Job-Observations

What can you tell me of what you know about the book of Job?

What do you think it is about?

How many of you have read it all the way through?

It’s a super famous story. It’s pretty straightforward, right? But it is a long book. We’ve all heard it before. This guy loses everything. Satan (or the satan-more on that later)and God have this weird kinda seems like almost a bet. He loses all of his family, except for his wife, which—the way she treats him probably, I don’t want to make that too dark and morbid—but my goodness, treats him horribly. She’s like, “Come on, curse God and die.”

You feel like the typical look at the book of Job includes that very first opening portion, and then you skip straight to the end where God does His thing.

Then that’s pretty much it.

When you think about it, it’s like, “Well, that book about suffering is weird. It’s a weird book.

The characters are doing weird things. It’s just a weird thing.” Let’s make some observations about Job right off the bat.

First, Job is a drama. I’m going to be a shocker to everybody, but it’s like a kind of play. It’s like when I was in school, at different points in English class, you’d have to enact a play and everybody would get their parts. We know what we’re looking at when we have a play in front of us with parts assigned.

Job was a drama. It’s not to say the drama is not based on an absolutely true tale. I don’t know, maybe there was a man named Job at some point. 

Some interesting facts about Job.

Nowhere in the story does it say that Job is Jewish. In fact, in Jewish tradition, this poor guy is a pagan.

Nevertheless, it’s a drama. Drama. Read Job like you would a play.

Second observation about Job. It’s interesting to note, Job’s friends are partaking in a Jewish practice that we’re often not familiar with. The concept of sitting shiva, to “sit shiva,” S-H-I-V-A. To sit shiva is something that you do with somebody that’s in grief. In Jewish culture, when a person is in a period of grieving and loss, the friends show up to sit shiva with the griever.

You are not allowed to speak unless spoken to, you are just there to be present for the suffering. Such a great passage. You don’t say anything, you don’t try to console them, you don’t try to explain it. You just sit with them. Now if they want to ask you a question, if they want to address you, you can talk to them, but that’s not your job. It’s not why you showed up. It’s such an interesting thing.

Why do you think they practice it this way?

Third observation, I know we have talked about this being wisdom literature. But you could place Job as an exilic prophet. Now, people often really kick back against this on a couple of different levels. Many conservative Bible teachers would teach that Job is one of the oldest stories of the Bible. That is a really prevalent idea. There are elements of the story that seemed to resonate with a much older Hebrew, somewhere around the dates of Abraham.

As you can imagine, the story of Job has its roots in the topic of suffering—

How long, do you think we’ve been wrestling with, as a human race, the problem of suffering?

Depending on how you want to talk about the Bible, all the way back to the days of Cain and Abel, or maybe even Adam and Eve, like the whole time. We have been wrestling with the problem of suffering. I can imagine that the roots of the story of Job really do go way, way, way back.

You remember I talked about Job being a really old book? The roots of the story can go way far back. However, there are many elements to the story that seemed to be problematic. Some of the content of the book does not match the time period, like their references to the zodiac. When it talks about Pleiades and Orion. Those are way too late to be that early. That’s not how they saw the zodiac, so what’s going on there? The language surrounding the beasts, et cetera. Additionally, the blatant reference to Satan would be almost a millennium ahead of its time. The reference to Satan as a personified character doesn’t begin until the Hellenistic period. 323 BCE to 31 BCE. For reference. The Abrahamic period is generally placed in the first half of the second millennium BCE (around 1900–1800 BCE). 

Such a reference to Satan wandering around heaven and talking to God and this character-to-character, mano-y-mano bet that they place. Such a reference would be unheard of that early in history. There’s another prevalent theory, especially amongst Jewish thinkers, that the book of Job belongs to the books of wisdom. That’s the other perspective.

In fact all these options could be true.  I imagine the story of Job would very likely be a very ancient tale. Humans have been wrestling with questions about suffering since the dawn of time. 

I think Job is one of those stories that probably got remade and rewritten and reshaped and retold. I do see, I don’t know if Solomon himself, but I imagine a character like Solomon taking this ancient, ancient tale, and then reworking it as this brilliant wisdom literature.

I believe it’s an inspired, authoritative Bible. Whether it got to me late or it got to me early, to me, it doesn’t matter, because at some point, it got to me in the form of what I have in my scriptures, that inspired authoritative drama. I’m good either way. That’s my personal hunch. I don’t get to have one, because I’m not a PhD. I don’t have the degrees to say I have a hunch, but I have a hunch just as a human being.

But there is something else that is remarkable about the book. Mainly in how it is structure. It’s what is called a “chaism”.

A chiasm is a literary or rhetorical device where a series of words or ideas are presented in a specific A-B-C...C'-B'-A' order, forming a mirrored, inverted parallelism like the Greek letter "X". In the Bible, chiasms are used to emphasize a central theme or message, add depth to the text, and guide the reader to the main point, which is typically found at the center of the structure. Recognizing these structures can help understand the original message and uncover intentional patterns by biblical writers.

And we will talk more of that later. Especially when we get to chapter 28! There is an incredible treasure to be buried in the center of a play about a guy who loses everything.

But there is one thing I want you to take with you as we study this book. Do you remember how in Genesis. That I mentioned the structure is not designed to give you a sequence or chonology of events? But a “purpose”! One of the things with wisdom literature it is all about “perspective”.

Why do you think that is the emphasis of the wisdom book. Job in particular?