Job — themes & analysis

The book opens with two scenes set in heaven that commit it, before Job ever speaks, to a particular argument. In the first, the sons of God present themselves before the Lord and the Satan — ha-satan, 'the adversary,' a kind of divine prosecutor — comes among them. The Lord asks whether the Satan has considered his servant Job, blameless and upright, who fears God and turns from evil. The Satan answers with the question that the rest of the book will be obliged to investigate: 'Doth Job fear God for nought?' Hast thou not made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath, on every side? Take that protection away, and he will curse thee to thy face.

The Lord agrees to the test, with the limit that the Satan may touch what Job has but not Job himself. Job loses everything in a single afternoon and refuses to curse God; he says only, 'The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' In the second scene the Satan returns and the test is escalated: skin for skin, all that a man hath will he give for his life. Touch his bone and his flesh. The disease comes and the wife's bitter line follows: 'Curse God and die.' Job answers, 'Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?'

What the prologue commits the book to argue, by setting up this frame, is that the question on the table is not 'why do bad things happen to good people' in the abstract sense modern theodicy gives the question, but a more specific one: whether disinterested piety exists at all. Whether anyone serves God for any reason other than the rewards he expects. The Satan's challenge is, in effect, that all religion is bribery. The book exists to test that proposition.

The answer, by the time Job is sitting in the ashes refusing to curse God even as his friends offer him every theological consolation that would let him do so under cover, is that disinterested piety does exist — but at a cost the prologue cannot accommodate, and which the dialogue will spend the next thirty chapters describing.

Where to follow it: Job 1 (the first wager), Job 2 (the second test), Job 31 (the oath of innocence), Job 42 (the epilogue).

The three friends are not strawmen. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar speak the wisdom of their tradition, and what they say is, on its own terms, the orthodoxy of the ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature: that the moral order of the universe is administered by a just God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. The friends believe this in good faith. They also believe, with the patience of men who have seen many cases like this, that no one is wholly innocent, that suffering on Job's scale is evidence of wrongdoing somewhere, and that the proper response is humility and repentance.

Eliphaz speaks from a vision he has had: 'Shall mortal man be more just than God?' Bildad speaks from the testimony of the fathers: 'Doth God pervert judgment?' Zophar speaks from common sense: 'Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.' The arguments are sober, sometimes beautiful, and from the framework the friends share, irrefutable. Job's response is not to demolish the framework. He grants, in many of his speeches, that the framework is what he has always believed too. His complaint is that the framework does not match what has happened to him.

The book is precise about this. Job is not arguing that there is no God, or that God is unjust in principle, or that the moral order should be abolished. He is arguing that in his particular case the doctrine the friends are using to interpret his suffering does not work, and he wants to put his case to God directly. The friends, increasingly, refuse to permit this. They hear Job's protest as the noise of a man who will not accept what his suffering has revealed about him, and they harden against him over the course of the dialogue. By the third round Bildad's speech is reduced to six verses; the orthodoxy is running out of arguments.

The book's central literary achievement is that it forces the reader to feel the inadequacy of an answer that, in any other context, the reader might assent to. The friends' theology is what most religious people, most of the time, believe. The book is the long demonstration that there are situations in which it does not suffice.

Where to follow it: Job 4 (Eliphaz speaks first), Job 8 (Bildad speaks first), Job 11 (Zophar speaks first), Job 19 (the redeemer speech).

From chapter 3 through chapter 37, God does not speak. The book stages, on a scale not attempted again in the Bible, the experience of religious silence. Job calls for an audience. Repeatedly, in some of the most striking poetry in the dialogues, he imagines a court at which his case can be heard. He asks for a daysman, an arbiter, who can lay his hand on both parties — on God and on Job — and hold a hearing. He swears, in the great oath of chapter 31, that he has lived a moral life so cleanly itemised that any honest court could read the indictment. He challenges, almost demands, that God answer.

And for thirty-five chapters the answer does not come. The friends speak. Elihu speaks. Job speaks again. The whirlwind has not yet arrived. The reader waits with Job through the slow accumulation of speeches that do not satisfy and a sky that does not open. This is not, in the end, the only thing the book is doing, but it is one of the things it is doing, and it is what gives the closing theophany its weight. The God who finally speaks in chapter 38 has, by the rules of the book's own dramatic time, kept silence for the whole of Job's protest.

The silence is not denial; it is not absence; it is the texture of the book's middle. When the Voice does come, what it says is shaped by the long delay. The book has earned the right to ask whether God's reply, when at last delivered, answers the question that has been asked, or whether it changes the question, or whether the act of speaking at all is itself the answer. The reader who has not sat through the silence cannot fairly judge what is given when the silence breaks.

Where to follow it: Job 3 (Job breaks silence), Job 19 (I know that my redeemer liveth), Job 31 (the oath; waiting for reply), Job 38 (the whirlwind breaks).

When God finally speaks, in chapter 38, the answer is not an explanation. It is a tour of the wild creation. The Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind and asks him where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid; who shut up the sea with doors when it brake forth as if it had issued out of the womb; who has commanded the morning since the days began; who can bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion; who provides for the raven his food when his young ones cry to God and wander for lack of meat.

The questions accelerate. The wild ass, scornful of the city, hearing not the crying of the driver. The wild ox, who will not consent to wear thy harness. The ostrich, who leaves her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in dust, hardened against her young as though they were not hers. The horse who paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength, who saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha. The eagle who dwelleth on the rock, whose eyes behold afar off. Then, in chapters 40 and 41, two great speeches on Behemoth and Leviathan — both depicted as figures God controls and Job cannot.

The speech is one of the most magnificent passages of nature writing in any language, and it is structured as an argument: the world Job is asking the moral order to be intelligible within is a world he has not made, does not understand, and cannot administer. The answer is not that Job's suffering is justified. The answer is not that Job has sinned. The answer, if the speech contains an answer, is that the world is larger than the doctrine the friends were using to read it; that the wild creation is full of creatures whose existence has nothing to do with human moral economy; and that the same God who has not protected Job from his suffering has also not failed to govern the wild ass and the eagle and the sea.

Whether this is consolation, evasion, or theological breakthrough has been argued ever since. What can be said with confidence is that the speech is the longest sustained piece of nature poetry in the Hebrew Bible and that Job, when it ends, lays his hand upon his mouth.

Where to follow it: Job 38 (the whirlwind begins), Job 39 (the wild creatures), Job 40 (Behemoth; Job's first answer), Job 41 (Leviathan).

The book closes with a prose paragraph that has divided readers for two and a half thousand years. After the whirlwind, the Lord rebukes the friends — 'my wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath' — and instructs them to bring sacrifices that Job will offer for them. Job prays for them and is heard.

Then, in a sentence the King James renders with the slight hesitation it earns, the Lord turned the captivity of Job and gave him twice as much as he had before. His brothers and sisters and former acquaintances come and eat bread with him in his house and bemoan him and comfort him. He is given fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand she-asses, seven new sons and three new daughters — Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-happuch, the most beautiful women in all the land, who are given inheritance among their brothers. Job lives a hundred and forty years, sees four generations, and dies old and full of days.

The reader who has come through the dialogues and the whirlwind has to decide what to do with this ending. One reading is that the restoration is consolation: the just suffer, and they are afterwards restored, and the moral order has been ratified. A second reading is that the restoration is the problem: that the children who died in chapter 1 cannot be replaced by new children in chapter 42, and that the prose ending sits in a deliberately uncomfortable relation to the whirlwind speech that preceded it. A third reading, which has accumulated through Christian, Jewish, and modern interpretation alike, is that both are true at once — that the restoration is real and inadequate, that the children are real and irreplaceable, that what the book finally gives the reader is the experience of holding both at once.

What no reading has been able to do is make the ending tidy. Job is a book that refuses the consolations of its own resolution, and the prose epilogue is the last refusal — disguised as the thing it most resembles, which is closure.

Where to follow it: Job 1 (the first children), Job 38 (the whirlwind), Job 42 (the restoration).