible. This makes the most sense in a panentheistic view. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are beyond even our causal domain.
+Even in a grounded, Jahwist, immediate and physical view of God (He is, after all, there in the form of a whirlwind), his entrance comes off as bizarre and unnerving. He passes through the physical plane as the Sphere does through the Square’s planar existence. Even in so physical a form, He proves His very incomprehensibility.