Job Overview
Where To Start
Wisdom Literature
I Before E
It’s as if Job’s friends knew a proverbial rule that “i comes before e,” but they had no category for “after c or sometimes y or with sounds of a like neighbor and weigh.” Therefore, they misapplied true things and damaged their neighbor instead of loving him—and all of this, they did misguidedly in God’s name.
By taking up this untidy voice, the Preacher isn’t using this sermon to describe life as we expect it, or as he desires it or as what good theology says that life should be. Rather the Preacher describes life as it actually presents itself “under the sun.” If someone were to say to him, “You shouldn’t talk about such things,” it is as if he responds, “But people already go through this kind of stuff and have to talk about it under the sun.” If someone were to say to him, “The things you talk about shouldn’t happen,” it is as if he says, “No, they shouldn’t, but they do, so now what?”
Who wrote this book
What Was Written For Us
The Tough Questions:
1. Does God need to be informed about Satan’s activities? No. The author uses conventional thinking about how the heavenly council operates in order to stage the conversation that sets the scene. Yahweh is portrayed as a royal figure who receives reports from the functionaries to whom tasks have been delegated. In other words, the description of heaven is modeled after an ancient Near Eastern royal court. The angels are his court officials—his divine council—and the challenger (“Satan,” see chap. 6) is a spy, a member of the heavenly CIA. This is a literary motif, and we do not need to believe that God actually works this way. Even if he did, there would be no reason to believe that his question reveals his ignorance. His question is intended merely to receive a report and evoke a response.
2. Does God involve himself in a wager with the devil? No, on numerous counts. We will discuss the identity of the challenger in the next chapter. Regarding the wager, the author is not offering us revelation about how God operates. The literary role played by the wager is to demonstrate from the start that Job’s suffering is not the result of anything he has done.
3. Does God have to find out what Job’s motivations really are? No. The question being resolved for the readers is not, Will the most righteous man ever known maintain his righteousness when his world falls apart? The text is offering answers to our questions, not to God’s uncertainties. Readers have no benefit in being told that God knows that Job’s motivations are pure because it is not Job who is our ultimate concern. As readers, we are investigating how God’s justice interacts with our experiences and circumstances. The book is concerned with what we need to discover, not with what God needs to discover.
4. Does God care about Job? That is, should we infer God’s relative care for Job from his question, “Have you considered my servant Job?” We cannot deduce God’s “feelings” about Job from his introduction of the conversation about Job. Everything in the scene in heaven is artificial—a scenario designed to set the scene literarily. The characters need to be considered as characters in a story.
5. Is God uncaring about Job as he launches his ruin? No. The literary scenario holds all such assessments at bay.
6. Does God violently wipe out Job’s children? There is no reason to consider God as careless with human lives simply to make a point. It is essential that the extremes of Job’s suffering be portrayed as convincingly as the extremes of his righteousness and his prosperity. Nothing less than total loss would provide the necessary factors for the wisdom instruction that is the focus. Again, it is instructive to use the same sort of thinking that we use when we encounter Jesus’ parables, which examine realistic issues by constructing situations that mix realism with extreme, exaggerated or unbelievable factors. These extremes provide one of the telltale signs that we are dealing with a literary construction.
7. Does God heartlessly ignore Job’s pleas? It is clear that God is unresponsive, but the book and its teaching would flounder badly if Job succeeded in drawing God into litigation. That God is impervious to such pleas does not make him heartless; it shows that this is not the path to a solution. The message that the book intends to convey is not achieved by God giving explanations; in fact, that would destroy the message of the book. The posture of God therefore has nothing to do with whether he is emotionally responsive to Job.
8. Does God intimidate Job into silence? In Yahweh’s speeches he is undeniably portrayed as intimidating—given that he is God, intimidating does not begin to capture his nature. But, does the author intend for the reader to be cowed into abject groveling as the appropriate response to this Wizard of Oz power play? If the book of Job is suggesting a portrait of God that conveys, “How dare you approach me?” it would stand in sharp contrast to the book of Psalms in which, by the example of the psalmists, God is approachable with all sorts of concerns. We would therefore again maintain that this posture of Yahweh is necessary as a literary means rather than as a theological end. The point is not that God is unapproachable but that he is irreducible. Yahweh wraps himself in a storm not because Job dares to question him but because Job has been willing to make his own righteousness and his own perceptions of the operations of the cosmos the basis by which God’s actions can be assessed. It is on this specific point that the message of the book comes into play.