Why I love the book of Job

The book of Job has a bad reputation, and from a surface reading it is not hard to see why: most of the characters in it (including God!) appear to be pretty unpleasant, whether it is Job's friends, Job himself (a wealthy and self-satisfied customer, at least at the opening of the book) or God and Satan (literally "the Accuser" or "the Adversary") inflicting misery much as the Duke brothers in the movie Trading Places did to their former star employee, just to win a bet.

But surface readings rarely get to the heart of what is going on in the Bible, or that is my experience of reading it anyway. Here, the title "Accuser" or "Adversary" is particularly apt. Satan's eternal purpose and urgency is to drive a wedge between God and Humanity, and to prevent reconciliation between us and the divine "Her/Him/It/Them" (male pronoun only used from here on, as is the convention).

The basic plot falls into three sections: first, a preamble or introduction, setting up Job's comfortable living standards and pious nature, and then setting up the bet, and what God allows the Accuser to do to Job to try to win the bet. Second, Job's friends pop by to offer some counsel, mostly of the variety of "if bad shit's happening to you, you must have done something to deserve it. Sort your act out, and things will be right again!" Job appeals first to his friends' sympathy and then to God's justice. Finally, God and Satan agree the bet has been settled, and God restores Job to his former standing (a rather better outcome of the bet than that proposed in Trading Places, although there the victims get their own back eventually).

But the nature of the bet is crucial, and it is here that I start to love the book of Job. Job and Ecclesiastes fascinate me because each of them seeks to answer the question, "How can it be, in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, merciful God, that bad things happen to good people? If God is just, how come the world is not?" The bet is part of that exploration.

God (YHWH) holds up Job as a paragon of virtue and worshipful behaviour, to which the Accuser says, "Anyone can be virtuous if they are as well-off as Job is! He's just being nice so that you continue being nice to him. If you stop being nice, you'll soon see what people are really like!"

At stake is not just a matter of one-upmanship between God and the Devil: this goes right to the heart of a question that has plagued children for probably a century or so (and has been presented in a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, even): "If I am only good because I want to receive presents from Santa Claus, doesn't that just prove that I can be bought? Does that count as genuinely being good, and if not, will I still get my presents?" I know I wrestled with this problem when i was young!

Here, the Accuser's objective is to say to God that He can never know that His people truly have faith in Him and are truly virtuous - the Accuser says instead that all of us (embodied in the example of the virtuous Job) are self-serving hypocrites (and therefore in our hearts belong not to God but to Satan). The point of the bet is therefore not simply to settle "Will Job turn against God?" but also "Is it ever possible for humanity to be reconciled with God?" At stake, therefore, is whether or not the whole human race is condemned to Hell or not. (A bit more serious than just Santa considering "is this child really good, or just bribe-able?"!) Thus, Job serves as an allegory for humanity.

God cannot turn down this metaphysical challenge to His relationship with humanity - just the fact of the doubt being raised means that until it is resolved, God cannot be truly reconciled with us.

So, bad shit sometimes happens to good people because otherwise humans will just be corrupt and hypocritical in our behaviour, and not truly love God. That would mean that the Accuser/Adversary has won and God and His people are irrevocably torn from one another! But if there are people who love God despite bad shit happening to them, then there is the possibility of God being reunited with Humanity.

So the testing of Job begins. First, God permits the Accuser (who has no power that God cannot overrule) to take away Job's wealth (which includes his children - remember that in the 2nd millennium BCE offspring were considered possessions of their parents; if this were meant literally, it would be very problematic, but we are reading it as an allegory for humanity). Job responds more-or-less, "I started out with nothing, and I've still got most of it left, God owes me nothing, Praise the Lord" (actual passage here.

God says, "told you so!" Satan says, "Ah, he can afford to be that way about material possessions, but strike at his body and he'll sing a different tune!"

So the Accuser gets to give Job hideous diseases as well, as long as he doesn't actually kill Job.

Job says, "I'll take the rough with the smooth".

Now comes the juicy bit: Job's comforters. This is the second bit that I love about the book of Job. Job's friends are basically your classic victim-blamers, pivilege-deniers and "holier-than-thou" people. In the modern world, most conservatives and right-wing Christians are directly analogous to Job's friends. And, like classic trolls in feminist/progressive spaces, they pull out the "tone argument", the "how dare you call me -ist when I'm really a good person" type of argument and so on. Pretty awful so far, but here's the good bit: Job's friends are the butt of the joke in the book of Job. This book is about why they are in the wrong! Observe:

Job 42:7-8 (NIV - UK edition)

After the LORD had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.

So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.

Job's defence of himself against their accusations is accepted as legitimate, and Job's observations (like those in Ecclesiastes) that actually, sometimes bad things happen to good people and bad people get to live comfortably, are not dismissed as false by God.

That said, the lesson for Job is to not question what God, however incomprehensible or unjust it might seem to us. This is where the book concludes. In contrast to the introduction (where we are permitted a brief look into the divine reasoning), in the conclusion we are forced to see it from the point of view of humans living in the world. God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving, and yet He allows bad things to happen. It is beyond our ability to understand (since God is infinite, a good way to picture this is to observe the impossibility of knowing the exact value of π - an infinitely long number. Likewise, us finite humans are not able to know the mind of an infinite God). Thus it is that Job speaks not of "things I am not meant to know", but instead, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3) When we, with our limited knowledge and perspective, see things that we do not understand in terms of the apparent injustice of the universe, it ultimately comes down to the fact that it is beyond our capacity to see enough to be able to understand. It is a hard lesson to accept the limitations of our capacities, but a valuable one - our duty to ourselves, to other people and (if we are believers) to God, is to make the best of what is presented to us. Job's friends, instead of making the best of what happened and genuinely comforting and helping Job, simply turned up to reassure themselves that they were better than he, and could by their own hand escape the same fate (God points out to Job that his inability to shape his own destiny is a reason why his request to justify himself before God was foolish; the same applies to the comforters).

This is like my favourite prayer:

LORD:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

And that is why I love the book of Job.