Job

The Book of Job recounts how the patriarch whose name it bears, a man of exemplary piety, was overtaken by an unprecedented series of calamities, and reports the debate between Job and other speakers, to which the occasion is supposed to have given rise.

The Book of Job is a product of the Wisdom-literature: it deals with a problem of human life; in modern phraseology it is a work of religious philosophy. The problem with which it deals is this: Why do the righteous suffer? and its principal aim is to controvert the theory, dominant at the time when it was written, that suffering is a sign of the Divine displeasure, and presupposes sin on the part of the sufferer. The doctrine that righteousness brings prosperity, while wickedness is the forerunner of misfortune, is often taught in the OT.: with regard to the nation, for instance, it is inculcated in the exhortations Ex. 23:20ff, Dt. 28, Lev. 26; applied to individuals, it is the principle repeatedly insisted on in the Book of Proverbs. Of course, in a large measure, this doctrine is true. Society being organised as it is, the habits which go to constitute righteousness are such as to win a man respect from his fellow-men, and to command success; on the other hand, wickedness paralyses the moral energies, blinds an individual and a nation alike to the real conditions upon which prosperity depends, and often overreaches itself. The doctrine was deeply impressed on the ancient Hebrew mind; and all exceptions were a source of great perplexity to it. The perplexity was the greater, because the Hebrews had an imperfect conception of general laws, whether in nature or in society: they were keenly sensible of God's omnipresence, and pictured Him as interposing actively in the course of the world: hence virtue overtaken by calamity, or vice flourishing unrebuked, seemed to them to cast a direct slur upon the justice of God's government of the world.

But the laws governing nature and the constitution of society being general ones, it may happen that in individual cases their operation does not redound to the advantage of virtue or the punishment of sin: the forces of nature may combine to overwhelm the innocent; men, in virtue of the society in which they live, being variously bound together, the innocent may suffer through the ill-deeds of the guilty; or wickedness may elude detection, and triumph unchecked. The problem is touched on in Jer. 12:1f, 31:29f, Ez. 18, Hab. 1:13f, Ps. 37, 49, 73. One solution which the Hebrew thinker found was that the prosperity of the wicked was shortlived, that it met with a sudden and ignominious fall (Ps. 37:20f, 36, 73:18-20). while the righteous in the end inherited the land (Ps. 37), or was conscious that he owned a higher and inalienable spiritual possession (Ps. 49, 73). In the case of the sufferings of the righteous, there was a tendency to invert the argument, and to conclude that because sin was followed by suffering, therefore suffering was necessarily a consequence of antecedent sin. That this conclusion is illogical, is, of course, obvious. Nevertheless, it was a conclusion that was widely drawn; it prevailed even to the days of Christ (Luke 13:1-5; John 9:2). And it was the conclusion which Job's friends drew. Job's sufferings, they argue, convict him implicitly of some grave antecedent sin, which they urge him to acknowledge and repent of. This conclusion Job controverts. He steadily refuses to admit that he is guilty of any sin adequate to account for his extraordinary sufferings. And when his friends appeal to the evidences of God's retributive justice visible in the world, he retorts by pointing to the numerous instances which experience affords of the wicked prospering even to the day of their death.

The main aim of the Book is thus a negative one, to controvert the dominant theory that all suffering proceeds from sin: God's retributive justice is not the only principle by which men are governed. Positively the book teaches— 1. (the dialogue being interpreted in the light of the prologue) that sufferings may befall the righteous, not as a chastisement for their sins, but as a trial of their righteousness, and that as such they have a tendency to strengthen and establish their faith. Eliphaz, also (5:17ff), and particularly Elihu (33:15-30, 36:8-25), insist, in addition, upon the disciplinary value of suffering. 2. The Book teaches the danger of conceiving too narrowly of God and His providence: by conceiving of Him solely as a dispenser of rewards and punishments, the friends charge Job unjustly with grave sin; and Job, conscious of his innocence, imputes injustice to God, and is tempted to cast off his fear of Him altogether. 3. Inasmuch as Job, in spite of his combined physical and mental suffering, does not succumb to this temptation, it teaches, in opposition to the insinuation of the Satan (1:9), that man is capable of real and disinterested goodness, and can love God for His own sake. 4. It teaches (c. 38-42) that the true solution of moral perplexities is to be found in a fuller and larger sense of God, in a conception of Him as the author of a vast and infinitely complex system of nature, in which it is unreasonable for the individual to conceive of himself as isolated from the care of Providence, or to infer that his sufferings have no place in God's purpose. 5. It has also, probably, a practical aim, that of helping the author's contemporaries, who appear to have been in circumstances of national depression, to understand the situation in which they were placed, and of encouraging them to hope for a favourable issue. In other words, Job is a type of the suffering godly Israelite.

In structure, the Book of Job is of the nature of a drama, and may be termed a dramatic poem. Its principal parts are constructed in the form of a dialogue; and the action which it represents passes through the successive stages of entanglement, development, and solution. The action is, however, for the most part internal and mental, the successive scenes exhibiting 'the varying moods of a great soul struggling with the mysteries of fate, rather than trying external situations.' And as the author of the Book comes forward clearly as a teacher, the ends which he had in view would be better secured if he set vividly before his people a history of which the outlines were popularly known, than if he took as his hero one with whose name they were unfamiliar. To determine precisely what elements in the Book belong to tradition, is, of course, no longer possible. But probably tradition told at least as much as that Job, a man of exceptional piety, was overtaken by unparalleled misfortunes, that he broke out into complaints against God's providence, and refused to be satisfied or calmed by the arguments of his friends, but that he never absolutely discarded his faith in God, and was finally restored to his former prosperity. This history is made by the author of the Book the vehicle for expounding his new thoughts on the religious and ethical significance of suffering.