Larry Hart, Curtal Friar¹

Abstract
This paper is a serious attempt to engage with the Book of Job, utilizing the specialized studies of literary, language, and historical scholars (Jewish, Christian, and secular) while remaining conscious that Job is not an academic treatise but a book of wisdom intended to be read, not as a philosophical discussion of the problem of evil and suffering, but as a help and guide for those who, faced with all the difficulties, challenges, sorrows, and joys of real daily life, are on a wisdom quest. Consequently, it also takes seriously the sages, saints and scholars in spiritual theology and history across the centuries. By “spiritual” I do not mean anything spooky, paranormal, or fantastically odd, but a life lived and transformed by an inner consciousness of the mysterious, but very real, presence of God.² Indeed, this essay argues that as essential as facts are to the work of hermeneutics, the interpretation of Job requires not only an analytical mind, but a dioratique (insightful) soul.³ As the British philosopher Keith Ward insists, the most basic, the most elemental, question for us is whether ultimate reality is materialistic––consisting solely of matter and its bio-chemical processes; or, whether reality has about it those qualities we describe by such words as consciousness, intelligence, mind, or spirt.⁴ This paper, then, is written from the perspective of one who is unapologetically Christian, and with pastoral intent for pastors, priests, ministers, and for those seeking a word of wisdom from the Book of Job in a desperately troubled and hurting world–– a word of wisdom rooted in intellectual honesty in its treatment of the text, and in the spiritual tradition of Judeo-Christian spirituality.

Key Words
1) Job, 2) suffering, 3) wisdom, 4) spiritual, 5) injustice, 6) righteous, 7) innocent, 8) just, 9) whirlwind, 10) Spirit, 11) encounter, 12) nonlinear, 13) systems, 14) hermeneutics

A Difficult Read
Job is one of the more difficult books of the Bible, perhaps, outside of Revelation, the most difficult. Edward L. Greenstein, professor emeritus of Bible at Bar Ilan University, writes in his preface to Job: A New Translation, “The Hebrew of Job with its eccentric idiom and often inscrutable text, poses an extraordinary challenge to the scholar of difficult language, the philologist, the lover of words.”⁵ The ideas expressed in Job have been referred to as not only challenging, but strange. Since the Medieval period of Western Europe, it has even been suggested that perhaps the difficulty encountered in the language of Job stems from its having been translated from another language, such as Edomite, into Hebrew. This is rejected by Greenstein and others, but it certainly points to the scholarly consensus that Job is indeed a difficult read.⁶ The Arabist and Hebraic scholar Alfred Guillaume wrote: “Hebraist have always noted that there are a great many words and expressions which have never been satisfactorily explained; and despite the many excellent commentaries on the Book of Job. . . hardly any more of the more obscure passage of Job have been elucidated, though commentators at home and abroad have shown great skill and ingenuity in explaining them away.”⁷ Further complicating the reading of Job is that nearly every genre of literature found in the Old Testament is to be found in Job: laments, curses, riddles, proverbs, nature poetry, hymnic material, and quasi-juridical rhetoric. Job has frequently been thought of by those teaching the Bible as literature, as a kind of poetic drama, one of the greatest plays in literary history with the characters appropriating each other’s lines and using them in contradictory ways. Although the academy is generally agreed that scholars have made considerable progress in the analysis of Job, especially in understanding the meaning of obscure words, the number of differing opinions and sheer contradictions among scholars continues to make the reading of Job for both historical-critical information and spiritual formation a rather daunting task.⁸

It is possible that the story of Job is based on an old oral legend, but which other than the book itself as we now have it is lost in antiquity. The actual writer, whoever it may have been, was obviously from among the educated elite. This is clear from a number of the book’s characteristics. It is full of allusions to the literature and myths known and circulated among the educated in the Middle Eastern world at the time. The vocabulary, the refined intellectual arguments used by the characters, its style, and tone all indicate it was originally written for a relatively small audience of scholars and sages. David Clines says of Job:

It implies a highly literate public, with a rich vocabulary, a taste for imagery and a stomach for elaborate and extended rhetoric. It implies a readership that is not literal minded. one that delights in irony, exaggeration, misdirection, and whimsy.⁹

Job is, then, a difficult read not only for the non-specialist, but also for the scholarly specialist as well. Guillaume thought that “the centuries old problem of interpreting Job is the failure to recognize that the Book of Job was written by a poet whose language was impregnated through and through with Arabic.”¹⁰ I would think that he is correct on both accounts, but that the greater problem for both scholar and non-scholar alike is not a problem of ancient languages, but learning to see and read Job as poetry. The question to be asked in reading a poem (and nearly all of Job is poetry) is, in the words of John Ciardi, not what the poem means, but how it means––how all its elements, its language, its rhythms, its images, and moods all work together to form its meaning.¹¹ Learning to read Job as poetry, as wisdom, requires a new way of seeing, and of reading that goes beyond form criticism or the historical-critical method. It requires seeing in a more holistic way, seeing causes and effects in a nonlinear fashion, and feeling our way as we might with a poem.¹²

The divine answer to Job’s question even comes in the form of nature poetry. Job asks, in effect, “Why if God is real, powerful, and just is there such awful suffering on earth?” And the divine response is, what many scholars are agreed, is in Hebrew some of the most exquisite nature poetry in the history of world literature. In The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, Bill McKibben writes of God’s speeches:

Glory shone around on every side, and for Job this glory was enough. It seemed quite literally to fill him up. “I am speechless what can I answer?” he said, I put my hand on my mouth. / I have said too much already; now I will speak no more.” It is not simply his smallness in the face of the infinite, it is his sense that that infinity is somehow sufficient. I had heard of you with my ears; / but now my eyes have seen you. / Therefore, I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust [emphasis added].¹³

It should be noted that a particularly intriguing aspect of these nature poems is the absence of any lyrical song of humanity––it is creation before the appearance of humanity. It is the Earth, and the cosmos in which it spins, uninhabited by humanity. The Book of Job is not anthropocentric but theocentric. In short, we want to read the Book of Job as being about Job when in reality it is about God. God never says anything about Job and his suffering, but instead describes the wonder of the cosmos and the divine purpose.

God speaks, but in an unpredictable way––making no reference to concrete problems and therefore not responding to the distress and questions of Job. This does not seem correct. What God says is disconcerting to the reader, but Job seems to understand it. Our aim is to share this understanding.¹⁴

The proposal, to which I want to lend my support here, is that the answer to Job’s question is not found in a concept, formula, idea, or verbal thought, but in an encounter with the presence of God in which there is a shift from self-centered consciousness to God-centered consciousness.¹⁵

Poetic Analysis and Systems Thinking
Asking how all the elements of a poem work together is systems thinking applied to literary analysis. It is, therefore, a non-linear and holistic perspective. This allows a reading that is tolerant of ambiguity, and finds meaning in paradox, and mystery, and beauty.¹⁶ In systems thinking the focus is more on relationships and their processes than content.¹⁷ In order to understand an organized whole, it is thought, we must identify not only a system’s individual parts, but the relation between them as well. With such an orientation “it no longer becomes necessary to know all about something, a text for instance, in order to comprehend it.’¹⁸

In systems analysis it is particularly important that any part of the system be understood in terms of how it functions in relation to the whole. Any attempt to remove a component of the system and analyse it in isolation collapses the whole system. As Edwin Friedman explained:

Each component, rather than having its own discreet identity or input, operates as part of a whole. The components do not function according to their ‘nature’ but according to their position in the network. . . . To take one part of the whole and analyse its ‘nature’ will give misleading results, first, because each part will function differently outside the system, and second, because even its functioning inside the system will be different depending on where it is placed in relation to the others. In fact, the very notion of effect becomes relative.¹⁹

The point is simply that every attempt to understand Job apart from the non-linear, holistic, relational process distorts, or even collapses, the meaning of the book. A non-linear, holistic, systems orientation necessitates what Longman III refers to as a synchronic rather than diachronic study of Job; that is it must be studied within the context of not just the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, but within the context of canonical Scripture as a whole, rather than from the historical -cortical perspective which tends to fragmentation of meaning and speculative interpretations.²⁰ Reading Job from a systems perspective, reading Job as a poetic experience will bring, in Gillespie’s words, “. . .a recognition of the universe that scientists following Newtonian methods cannot hope to discern.”²¹

What Is Job All About?
In his Poetics, Aristotle described what became the definitive philosophy of literary theory, the guiding criteria for dramatic writing. Following Aristotle’s canons, the writer informs the reader of some point of tension that needs to be resolved––a question to be answered, a problem to be solved, a danger, difficulty, or challenge to be overcome. A series of logically connected events is then narrated leading in chain like fashion from the problem (the point of tension) to a conclusion that is satisfying to the reader or audience (the resolution). This sequence of events beginning with the point of tension or problem and moving to its resolution is the plot. When someone summarizes the plot in a sentence or a paragraph, they are saying what the story is all about. So how can we very briefly summarize the plot of Job? What is Job all about?

A casual on-line search will find numerous attempts to formulate what Job is all about––many of them quite reasonable and even profound. Job, it is said, probes the reality of suffering. It is about the meaning of suffering. It is concerned with the question of why innocent people suffer, and why bad things happen to good people. A great many people of the sort of simple faith, perhaps at times even naive faith, of which Marcus Borg is so critical, take it that the message of Job is: “Trust God, be patient, and although terrible things may happen to you, God will see to it that in the end everything ends happily––without so much as a painful scar. For some Job is understood as raising the sharp-edged question: “Is there a moral order to the universe?” Or does Job prove the nihilist assertion that life is totally contingent, meaningless, absurd? For others Job is about whether “disinterested virtue” (love of God simply for God’s sake) is a possibility. And there are those who see Job as a symbol of human defiance of an unjust God, or of fate––”head bloodied but unbowed.” The Jewish Scholar Matitiahu Tsevat, in his outline and summary (The Meaning of Job and Other Biblical Studies), regards not simply suffering, but the suffering of the innocent as the theme of Job. “The problem,” he writes, “of the suffering of the innocent is everywhere in the book. . . From this vantage point, looking back over the disputation of Job and his friends and forward to the answer of God, we have no difficulty identifying the suffering of the innocent as the problem in a preliminary way. It (the theme) is the suffering of the innocent.”²² All of these proposals are true. But for the most part just are not large enough or comprehensive enough to be satisfying. One reason they are not large enough is that they are theoretical, or academic answers to theoretical or academic questions. Actually, if all we want is to know the meaning of Job as a piece of information to file away, or perhaps to argue about, any of these statements will suffice. But if we engage with them, wrestling with them, as the realities of our very existence, then, they will become wisdom questions.

A Wisdom Setting
A man there was in the Land of Uts––a simple but not insignificant opening. To most readers or people gathered in a Bible study group, knowing that Uts, or Uz as most English versions render the name, probably refers to a place located somewhere in the southern Transjordan will hold no great interest unless they are particularly intrigued by geography, but finding that the name means “land of the wise” will catch the attention of anyone reading for spiritual formation. In Lamentations 4:21 Uts, or Uz, is associated with Edom, and in Jeremiah and Obadiah 1:8, Edom is recognized as a center of wisdom.
Now, not only does Job live in a place and among a people noted for their wisdom, but Job is himself a person noted for his wisdom––people come to him to settle their disputes, and to ask for advice. He is an elder, a sage, a satrap who sits with leaders, “judges,” and the learned at the city gate for that very purpose. Everyone knows him and respects him for his fair and just judgements. When Job speaks everyone listens (Job 29:7-29).

Will Kynes rejects the whole idea that a separate genre of Old Testament writings that can be classified as Wisdom Literature exists as a distinct category.²³ Kynes is concerned that thinking of wisdom literature as a particular Old Testament genre has led to the erroneous notion that it is a different type of literature written by people (sages) with a radically different point of view from that of the prophets, priests, and other Old Testament writers in which theology is grounded in the redemptive history of Israel. Sages, argues Kynes, rely on reason rather than revelation in an effort to discover how to live more effectively. It is simply not within the scope of this paper to debate the case for an Old Testament wisdom genre, or in what sense the genre may or may not exist. What can confidently be said is that there are texts in the Hebrew Canon which focus on wisdom and share a number of characteristics––including aphorisms, riddles, proverbs, enigmatic paradoxes, highly symbolic images, figurative language, and poetic features even when written in prose.

Kynes is correct in one important respect. There is a difference between the perspective of the prophets and priests of Israel and the Sages. The Torah is, as are the Four Gospels of the New Testament, anthropotropic, that is they have to do with God reaching to humanity, with God’s favorable and loving disposition toward humanity. So, the great Jewish scholar and mystic, Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote: “God may not be of much concern to us but we are of much concern to God.”²⁴ And Paschal, thinking of those who were distressed because in spite of their seeking of God felt God somehow remained distant or hidden, famously imagined Christ comforting them by saying: “Take comfort, you would not seek me if you had not found me.”²⁵
The wisdom literature of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, as well as the apocryphal books of The Wisdom of Solomon and Sirac are all theotropic; in that, they represent the human quest, the longing, to know God––to know God not as an abstract idea or concept, but as a lived experience. This is the very thing Paul seems to be talking about in Acts 17:27-28, “God did all this so that we would search for him and reaching out touch him. Although he isn’t far from any of us––in him we live, move, and have our being.” Wisdom is effortful, requires genuine engagement, and at times even intense struggle (Job 28).

I have spent an inordinate amount of time here on Job as a cherished book of poetic wisdom written by an ancient Hebrew sage for sages, because our basic orientation to any piece of literature is a determinative in interpretation. Tremper Longman III has a helpful phrase, “Genre triggers reading strategy.”²⁶ He appreciatively employs Heather Dubrow’s illustration of how our understanding of genre affects our interpretation. It’s actually a little thought exercise that goes something like this:
First, read the following under the title, The Personal History of David Mapplethorpe, and then read it again entitled this time as, Murder at Mapplethorpe.

The clock on the mantlepiece said ten-thirty, but someone had suggested recently that the clock was wrong. As the figure of the dead woman lay on the bed in the front room, a no less silent figure glided rapidly from the house. The only sounds too be heard were the ticking of the clock and the loud wailing of an infant.

The first title suggests that we ae reading a biography, that the wailing infant is David Mapplethorpe at the time of his birth, and the dead woman his mother who has died giving him birth. The silent figure we might reasonably assume to be the doctor leaving the house. The second title lets us know we are reading a murder mystery. With this shift in genre, we naturally assume the dead woman is the murder victim, and the silent figure gliding into the night the murderer. For Job to do anything to us, we must learn to read it as poetic wisdom.

Still another way to say all this is that how we frame anything, a photograph, a painting, a past conversation, or an idea makes a substantial difference. A news editor, for example, attempts to influence our opinion by framing what a politician said variously as: “She criticized,” Blasted,” “Ranted wildly,” “suggested,” “argued for,” “provided evidence for,” all calculated to direct the reader’s feelings and understanding in a particular direction. It is not at all unusual to find scholars who possess outstanding credentials characterizing God, or the discourses the narrator gives to God in the Book of Job, as the “huffing and puffing of God,” the attempt of God to intimidate and humiliate Job who, like some twentieth century anti-hero from an American movie, remains defiant and sarcastic to the end. David J.A. Clines sees Job’s response to God in 42:2-6 as resistant, recalcitrant, and disdainful of the possibility of having a real discussion with God regarding divine intervention in human affairs.²⁷ God, Clines thinks, engages in an “unattractive baiting” of Job and is uninterested in anything Job has to say.²⁸ “Has our poet,” Clines asks, “set before us, in the magnificent sweep of the cosmic Plan, a deity who is in the end unlovely and not a little chilling. Has the deity perhaps a little too much attachment to crocodiles?”²⁹ It is astonishing, given the basic stability and complexity of the Hebrew religion and culture, the steadiness and definiteness of the wisdom tradition, the long history of the Book of Job and it place in the Tanakh (the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible), the ambiguities and unknowns in the language, and the impossibility of knowing the tone of voice with which the text should be read, that anyone could make such wild assertions with such confidence. Job must be interpreted consistently with the information and setting provided by the narrator, and in the context of Jewish mores and spirituality.

Job: The Man From Uts
A man there was in the Land of Uts––Job was his name;
and that man was whole (in heart) and straight (of path), and
fearing of Elohim and turning from evil (JANT.)³⁰

The name “Job” means “where is my father” with the connotation of “one who cries to their father (in this case the divine father) for help.” Whatever emotion we see or read into this poetic drama, Job’s every lament, his every complaint, his every argument is an appeal, a cry of desperation for help. That’s the first thing we learn as we begin to read. There was a man in the land of the wise, where people have all the intellectual and informational answers, who cried out in anguish, “Where is my father? Where is my help?” The second thing we learn is that this a man we can care about––that we don’t want to see suffer. Indeed, we may even begin to feel drawn into Job’s experience of suffering and his encounter with God, and isn’t that the point? Otherwise, why not write a philosophical essay rather than a drama? It’s not that Job has never done anything wrong, nor that he will do no wrong in the future, but that the pattern of his life not only elicits the respect of those who know him but stirs in them a desire to do better to be better themselves.³¹ Job’s suffering, his struggle, is a paradigm for the way of wisdom and the spiritual life.

This man Job, we are told, was whole in heart, straight of path, fearing of Elohim, and one turning from evil (1:1).
1) Job is whole, or pure of heart The King James version says “perfect,” and the New American Standard Bible “blameless.” What is imagined is a person who is genuine, congruent––without deceit, treachery, hypocrisy, or ulterior motives. It is the opposite of the double minded person of James 1:8 who can’t decide what they most desire. In his book, A Spirituality of Perfection, Patrick J. Hartin, Professor of New Testament at Gonzaga suggests there are three elements to perfection, or wholeness of heart:
• Perfection is achieved when there is an inner wholeness or completeness which results in the fulfillment of the intention or purpose of our original constitution––the purpose for which we were created.
• Perfection is an undivided devotion to God. For Christians it is a wholehearted consecration to Christ. For ancient Hebrews and modern Jews, it is living a life in obedience to the Torah, and for Christians it is following the precepts of Christ (John 14:15-24).
• Perfection is wholeness in the sense of a relational unity between God, believer, and the community of faith. Hartin says in this sense it is akin to the Arabic adjective saddiq, a term meaning a friend who is completely trustworthy.³² Hartin ties this together when he goes on to write:

The gift of wisdom is identified as the perfect gift that renders us whole and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:5), restoring us as first fruits to the image of God’s people. More especially the completeness flowers forth in establishing right relations with God. Friendship with God is the privilege of not just a few, but the experience of all who receive God’s gift of wisdom. This friendship embraces an enduring and exclusive relationship to the Lord. . . . Perfection is the outcome of the gift of wisdom implanted within the souls of believers.³³

2) Job is “straight of path,” or “upright” (KJV; NASB)). “Upright” is the English equivalent most often used for the Hebrew yasar. Literally yasar pertains to that which is vertically fixed (Gen 37:7; Exodus 36:20); or is horizontally level or smooth (Isa 26:7). It’s basic meaning has to do with what is straight (Isaiah 40:3), or evenly distributed (1 Kings 6:35). The English etymology of the English word “righteous,” or “righteousness,” makes this clear. William Tyndale in his translation of the Bible into English coined the word “righteous” from the English words riht (right) and wīs meaning the way or direction in which something moved or traveled. (Think of the words clockwise or otherwise.) Together riht and wīs formed rihtwīs, rightwise, righteous. “Righteousness,” rihtwīs, then, simply means the right, or correct, way to walk, to journey, to live. For much of their history the Hebrew people were wilderness nomads. Traveling the straightest and safest route from one place of water and pasture to the next was a matter of life and death. For the ancient Hebrews the wise person was the one who walks the good path, who knows the path that leads straight through the desert to the oasis of wisdom and blessing. Job was just such a person––one who knew and followed the sacred path.
3) The word for “fearing” here in Job, yirah, originally meant to shake, quake, or tremble. But many experiences may leave one trembling––a threatening danger, an acute crisis, clinical anxiety, dread, relief, ecstasy, awe. intense delight or pleasure, or an experience of the numinous––the mysterium tremendum. Yirah, as well as the other words for fear in Hebrew must, therefore, be understood in light of the context in which they occur, and because theology is essentially the study of God and the relationship of God and humanity, fear must be understood theologically––as an inexplicable awareness or consciousness of God. Besides being an attitude, a feeling, or an emotion, fear in the Old Testament is the observance of moral and ethical standards, as well as religious rituals and ceremonies.³⁴ So, when Abraham and Sarah move to Gerar Abraham tells Sarah, who is evidently a beautiful and desirable woman, to say she is his sister rather than his wife. It may be, Abraham reasons, that there is “no fear of God there,” and they might decide to kill him and take Sarah (Genesis 20:11-13). By “no fear of God” Abraham clearly means there may be no conventual morality in Gerar such as is common to civilized human beings.³⁵

Derek Kidner says that theologically, in regard to our relationship with God, “‘The fear of the Lord’ is that filial reverence which the Old Testament expounds from first to last.”³⁶ Fear, in this sense is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, 9:10; Psalm 1 11:10; Job 28:28 ).³⁷ It is this “filial reverence” that William Barry seems to have in mind when he writes of what he calls the Abba / Amma experience––an experience of being held by an awesome power with which one is completely safe––like being held in the arms of a loving mother or father.³⁸

There can be little doubt for anyone who has read Job, that Job experiences the full range of what Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a religious or spiritual experience of God as The Holy, the numinous, the ineffable mystery in the presence of which one both trembles and is fascinated, before which one is both frightened and strangely drawn or attracted, before which one may simultaneously feel both like fleeing from and is drawn to. There can be a frightening sense of overwhelming power, yet also of being safe in the hands of that power.
4) The importance of “turning from”, or “eschewing”(KJV) evil, is a basic teaching of the wisdom tradition which Job practices. The idea of turning belongs to the image of the devout or spiritual life as a path we walk. Tuning off the path, leaving the path, the traveler may become, like the Hobbit and dwarves, hopelessly lost in Mirkwood Forest––dark, ominous, suffocating, devouring. Scripture, especially the sapiential literature is full of such advice, and warnings, to the adventurer. One may, for example, think immediately of Proverbs 3:7: “Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the Lord and turn away from evil.” Proverbs 4:27: “Do not turn to the right or to the left; Turn your foot from evil.” Or, of Psalm 1:1-2.

Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stands in the way that sinners take
or sits in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night (Psalm 1:1-2 NIV).

Rabbi Nahum Sarna, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Brandeis University, in his study of Israel’s Psalms noted that the combination of “Blessed is the one” with the verb “to walk,” indicates a conception of happiness that is active rather than passive. “It imagines a dynamic process involving constant movement from one path in the direction of another.³⁹
But what is this evil that Job has renounced? Who are the wicked from which he has turned? They are the arrogant who are contemptuous of others, they are those for whom right and wrong are determined by their own perceived self-interests, they are those who plot against the innocent, pervert justice, and terrorize the disadvantaged and powerless of society, they are those who betray friendships, who borrow and do not pay back while amassing wealth, who exploit workers, who are financial and economic predators, they are the materialistic, greedy, and manipulative, they are the sexually and sensually self-indulgent, self-occupied, they believe they are immune from all accountability and so mock God as unseeing (ignorant of what they do), as powerless, or nonexistent.⁴⁰ These are the societal standards, the influences, and the enticements which Job “eschews.”

Finally, it needs to be noted, if only very briefly, that for the believer, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures, the people of God are called to a “righteous” life because God is righteous (Leviticus 11:44; Matthew 5:48; Luke 6:36). In his simple but profound devotional book The Way, E. Stanley Jones argued that there is a way to live and a way not to live––a way that gets results and a way that gets consequences. This way Jones writes, rather than being imposed on life is inherent in the very nature of reality––within the structure of reality rather arbitrarily impressed on it. This “Way” is revealed in the Old and New Testament Scriptures, and ultimately for the person of Christian faith in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.⁴¹

Act One: Scene One––The Adversary’s Question
We should not make too much of the royal council meeting (Job 1:6-8) as if it could give us actual information about what goes on in the “heavenly imperial court.” That is not its intent. We are not reading the heavenly equivalent of the royal archives of Babylon, Egypt, or Israel. It is merely a creative literary device, like the rest of the prologue, which allows the narrator to introduce and move the plot forward easily, quickly, and dramatically. Like the opening scene of any play (Job 1, 2) attempts to do at least two things. First it seeks to capture the audience’s attention. This is frequently done, as it is in Job, by introducing some problem, or tension, that needs to be resolved (Job 1:6-11).

On a (certain) day, the sons of Elohim came to station
themselves around YHWH,
and the Satan too came among
them.
YHWH said to the Satan,
“Whence do you come?”
And the Satan answered the YHWH:
“From roving the earth and from going all about it.”
YHWH said to the Satan:
“Have you set your mind on my servant Job,
that there is none like him on earth–– a man whole (in heart) and
straight (of path), fearing of Elohim and turning from evil?”
The Satan answered YHWH and said:
“Is it for nothing that Job is Elohim-fearing? You have put a hedge around him and around his household and around all that is his. You have blessed all that his hands do, so that his livestock have waxed abundantly.
However –– send forth your hand and affect all that is his,
I swear he will ‘bless’ (curse)⁴² you to your face.”
YHWH said to the Satan:
“Here: All that is his is in your hand.
Just do not send forth your hand against him.”
Then Satan took leave of YHWH (Job 1:6-12 JANT).

From the calm and stable image of a man who has everything we are shifted suddenly to the ominous supernatural figure of the Satan, the Accuser, the Adversary, who stalks the earth spying on people so as to trip them up and then report them.⁴³ It does not seem to me that, while in some ways it makes sense, the issue raised by the Accuser is one that can be easily put as a matter of “disinterested service.” The question is not will Job worship God if there is nothing in it for him, but rather will suffering dehumanize Job? Will it degrade his soul? Rot his spirit? Will he “sell out to evil?”⁴⁴ Will he curse and blaspheme God; or will Job maintain his integrity? Will he continue to walk the sacred path––follow the wisdom way? That this is not the only, but certainly a primary question is borne out by what happens next.

One peaceful day murderous raiders fall on and drive off the grazing cows and donkeys and kill the herders. Then all the small livestock and their attendants are caught in a horrific lightning storm and killed. A third disaster and tragedy strikes as marauders attack in three columns taking the camels and hacking their keepers to death. As word of this last catastrophe reaches Job one more messenger arrives to tell Job the most devastating news of all––while his sons and daughters were all happily feasting in the oldest son’s house a powerful desert wind collapsed the house and killed them all. Yet, in all this Job holds to his “wholeness of heart,” or “integrity” as some versions have it (Job 2:9 NIV).

In spite of all this, Job did not commit a sin––
he did not speak “insult” to Elohim (Job 1:22 JANT).

But the Adversary is relentless. He is neither pleased nor satisfied at having found a person of integrity, and so when the “heavenly council” gathers again, and Elohim points out that Job has maintained his integrity in spite of all that has been done against him the Adversary answers:

“Skin for skin! For all a man has he will give for his life.
However send forth your hand and affect his bone and flesh!
I swear he will ‘bless’ (curse) you to your face!”
YHWH said to the Satan:
“Here he is in your hand. Only keep him in life.”
The Satan took leave of YHWH and he struck Job with a
terrible inflammation, from the sole of his foot to the top of
his head.
He (Job) took a potsherd with which to scratch himself as he sat in
the ash heap.
Still Job remained “whole (of heart).”
Then his wife said to him:
“You are still holding fast to your wholeness”
‘Bless’ (curse) God and die!”
He said to her:
“You speak the speech of unseemly women!
Can we accept the good from Elohim and not accept the bad?”
In spite of all this Job did not commit sin with his lips. (Job 2:5-10 JANT)

In the following chapters Job’s emotions run wildly in every direction, and certainly he does plenty of complaining, although considering what he has gone through it can hardly be called complaining as we conventionally use the term. Nowhere in the entire book does Job reject God––nowhere does the narrator portray him as cursing, insulting, or blaspheming God. That is, there is no verbal attack on God, no expressed desire to injure, diminish, or deny God. The character of Job never scoffs at God or equates God with evil (Leviticus 24:11).⁴⁵ In responding to his friend Bildad Job says quite emphatically:

I will not sit aside my integrity.⁴⁶
I will hold fast to my righteousness.
I will not let it go (Job 27:5 JANT).

Such expressions remind us of one of the best known most often quoted lines from Job: “Though he slay me; yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15 NIV). Used as an answer to the Adversary’s question this would mean something like: “Even if it kills me, I will remain true to Yahweh.”

A Question Posed by One Sitting on a Heap of Ashes and Travail
The first question, the Adversary’s question, is asked of Job. The second question is asked by Job as he sits alone and naked on an ash heap scraping his pustulant sores with a broken piece of pottery. Job’s question is obviously different from that of the Adversary; nevertheless, it too identifies a point of tension that requires resolution. In 3:20 Job asks:

Why give light to one in travail?
Or Life to those bitter of spirit? –– (Job 3:20 JANT)

Job’s question in chapter 3 is, “Why suffering? Why me? Why do I have to suffer like this? and develops more emphatically into the question: “Why do the innocent suffer?” or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Job’s friends, who have come to console, him hammer him relentlessly with the theory of retributive justice; that is, the idea that God gives to people what they deserve––good to the good and bad to the bad.

However, Job is now ensnared in a dilemma. He feels he has been cruelly abandoned by God, which deep cultural beliefs insist mean he has sinned, but a lifetime of feeling close to God tells him this cannot be true, that he has done nothing so seriously wrong as to deserve this magnitude of suffering.⁴⁷ He is unable to resolve his former experience of God’s closeness with what now seems a cruel and unjustified distance. Even now in his suffering, he longs for the communion he had with God before all this happened––for when Shaddai was still with him (Job 29:2 JANT). He mourns the loss of: “The time when God’s lamp would shine over his head, when he would walk by its light in the dark” (Job 29:3 JANT) “I cry out to you,” Job says in grief, “but you do not answer” (Job 29:20 JANT).

Jobs dilemma is easily seen in the four following quotations where Job is self-contradictory in his arguments (as people frequently are in times of unimaginable stress). Notice A and B are complimentary to one another, but contradictory to C and D and E which are complimentary to each other. In A and B God rules the world with absolute justice, people receive what they deserve––good people receive good things and bad people bad things. In C, D, and E there is no justice.

A) For what is the lot from Eloah on high,
And what portion from Shaddai above?
It’s disaster for the villain (Job 31:2 JANT).
B) Thus is there hope for the poor,
As (all) injustice is silenced (Job 5:16 JANT).
C) Though I make an outcry, there is no justice (Job 19:7 JANT).
D) It’s all the same.
And so I declare.
The innocent and the guilty he brings (to the same) end (Job 9:22 JANT).
E) Why do the wicked live on, and live well?
Grow old and gain in wealth and power? (Job 21:7 JANT).

As a child of his culture Job had learned to see everything that happens in life as a direct expression of God’s will––a world in the hands of an absolutely just God who blesses the “righteous,” and is against the “unrighteous.” The cultural assumption of his people was that if someone is prosperous they are prosperous because they have been blessed by God, and they have been blessed by God because they are good. If they are poor, and sick, and with little by way of children and family, it must be because of their sins.⁴⁸ Yet, Job is a wise man and a keen observer of life whose experience tells him this is just not true. Manipulative, deceitful, violent, greedy, and self-indulgent predators become rich and powerful, while the kindhearted, the compassionate, the generous and morally responsible may languish in poverty and misery. Once Job, a good man, has himself sunk to the bottom of human despair, he cannot ignore the cry of the suffering righteous:

Why is one who turns from evil put to shame?
And one who fears Shaddai accursed” (Job 6:14 JANT)?

In general, it appears that cultural wisdom is correct––good people do well, and evil people suffer many painful consequences. But that is not always true––frequently the innocent suffer and the cruel are rewarded with wealth and power (Psalm 73). Even though Job cannot give up the cultural or societal idea he has been taught; namely, that God gives good or evil to people as they deserve, neither can he reconcile it with his observation that real life does not always bear that out, nor does it harmonize with what he knows of himself. He simply cannot let go of either idea.

Questions of “Ultimate Concern”
Since theology is by definition the study or knowledge of God, and the divine-human relationship, the Adversary’s question is a theological query; indeed, everything in Job is either a theological question or statement. The Book of Job is, therefore, also, in the words of Paul Tillich, an expression of “ultimate concern.” In his little book Dynamics of Faith, Tillich wrote:

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. . . If a concern claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of one who accepts the claim. . . . Faith, for those of the Old Testament is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand, threat, and promise.⁴⁹

Questions about suffering are not within themselves theological questions, nor are they automatically expressions of ultimate concern. Why there is human suffering, or why I suffer, are merely anthropocentric concerns until they are asked in relation to God. Questions of suffering and integrity are for Job matters of Ultimate Concern because they have to do with the existence of Job in relation to the being of God.

It was not simply for the sake of a catchy title that Viktor Frankl named his book recounting his four years in Auschwitz Man’s Search For Meaning: From the Death Camp to Existentialism.⁵⁰ One could certainly say that Man’s Search for Meaning is about the horrors of Auschwitz, or the evil of the immense suffering human beings inflict on one another, or that it is an amazing story of survival, and those summaries would all be true, but more than any of that it, like the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suffering in the Gulag,⁵¹ is the story of suffering endured in such a way as to turn it into something mysteriously transcendent. In words attributed to William Barclay it is about: “That endurance which is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”⁵² I would suggest that a helpful exercise in the study of Job, might be to read The Book of Job, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956):, and Philip Yancey’s Disappointment With God all in tandem.

Though He Slay Me
The answer to the first question, the question asked by the Adversary, “Will Job maintain his integrity?” is “Yes!” It is a “yes” which reminds many of a profound and moving short story by Zvi Kolitz. In that story, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, a Jewish resistance fighter writes a letter, a last testament, as the Warsaw Ghetto is devoured in hate and flames. and he and his comrades fight without any hope from one of the last houses still standing. In this last letter Yosl tells the story of a Jew who escaped the Spanish Inquisition, making it across stormy water to a small stony island. As they reach the island his wife is killed by lightning and his young daughter whipped into the stormy sea by the wind. Wet, cold, naked, barefoot, he stands in the dark, rain, and lightning with his hands raised to God and prays like this:

God of Israel I have fled to this place so that I may serve You in peace, to follow Your commandments, and glorify Your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in You. But if you think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to You, my God, and the God of my parents, that none of it will help you. You may insult me, You may chastise me, You may take from me the dearest and best that I have in the world, You may torture me to death––I will always believe in You, I will love You always and forever––even despite you. . . . You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease o believe in You. But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You.⁵³

Although there are many dissimilarities between Job and the Jewish refugee in Yosl’s letter, both stories encapsulate Job’s declaration: “Though He slay me; yet will I hope in Yahweh” (Job 13:15 JANT).

This verse (Job 13:15), when used honestly and with humility, is certainly a memorable and informative statement in the interpretation of Job; however, there are a number of translation questions in the Hebrew that are difficult to resolve. To begin with there is the question of whether the Hebrew hên at the beginning of the sentence should be rendered as “behold,” or does it mean “if” or perhaps “although?” Second, is ’ă·ya·ḥêl which is often translated as “yet will I trust or hope” better rendered as “yet will I wait?” Although, for readers such as myself there is not a lot of difference between “wait” and “hope.” And, there is the question of whether Job’s assertion is positive: “I will wait, hope, or trust,” or is it negative, “I will not wait or trust”––or “I have no hope?”⁵⁴ Notice, then, the differences in the following translations:

1) Though he slay me, yet will I wait for him (Job 13:15 RV 1885).
2) Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him (Job 13:15 KJV).
3) Though he slay me, I will not wait (Job 13:15 JANT).
4) Though he slay me, yet will I wait for him; (Job 13:15 Guillaume)
5) Though he slay me, I will hope in him (Job 13::15 NASB).
6) Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope (Job 13:15 RSV).

The one way of reading the text seems to say that even if by death God  bars  the way Job will not be deterred from presenting his case  .⁵⁵  The other is perhaps more general, indicating that no matter what happens, even if the end of his whole ordeal is that God kills him he will still trust God. But he can take this stance because he is confident of the justice, or righteousness of God (Job 13:16), and so Job hopes against hope (Romans 4:16). What Job hopes for is not that his family, his fortune, and his health will be restored––that his nightmare will become untrue, but that he will be vindicated as a person of spiritual integrity.⁵⁶ Job is confident that God will rule that none of the things that have befallen him are justified, are the result of his own sins––his own wrongdoing. In short, truth, goodness and beauty are stronger  than deceit and evil. Justice, hope, and faith triumph over death and despair.

The pastoral word of Saint James to the suffering men and women to whom he wrote was to remember the patience of Job (James 5:11 KJV). This reference drawn by James, a New Testament book of wisdom, from Job, an Old Testament wisdom story, is informative. For one thing it tells something of how rabbis, scholars, and observant Jews two thousand years ago interpreted Job within their historical-cultural matrix from which the book of Job had emerged some 600 years earlier. What this little verse tells us is that ancient Judaism regarded Job as a book about suffering––about wisdom as patient suffering. Although, “patience” is perhaps not the best translation here. As normally understood, patience is the ability to tolerate delay, inconvenience, provocation, or trouble without immediately becoming upset or angry. It is the ability to take one’s time and to wait for the right moment for taking action. Patience includes being able to work at a tedious project without becoming frustrated, and, so, is often thought of as a passive quality, but here in the Epistle to James (or Job) it is anything but passive. The Greek term is actually hypomone, and is better translated as “perseverance” or “endurance” as in the NASB. Endurance is certainly not passive. In spite of all of Job’s anguished questions and passionate arguments he remains loyal to God, faithful to his values, unswerving from his purpose. So, he says things like, “Though he slay me I will no longer wait” (Job 13:15 JANT), but he also says, “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high” (Job 16:19 JANT); and, “I know that my redeemer lives” (Job 19:25 JANT) Job struggles and argues and complains, but remains whole of heart, straight of path, fearing of God.

Either interpretation of Job 13:15; that is whether it is taken to mean, “Even if God kills me I will trust Him,” or: “God will kill me, I have no hope of presenting my case,” as long as understood contextually, holistically, and systemically, answers the Adversary’s original question positively: “If Job loses everything, if he loses his fortune, his children, the support of his wife, his health, his status in the community and the respect of his friends, if he is utterly humiliated and reduced to suicidal despair will Job curse God––will he blaspheme God with his dying breath. That is, as the philosophers say, the existential question. Is Job a person of authenticity––one who will remain true to the reality of God regardless of the pressure. “Job’s back,” writes Tesvat, “is not broken. Up to the last verses of the book he not only stands upright, but actually grows in strength, and as the disputation continues we see the development and integration of his personality.”⁵⁷

The legal verdict, the definitive answer, regarding Job’s integrity must, of course, be pronounced by God and not Job, and so it is when God speaks out of the whirlwind to Job’s friends, who have argued forcefully for retributive justice (that Job’s suffering has to do with some sin). For them suffering is not a problem since there is no such thing as underserved suffering. To them the voice out of the whirlwind says, “You have not spoken of Me what is trustworthy, as My servant Job has” (Job: 47:7 NASB).⁵⁸ Or, as Greenstein translates: “You did not speak about me honestly as did my servant Job.” The friends, but not Job, are then told to make a sin offering. (Job 42:7 JANT). “And YHWH lifted up Job’s face.” Job’s family and friends come to eat with him and pay him tribute, God restores Job’s vast fortune, even doubles it, sons and daughters are born to him, and he lives a long and happy life. However, Job’s blessings at the end should not be understood as a compensation or reward for getting it right, but as a sign of Job’s legal vindication––divine judgement has been made and carried out. Even the most spiritually obtuse Jewish believer of the time would have recognized that Job has been fully acquitted by the heavenly court. Job has done nothing serious enough to warrant the degree to which he has suffered. However, the question is not only whether Job will hold to his integrity, but what his suffering will do to him. The question for all of us, the universal question, is not merely the nature of a particular experience, but what we do with the experience. Job cannot evade the question: “How do I respond to things as they are?” “What is required of me in such a moment as this?”

Why If God Is Good Is There So Much Misery
The second question, “Why do the innocent suffer?” is given no answer at all; at least, no formal philosophical or theological answer, no verbal or discursive explanation from God that is meant to intellectually satisfy the mind. Job’s friends press him relentlessly to acknowledge that all his misery is the result of some personal wrongdoing, but Job tenaciously argues his innocence and in doing so recognizes the problem of unjust suffering. Neither the beginning nor ending of this story provide a reason for evil and suffering; that does not mean, of course, there is no reason for human misery, only that we do not know the reason––or at least do not know it fully.⁵⁹

The Mysterious X Factor
Earlier, I mentioned Aristotle’s Poetics and his criteria for writing a good story. Aristotle was right about how to write a play or tell a poetic tale, but his literary principles do not transfer to how events actually connect and unfold in reality; that is, telling a story well does not necessarily correlate with how things happen in real life. Glenn Chestnut was trained in Theology at Oxford University and retired as Professor of History and Religious studies at Indiana University in 2003. Toward the latter part of his life Chestnut focused primarily on the spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous. In his God and Spirituality: Philosophical Essays he addresses this very issue. Chestnut notes how for Aristotle a well written story is a logically interconnected series of events which lead to a satisfying resolution to the problem or point of tension with which the story began. However, Chestnut says, even Aristotle observed that this logical sequence of events from the problem to an orderly and logical conclusion is not how real life actually works. The criteria for writing a story, said Aristotle, do not apply to life because real life is so often totally illogical. In real life things may be speeding toward disaster, then suddenly, and with no prior explanation, there is an unexpected and inexplicable turn of events. “In real life,” in actual conversion experiences whether Christian or in AA, says Chestnut, “the person’s life is terrible, then suddenly without explanation it gets wonderful.” Life does not make sense the way a play or novel does. “Some mysterious X factor,” says Chestnut, appears in the story. Something intervenes from ‘outside’ into the familiar this-worldly sequence of events and produces something inexplicable.”⁶⁰ What I am proposing here, is that the author of Job is recounting the same mysterious “X factor” described by Chestnut in his book.⁶¹

Grace, the mysterious X factor, knowledge of life, wisdom, social intelligence, good judgment, or whatever you want to call it, is a process––a lived experience. When God first speaks to Job out of the whirlwind God says: “Who is this who obscures good counsel? (Using) words without understanding” (Job 38:2 JANT). Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychiatrist famous for his work integrating medicine, counseling, and Christian spirituality wrote:

Life’s problems are not like algebraic equations, which can be turned in every way, all over the page, until the final answer––X=25 is worked out at the bottom. The situation of a life problem is always dependent upon a new awakening of the conscience, a change in attitude, a growth in personality. It may come through psychoanalysis or through reading the Bible; the phenomenon is the same. The insoluble dilemmas thus give away.⁶²

What we now know is that achieving complete objectivity, even in the so-called exact sciences, is a delusion. Michael Polanyi, the modern thinker who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy thought that one reason for this is that a knower does not stand apart from the universe but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation. Polanyi thought that a great scientist not only identifies patterns, but also, often unaware, chooses the significant questions likely to lead to a successful explanation of those patterns, or the resolution of a problem. Complimentary to what Polanyi referred to as tacit knowledge is Paul Ricoeur’s observation. Ricoeur, one of the most brilliant, complex, and fascinating philosophers of the twentieth century said, “Never do we as interpreters get near to what the text says unless we live in the aura of the meaning we are inquiring after.”⁶³ It is simply not possible to get near the real meaning of a wisdom text, a confessional book, by reading it non-confessionally.

The Voice in the Wind
Upspeaks YAHWH to Job from the windstorm, and he says:
Who is this who obscures good consul,
(Using) words without knowledge?
Bind up your loins like a man!
I will ask you –– and you will help me know!
Where were you when I laid earths foundations?
Tell me––if you truly know wisdom!
Who set its dimensions? Do you know?
Who stretched the measuring line (Job 38:1-6 JANT)

In the religiously and biblically informed imagination of the Ancient Hebrews the wind (flowing air) is always symbolically associated with the presence of God––invisible, immaterial, powerful, essential. Scarcely anyone will need to be reminded that the Hebrew and Greek words for “spirit” (ruach and pneuma) simply mean a puff or blast of air as with the breath, a gentle sigh, the flow of air through a flute, a refreshing breeze at the end of a hot day as the sun sets, a harmless but fascinating “dust devil” that appears suddenly and then is gone, or the fierce wild wind of a Haboob. When the author of Job needs to find a point of contact, of encounter, or of meeting between God and his character Job it is not difficult to locate one that is simple, believable, and that the audience already connects symbolically to the real but mysterious presence of God; and, so, in this story of the meeting of God and the man Job, the writer pictures the voice of God speaking from the midst of a whirlwind as it did to Moses from a burning bush. My point of emphasis is that what the writer pictures for us is the man Job tormented in mind, body, and soul struggling to understand with all his might what has happened to him, when suddenly there is a whirlwind, God’s presence and the voice speaking to him directly and personally.⁶⁴

Whether in a voice that is silent or audible Yahweh, says: “Who is this who obscures good consul, (Using) words without knowledge” (Job 38:2 JANT)? How ironical that this man sitting naked in an ash heap, covered with nasty sores, scraping them with a shard of pottery speaks so eloquently and so learnedly of the meaning of life, of God and of God’s purpose, cosmic design, of justice and the moral order. The problem is Job speaks without knowing how much he does not know. He obviously knows nothing of what has transpired in the heavenly council and the exchange between Yahweh and the Adversary. Job has not attempted to thwart God or accused God of acting unjustly in the way God has designed the world, but rather it is his focus on the single value of justice to the exclusion of the divine milieu––the larger purpose and design of God. Clines observes, “It is not so much that Job is wrong as that he lacks adequate or appropriate understanding of the broader picture.”⁶⁵ And so with all his refined intellectual talk Job obscures the way of God.

Deuteronomy 29:29 seems especially relevant here: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law (Deuteronomy 29:29 NIV). Or, from the Wisdom of Sirach 3:21-24––the Old Testament apocryphal book also known as Sirach, Ben Sirach, or the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

Do not pry into things too hard for you
or investigate what is beyond your reach.
Meditate on what the Lord has commanded;
what he has kept hidden need not concern you.
Do not busy yourself with matters
that are beyond you;
even what has been shown you is
above the grasp of mortals.
Many have been led astray by their theorizing,
and evil imaginings have impaired
their judgements (Ecclesiasticus 3:21- 24 REB).

But the problem for Job is that with all his intellectualizing he is obscuring what he already knows and simply needs to continue live.

What we see with growing clarity is that what is happening here is not so much an experience Job has, as it is an encounter. An experience is an individual’s response physically, cognitively, emotionally, psychologically to an event. Experiences can be solitary, but all encounters are social. An encounter is a meeting, it is an interaction between both parties. It can be good or adverse. It can be an enjoyable meeting, or an ugly fight, but it requires the active participation of both parties––both experiencing one another, both responding.⁶⁶ What God says to Job next is not a challenge, but an invitation––an invitation to a meeting of two persons––an invitation to an “I-Thou encounter,” as Martin Buber called it.

Bind up your loins like a man!
I will ask you––and you will help me know (Job 38:3 JANT)!

Job has challenged God to a fight––to the sort of intellectual and legal battle about justice he is carrying on with his friends. Metaphorically, he has hoped to “subpoena” and confront God in open court, and now God responds, but God does not have in mind a rational, academic, or legal debate with Job such as Job has been having with his intellectually sophisticated friends. God takes Job’s summons personally and intends to engage Job directly and with personal immediacy. The language suggests that God somehow regards Job as worthy of a trial by “combat,” a “man to man” contest. Clines notes, “Some have seen here an allusion to a supposed ancient custom of belt wrestling, the winner being the one who can strip the other of his belt.”⁶⁷ Certainly this verse will remind one of Jacob wrestling the angel all one long night by the River Jabok with such intensity that Jacob’s very identity is shifted (Genesis 32:22-32).

But what God says after this opening confrontation,⁶⁸ is unutterably astounding. What follows are a series of nature poems evoking the marvelous beauty, wonder, and mystery of creation; and, therefore, the unfathomable mystery of God and of God’s inscrutable creative purpose. It is breathtaking! But it is not an answer in any conventional sense. It is a visualization. It is not an answer. Or is it? Is it a transcendent answer larger than the question?

The Climax
As a drama Job climaxes with Job’s response to God’s poetic visualization––a religious, spiritual, mystical experience:

Upspoke Job to YHWH and he said
Lacking respect (Being so small) how can I answer you?⁶⁹
Truly I have spoken without comprehending––
Wonders beyond me that I do not know.
As a hearing by the ear I have heard you,
And now my eye has seen you. (Job 40:2-4; 42:3; 42:5 JANT).

It is a moment of rebirth for Job––a moment of revelation, of metanoia, of enlightenment, of wisdom and knowledge, and what is revealed, known, seen, encountered is God. There is no conventional answer to the why of suffering, there is just God. Notice that paradoxically at this point while nothing has changed externally for Job, everything has changed. Job has experienced a greater shift from self-consciousness to God-consciousness. Both the experience, or encounter, and the resulting transformation are ineffable––beyond definition, description, or explanation.⁷⁰ It has been observed, for example by Fohrer, that the term “know” in Job 42:2 signifies an experience that embraces the whole of one’s existence, and is a knowledge, or wisdom, that results in freedom and provides strength and support in trouble.⁷¹

The Paradigm
Job, as already frequently noted, is poetry. It is wisdom poetry, a wisdom paradigm, a spiritual pattern, an archetype that can be found reoccurring over and over again in both the Old and New Testament Canons. Sometimes it is stated in straight forward language as in Romans 1:17 where the Apostle Paul writes:

For in the gospel the righteousness of God
is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith
from first to last just as it is written: “The
righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:17 NIV).

Or, as we find it in Hosea 4:9, which Paul most likely had in mind when he wrote Romans 1:17:

Who is wise? Let them realize these things.
Who is understanding? Let them know.
The ways of the Lord are right;
the righteous walk in them.

So sometimes the pattern is described in simple and straightforward prose as with Hosea and Paul, sometimes it is presented in the form of poetry as with Psalm 1, and sometimes in enigmatic stories like Job or like Abraham and Sarah who are told to kill off their child whom they love in bloody sacrifice––the only son promised by God in whom all their hopes and dreams for the future are wrapped up. Abraham and Sarah are asked to do the unthinkable, are asked to do the impossible.⁷² Job also is asked to endure the impossible, to bear unbearable loss, grief, sorrow, tragedy. The story of Abraham and Sarah, as well as that of Job both come to a climactic moment in which they must choose between the willful and the willing way––whether to trust in the love and goodness of God no matter what or rely on themselves. Sometimes this paradigm is seen in the Scriptures as a bold theme, and sometimes as a subtle undercurrent, but it is always there––constant and ubiquitous. However, seeing and following this line of insight and wisdom requires a synchronic, canonical, holistic, systems reading of the Bible––a reading of the Scriptures as Scripture.

In Conclusion
Phil Davies, the Old Testament minimalist scholar at the University of Sheffield,⁷³ in a polemic meant to demonstrate the secular scholar understands the Bible just as well as the Christian, actually better, asked what he apparently thought a clever trick question. He asked, “Does the Christian understand the Old Testament better than the Jew?”⁷⁴ What Davies did not recognize, could not recognize as a secular, or nonconfessing academic, is that for Christians, for the man or woman on the wisdom quest, understanding is both a matter of the intellect and of the spirit. “Those who are in reality on a spiritual quest understand one another and the sacred writings of each in a way secular scholars no matter how well they understand the discursive content of a text cannot.”⁷⁵

Life cannot be explained, when we touch it, we know it is life. But how? Those who know, know. Those who don’t, don’t. Those who know can never explain to those who don’t––until they themselves know. Those who know life recognize it in others. Those who have death in themselves recognize neither life nor death. The natural man may discern between warmth and coldness, good doctrine and bad, but not between life and death.⁷⁶

In the same way the secular, or non-confessing, scholar, through meticulous academic analysis may discern many facts about words and grammar, and puzzling textual elements that stimulate intellectual curiosity and spark creative imaginative speculations that are fun to discuss, but which lead nowhere close to the deeper meaning of the sacred text––a meaning that, in the case of Job, is inscrutable, ineffable, mysterious. What is needed for the comprehension of Job (of mystery) is not a more analytical mind, but an open, receptive, appreciative, insightful soul capable of creative endurance. Job is not a theological treatise; and its meaning cannot, therefore, be comprehended through academic analysis alone––its meaning must be lived into rather than merely thought. No one can resolve the problem of suffering for us, it is a resolution, an answer, we must experience for ourselves. Rather than reading Job for a philosophical answer as to why there is so much suffering, evil, and misery in the world, I would suggest you ask David Clines question: “When you read the book of Job what does it do to you?”77 That, or maybe just let it silently work in you. If you want it, if you desire it, there will be an answer. What did the Beatles’ song say? “There will be an answer, let it be. Let it be.”



______________

Notes

1 curtal friar: (archaic, friar with a short gown, a slightly derogatory term suggesting inferiority). The monk attending the gate of a medieval monastery whose work required more contact with the world and limited participation in praying the daily office with fellow monks; and whose work carrying luggage and escorting guests to their quarters necessitated wearing a short gown. In Robinhood a less well educated and simple monk in trouble for challenging the arrogance and hypocrisy of religious superiors.
2  Larry Hart, A Grammar of Holy Mystery: Classical Christian Spirituality (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023).
3 Iréné Hausherr, Les Leçon d’un Contemplatif: Le Traité de l’Oraison d’Evagre Le Pontique. (Paris: Beauchesne Et Ses Fils, 1960), 85.
4 Keith Ward, The Evidence for God: The Case For the Existence of the Spiritual Dimension (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2014), 1-7. Also: Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008), 12.
5 Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (Grand Rapids: Yale University Press, 2019), ix.
6 For a discussion of the various difficulties posed by the language of Job and the many problems of arriving at a confident translation see: Edward Greenstein, Job: A New Translation, xxviii – xxxvii.
7 A. Guillaume, Studies in the Book Of Job With a New Translation, John MacDonald ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 1.
8 Francis I. Andersen, Job: Tyndale Old Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1976),                                                                              9 Job’s response to his wife in 2:10 indicates they are members of the upper social class.                                                                                                                                                10 David J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix. 2009), 124.
11 Guillaume, Studies in the Book of Job, 1.
12 John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? Part III of an Introduction to Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
13 Job, of course, like any other book of the Bible, can be read in what the Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder thought of as “a straightforward” manner, by which he meant that regardless of any editorial processes which a text may have undergone, it nevertheless makes sense as it has come down to us. John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Nashville: Disciples Resources, 1994), x.
14 Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2005) 5.
15 Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind, 27.
16 See: Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, Vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1991, paperback, 2004). Larry Hart, From the Stone Ages to Thomas Merton; A Brief History of Contemplative Prayer (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018). Also, my discussion of the solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in: Larry Hart, The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), 101-104.
17 Michael Patrick Gillespie, The Aesthetics’ of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism, (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2003).
17 Content issues involve the words spoken, the events, the “facts,” and ideas addressed. Process is concerned with the interpersonal relationship. A debate about whether I have been treated fairly or unfairly in a given instance is a content issue. The dynamics of a relationship, and how I am experiencing the relationship is a process issue.
18 Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1985), 15.
19 Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation, 15.
20 See: Tremper Longman III, The Fear of the Lord is Wisdom: A Theological Introduction to Wisdom in Israel (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), xviii.
21 Gillespie, The Aesthetics of Chaos, 3,16.
22 Matitiahu Tsevat, The Meaning of Job and Other Biblical Studies: Essay On the Literature and Religion of the Hebrew Bible (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1980), 8.
23 Will Kynes, An Obituary for Wisdom Literature The Birth Death and Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).
24 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Crossroad, 1993), xii.
25 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Introduction by T.S. Eliot, W.F. Trotter trans. (United States: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011). #194, 157-158.
26 Longman III, The Fear of the Lord is Wisdom, 278-279.
27 David J.A. Clines, Word Biblical Commentary 18B: Job 38-42, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 1213.
28 David Clines, Word Biblical Commentary 18B, 1202-1203.
29 Clines does however admit, “The foregoing remarks are by no means the received wisdom about this verse (46:2).” And: “But Yahweh’s tones do not strike all readers the same way. Terrien, for example thinks that Yahweh speaks with a ‘courteous and slight wistful irony,’ and Anderson finds a kindly playfulness in the Lord’s speeches’. . . . We should admit that to judge what is etiquette in a culture different from our own is always difficult.” David Clines, Word Biblical Commentary 18B, 1203, 1088.
30 Texts quoted from: Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (Grand Rapids: Yale University Press, 2019), are designated JANT.
31 Those who study moral and faith development tell us that while we may not really understand the level of development above us, we may, nevertheless, appreciate it and even feel drawn to it. See: Mary Wilcox, A Developmental Journey: A Guide to the Development of Logical and Moral Reasoning and Social Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979).
Patrick J. Hartin, A Spirituality of Perfection: Faith in Action in the Letter of James (Collegeville: MN: Liturgical Press, 1999).
32 Hartin, Spirituality of Perfection, 77, 78.
33 Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume, Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich editors, Translated and Abridged by Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), 1273.
34 See: Romans 2:14, as well as C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 1952, 1980).
35 Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job & Ecclesiastes: An Introduction to Wisdom
Literature (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 1985), 19.
36 Fear in this polyvalent sense correlates easily and beautifully with the three facets of wisdom posited by Tremper Longman III–– the ethical, the practical, and the theological. See: Longman III, The Fear of the Lord Is Wisdom, 6.
37 William Barry, S. J. God and You: Prayer and Personal Relationship (New York & Mawah: Paulist Press, 1987), 67.
38 Nahum, N. Sarna, On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel (New York: Schocken, 1993), 32.
39 Nahum, N. Sarna, On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel (New York: Schocken, 1993), 32.
40 See “The Western Creed in: Charles Tart, Living the Mindful Life: A Handbook for Living in the Present Moment (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 16-17.
41 E. Stanley Jones, The Way (Nashville: Abingdon, 1946, renewed 1974, 2015.)
42 “Bless,” Hebrew brk, is a contronym or “Janus word”––a word in any language with two opposite meanings. For example, in English you can dust a cake with icing sugar or dust the icing sugar off the countertop.
43 Greenstein, Job: A New Translation, 5.
44 See: M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).
45 As examples for the meaning of cursing or blaspheming see the story of Elijah taunting the false prophets: “Perhaps Baal is talking to someone, or is sitting on the toilet, or maybe he is away on a trip, or perhaps is asleep and needs to be awakened!”(1Kings 18:27). Also note: Jesus’s reference to the unforgiveable sin and why it is unforgiveable (Matthew 12:31); as well as the threatened rejection and stoning of Moses and testing of God at Rephidim (Exodus 17:1-7).
46 Integrity (from “integer” = the whole of anything, a whole number not a fraction – so whole person or character. Integrity speaks of an unimpaired state of mind and heart, of moral soundness and purity of heart. One who has integrity has taken the principles that govern life and internalize and integrated them into every area of life.
47 Notice deserved suffering is not part of Job’s question or dilemma, since if suffering is deserved, or is a punishment, it is just and not a philosophical problem. Furthermore, reward and punishment in a just world are proportional, so that Job, while not perfect in the sense of having never done wrong is underserving of suffering of this magnitude.
48 Read the story of the Man Born Blind in John 9.
49 Paul Tillich, Dynamic of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 1-3.
50 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism, Ilse Lash trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952, 1962, 1984, 1994, 2006).
51 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago Two (1918-1956): An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Part IV, “The Soul and Barbed Wire, 1 The Assent,” Thomas P. Whitney trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 597-617
52 Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God: The Questions No One Asks Aloud (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 157.
53 Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Random House, 1999), 8.
54 The Masoretic text reads, “I will wait for him.” Older texts have “I will no longer wait.” Among Hebraic and Arabic language specialists the debate centers around whether the Hebrew spelling is lo or lo’.
55 A good deal of Job’s petitioning to meet with YHWH and his complaint is in legal, or at least quasi legal, language. He wants, in effect, to appear before the “Appeals Court,” where he is sure, once his case is heard, he will be vindicated.
56 Too much is made of Job recovering his health, regaining his wealth, and having more children. Job will still grieve his dead children and feel the painful memories of his trauma. Job will experience joy again, but his former happiness, as often said, cannot be restored as if nothing had ever happened. The function of the drama’s end is not to comfort or provide the audience with good feelings, but to provide evidence of Job’s vindication.
57 Matitiahu Tsevat, The Meaning of Job and Other Biblical Studies: Essays on the Literature and Religion of the Hebrew Bible (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1980), 4.
58 They have spoken incorrectly in that they have mistakenly held to the doctrine of retributive justice, and also in that they have spoken out of their theories; whereas Job has spoken from conviction forged out of his personal relationship with God and in the crucible of lived experience.
59 What is known as the Logical Problem of Evil has often been stated as a syllogism: If God is good and all powerful, evil and suffering would not exist. / Evil and suffering exist. / Therefore, God is either not good or not all powerful or neither. The problem is, of course in the premise which presumes an infinite knowledge of God’s cosmic purpose and of the moral order of the universe––which is very similar to Job’s error.
60 This is quite to the contrary of Marcus Borg’s non-personal, non-interventionists, God. It can be argued that Borg did not really believe in a non-interventionist God since Borg himself recounts what he believed to be an experience of God.
61 This mysterious X Factor is for both Christians and many others simply another name for the phenomenon of grace.
62 Paul Tournier, To Resist or Surrender trans. John S. Gilmour (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1974), 57.
63 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 351
64 For a sense of powerful spiritual experiences in Scripture consider Job’s experience in meeting God in light of: Abraham’s Smoking Pots Vision (Genesis 15:12-21); Jacob’s Ladder Dream at Bethel (Genesis 28:10-17); Jacob’s Wrestling With the Angel (Genesis 32:22-32) Moses at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:2;) Elijah and the Thin Sound of Silence (1 Kings 19:11-13); The Wilderness Temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4: 1-11); and, the story of Paul On the Damascus Road (Acts 1:9-19).
65 David Clines, Word Biblical Commentary Job 18B, 1096.
66 An I – Thou relationship is one on which there is a mutual recognition and high regard or awareness of the presence and personhood of the other. It is characterized by mutuality, transparency, and a willingness to be truly present. In an I – It relationship the other person is viewed as an object––an “it” (a thing to fulfill one’s own needs, agenda, or desires; or which can be regarded with indifference.
67 David Clines, Word Biblical Commentary: Job 18a, 1097.
68 A confrontation in the therapeutic sense is not a clash between opposing forces, accusatory, or adversarial rather is, metaphorically speaking, the holding up of a mirror so that the person confronted is able to see the discrepancies in his or her own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. See: Kenneth E. Blaker, “Confrontation,” in Therapeutic Techniques: Working Models for the Helping Professional, eds. Anita M. Mitchel and C. D. Johnson, (California Personnel and Guidance Association, 1973), 151.
69 (Being so small) is my clarification of “Lacking respect” in Greenstein’s translation.
70 The experience of Job aligns with the characteristics of religious or mystical encounters delineated by William James’s classical study (ineffable, noetic, passive in that they involve a sense of surrender, and transitory (lasting only a short time but making the whole of life worthwhile). See: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (United States: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010). Also see: McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism; and Hart, From the Stone Age to Thomas Merton.
71 David Clines, Word Biblical Commentary, Job 18a,1214.
72 It is appropriate to think of Abraham and Sarah as being tested, as is Job, as long as we remember that biblically speaking divine testing is never meant to diminish or destroy, but only to strengthen and enhance. So gold is tested in the crucible of fire to drain off the baser elements leaving only the pure gold (1 Peter 1:7). Isn’t this simply the pattern, the paradigm, of life? Whether our own fault or not suffering happens and what we do with it purifies and enriches the soul or fouls the spirit.
73 Minimalists scholars generally reject the historicity of the biblical text; including, Hebrew slavery in Egypt, the exodus, the existence of Israel as a distinct religious nation before the Babylonian exile, the reigns of David and Solomon; and, of course, the Jesus story as told in the Gospels.
74 Philip Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 12
75 Larry Hart, The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), 163-164.
76 Watchman Nee, What Shall This Man Do? (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1961), 121-122.
77 David J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible  (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 136.