Job: His Character

OT Wisdom Literature: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job

Proverbs: God is Wise and Just. Righteous are rewarded, Wicked are punished. The World as created is fair. You get what you deserve.

Ecclesiastes: People don’t always get what they deserve. The World isn’t always fair, life is unpredictable, and hard to comprehend. Is God truly Wise and Just?

Job: The opposer or accuser supposes Job only loves God, because He rewards him. If God were to take everything away, Job would curse God and reject Him. Job is obeying just to get what he wants from God. When all is taken away, Job still praises God. But, his friends say that he must have done SOMETHING wrong, because God is Just and the World is ordered. But, God IS working with an infinitely complex universe, and His wisdom supersedes our understanding. Leaves Job in a place of humility and dependency on God. Losing everything was not punishment and restoration is not reward. No matter where we are God is trustworthy.

Job 1:1–5 ESV

1 There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. 2 There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. 3 He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. 4 His sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” Thus Job did continually.

Job’s Location

Job 1:

Job 1:1a ESV

1 There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

Exact location of Uz is unknown. Likely a region rather than an actual city. Probably SE of what we know as Israel. Regardless of its location, this detail is significant because it indicates that Job is not an Israelite. His non-Israelite status explains the absence of many key theological elements in the book, including law, covenant, temple, and references to Yahweh. Intriguingly, however, the book frequently evidences an Israelite perspective, which suggests that the story of the non-Israelite Job has actually been given its literary shape by an Israelite author for an Israelite audience. This secondary context gives the book a voice in the context of Israelite ideas about God and his expectations.

Job’s Qualities

Job 1:1b ESV

1 There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

Job’s qualities. “blameless” (tam) refers to Job’s character and “upright” (yašar) to his actions. These two words are used in other places in Job in the negative to express the opposite of Job’s character, such as “proclaimed guilty” (ʿqš, 9:20) and “wicked” (rašaʿ, 9:22). This verbal stem of ʿqš occurs only four other times (; , both in contrast to tam; ; , both in contrast to “justice,” mišpaṭ) and specifically refers to something twisted or perverse.

Second, Job is identified as “upright” (yašar), a term commonly used to describe people who behave according to God’s expectations—specifically, kings faithful to Yahweh (e.g., Joash, ). An upright person gains God’s favor (). God himself is upright (), and he made humankind upright (), but people have gone in search of schemes. The Israelites each did what was (up)right in their own eyes (; ) because they had no king and they were departing from faithfulness to God.

Second, Job is identified as “upright” (yašar), a term commonly used to describe people who behave according to God’s expectations—specifically, kings faithful to Yahweh (e.g., Joash, ). An upright person gains God’s favor (). God himself is upright (), and he made humankind upright (), but people have gone in search of schemes. The Israelites each did what was (up)right in their own eyes (; ) because they had no king and they were departing from faithfulness to God.

Blameless and upright are desirable accolades, but they are achievable for humans who seek steadfastly to order their ways according to customary conceptions of godliness. But these terms do not describe people who live lives of sinless perfection; rather, they describe those who have found favor in the eyes of God and other humans (cf. ).

The God Job Fears:

El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai

Job is also described as one who “fears God” (ʾelohim). As we would expect in Job, the author does not identify him as one who “fears Yahweh” specifically. We can again turn to the description of the non-Israelite Abimelech and his people and the premature assessment made of them by Abraham (). In common Old Testament usage, to fear the Lord/God is to take God seriously. That can mean different things depending on what one knows of God. For the sailors in Jonah, fearing the Lord entailed a different response than the Israelites, who “feared the Lord” in response to the covenant. In a non-Israelite context, fearing God could refer to being ritually or ethically conscientious, and the context of Job requires nothing more than this definition. In sum, Job is a paragon of devotion and integrity.

The God Job fears. The primary names used for God in the book of Job are El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai. The characters in the book leave no room for the distribution of divine powers among a variety of entities, though the speakers refer to other known divine entities in a variety of places. These indicate that Job inhabits the world of the ancient Near East, with all its mythologies, but he does not share the polytheistic worldview common to the region. Neither Job nor his friends specifically discuss Yahweh in their speeches to one another. What is the significance of this? We have noted that Job is a paradox. The region of his home and the practices of his family clearly show his setting to be non-Israelite. This non-Israelite setting would find support in the use of divine names other than Yahweh. Yet, at the same time, Job is notably Israelite-like in his beliefs (see Introduction, p. 38). With the Prologue and Epilogue featuring Yahweh, an additional Israelite component is recognizable, but there is no attempt to insert Yahweh throughout the work.

Job’s Possessions and Status

Job 1:2–3 ESV

2 There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. 3 He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.

Job’s possessions and status. In verses 2 and 3 Job’s prosperity is described in terms of his family and his possessions. The numbers all give indication of representing idealizations or stereotypes, but this is no evidence that they are contrived. Truth is stranger than fiction. Nevertheless, as suggested in the introduction, the book as wisdom literature would be expected to be the result of literary shaping. Everything about Job is ideal, which has the purpose of portraying him as the ultimate example of a person who is beyond reproach and who has achieved success by the highest standards.

Job’s Piety

Job 1:4–5 ESV

4 His sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” Thus Job did continually.

Job 1:4-5

Job’s piety. A number of questions emerge from the short vignette in verses 4–6. One might first question why these feasts are the setting for the potential offense of cursing God. Note that these are not cultic feasts because the word used here usually denotes special celebratory occasions; other terminology designates a cultic feast. From a literary standpoint these feasts have significance because they provide the setting in which Job’s sons and daughters eventually meet their demise (1:18–19).

This group setting might seem unnecessary at first glance since Job expresses his concern that they may have cursed God “in their hearts.” Although this phrase often refers to the private thoughts of an individual, when a group of people are part of the scene, it can refer to corporate thinking shared confidentially (cf. ; ; ). Tangentially, since just such a feast was taking place when Job’s family was destroyed, one might ask whether their behavior at the feast may have somehow brought this judgment on them (note that Bildad suggests exactly that in 8:4). In such a case, the death of his family could be interpreted by observers not as action against Job, but as action against his children. But the information here about Job’s scrupulous purifying rituals argue against that suggestion.

Second, why does Job even imagine that his family might curse God in their private conversations at these feasts? Again, a first glance can be misleading. It would appear that this is an extreme offense that would be unlikely of this pious family, where we might expect an illustration that shows more subtlety. But that initial impression evaporates under scrutiny.

Strange as it may seem, the word translated “cursed” is the normal Hebrew word for “bless” (barak). The general consensus among interpreters is that the use of the opposite word is euphemistic so that the uncomfortable concept of cursing God is circumnavigated. This unusual interplay between cursing and blessing becomes significant in the early sections of this book. In 1:11 (also 2:5) the Challenger suggests that Job will “bless” (= “curse”) God to his face (in contrast to the fears Job had that his children might bless/curse God in their hearts). Instead, Job truly does “bless” God (1:21, same verb). Job’s wife urges him to “bless” (= “curse”) God blatantly and die (2:9). Job does not respond with blessing God after the second round, but neither does he curse God. Instead, he curses the day of his birth.

We can identify some examples of this offense by moving beyond the actual occurrence of the term “curse” to exploring some of the offensive words people speak against God “in their hearts” in other passages:

• taking credit for what God has done (cf. )

• misjudging God’s motives ()

• thinking that God will not act ( [18]; ; )

• expressing one’s ambitions against God ()

• expressing one’s arrogance ()

stating that there is no God (; )

These examples all hold God in contempt by stating implicitly or explicitly that he is powerless to act, that God is corrupt in his actions or motives, that God has needs, or that God can be manipulated. These sorts of claims would constitute cursing God as they make God to be less than God. We thus discover that “cursing God” may not be as blatant and obvious an offense as first thought.

Our Character in Crisis

God in the Book of Job: El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai

El

El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai