Question
Reading through Job as research for the next book and y’all, it’s rough. First time going through it in like fifteen years. I can’t remember if it was Apocrypals or Bible For Normal People, but hearing a story of people struggling with their faith after reading it no longer surprises me c.c
So, what role does this play in Christianity? Is it a demonstration of God’s power or position over man or something?
Raised atheist, so I feel like I’m missing something important on a cultural level.
Responses
Fred Clark essentially posits Jonah as a response to Job, basically “god is actually good and forgiving and not a jackass who thinks mass murder pranks are a good time”
The point of Job is the ending, really. We can’t even discuss theodicy because we aren’t the ones who can see the whole picture and know what is evil and what is justified.
Here’s what I get out of it: it’s a story, probably the oldest part of the Bible, that says sometimes bad shit happens to good people, and if there’s a reason for it we may never know. There’s no pat moral answer in it, but there’s a degree of comfort in knowing that doubt and anger at God aren’t new.
One interpretation I’ve seen more than once focuses on Job’s friends and how they insist he must have done something wrong he needs to repent for, but they’re all wrong. Job did nothing wrong, and he is justifiably upset with God at the end, but he does not get a real answer, and neither do we.
Job is, I think, an attempt to repudiate the idea of “if bad things happen to you, it’s because you are a bad person”
Well, yes. We can’t check God’s work to know if they are playing for the good ending or the bad ending.
Another way I think about it is, if god exists outside of time and can perceive all time at once, the interventions they choose may be largely unrelated to the immediate perceived needs of humans, and more about a bigger picture we can’t perceive because it is too far beyond us. Butterfly chaos theory on a universal space-time level.
(Reply:)
That’s precisely what I’ve always loved about Job, is God showing up in a whirlwind and going “you don’t have and can never have literally any idea what you’re talking about”—and then telling the other guys Job was the only person present who said what was right. The sense of intrusion from another plane is as bizarre as anything in Ezekiel, it just involves fewer eyes
Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe, a sociologist, wrote a general theory of magic, Stolen Lightning, that (in opposition to George Frazer) described magic as a series of individual acts that take elements of their society’s existing religious structure and turn those elements to personal benefit. Kabbalah is definitely in that tradition.
(O’Keefe, an editor at Reader’s Digest for 30 years, is probably best known for inventing the holiday of Festivus; his son was a writer on Seinfeld and ported the family rituals into the show.)
Something, going back to the discussion about Job right quick
I remember, growing up in a Christian household under a mother who had remarkably super progressive ideas on how to teach and live it, that I also had trouble with Job at times. I understood that the point of the story was “sometimes bad things happen to good people, and we can’t always understand the reason why, but if they happen, it’s not some punishment for some secret sin.” But it still would linger in my mind.
Two things helped me see Job in a different light though. First was The Job Suite, by Christian musician Michael Scott Card. I remember, as a young tween, dealing with the trauma, the sorrow and the PTSD I had gained from being moved from my native Austria to the States, then facing constant, vicious bullying at all times at 5th & 6th grade public school before being homeschooled
I remember listening on repeat, over and over, the part of the Job Suite sung from Job’s perspective. The expression of sorrow and pain comforted me, validated how I was feeling, and I drew comfort from this particular set of lyrics:
The song is explicitly a Christian perspective on the story, with explicit references to not just Jesus, but the idea of what he represents as “God Among Us.” I came to view part of the moral of Job as being “Though bad things might happen to you, unexplainably and seemingly for no reason, have trust and faith that God is in control, and even if he might have allowed these things to happen, for whatever result of causal links you have no bird’s eye view of seeing, he recognizes your pain, suffering and sorrow, and stands with you in comfort over it.”
The second thing that changed my view on Job, was a book I found a few years after. I cannot for the life of me remember its title nor its author, but its argument was that, when Job had made his complaint towards God, it was effectively a court summons for grievances against God. And when God appeared to Job, and asked him “Who is it that darkens my counsel / Who speaks empty words without knowledge? / Brace yourself up like a man / And answer me now if you can,” critically GOD DID NOT DISMISS THE COURT SUMMONS
The book argued that Job, standing in for humanity, had called God to account over why “bad things happen to innocent people.” God’s explanations over how He is responsible for EVERYTHING in creation meant that there was a far greater picture going on that we, as humans, could not understand IN OUR MORTAL LIFETIME. And the author argued that Job’s acceptance of this wasn’t an acquittal of God so much as a “Okay, I will have faith in you and wait and see.” The court summons Job initiated still stands, and whether God faces acquittal or not will depend on the day we are reunited with Him and can see, from His perspective, ALL the causal chain of events that have gone down through the ages, like a mind melting series of dominoes
That fundamentally changed my outlook on The Book of Job at the time, when I was in my almost 20s. Now that I’m in my 30s, I accept that things that happen, good and bad, are so easily the result of chains of choices and their consequences I have no awareness of. And God allows them to happen because they might be either expressions of the laws of nature, or the free will of people. But just because he allows these things to happen in a causal universe, does not mean He has abandoned me. It does not mean He has stopped loving me. He is there in my suffering, sharing in it and comforting me, and I choose to trust and have faith that in the end, for all the bad that might happen, ultimately it will be leagues and bounds outweighed by the good.