Job: The Man Who Put God on Trial

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. The prose story at the beginning and end may be an old folk tale. The long poem in the middle was written by a great poet whose name is lost.

When: Debated. Most scholars place the poem between the 500s and 300s BC.

Where it fits: Set in a world like Genesis, with herds and family altars, in a land outside Israel. The poem was written much later, probably in or after the exile, though Ezekiel already knew Job as a hero of old (Ezekiel 14:14).

Where I quote it: Never directly. But when my friends asked whether a blind man’s sin caused his blindness, I gave Job’s answer (John 9:2–3).

If you only read three chapters: Job 1, Job 31 and Job 38.

Words to Know

The satan — in this book, the accuser, a member of God’s heavenly court whose job is to test. Not yet the devil.

Uz — Job’s country, outside Israel. Job is not an Israelite.

Redeemer — in Hebrew go’el, the relative who would stand up for you and win back what you lost.

Whirlwind — the storm out of which God finally answers Job.

Leviathan — a great sea monster, a picture of chaos that only God can tame.

The Book in Brief

Job is a long book, part story and part poem. A short prose story opens it in chapters 1 and 2 and closes it at the end of chapter 42. Between them is a long poem of speeches.

Job lives in the land of Uz. He is blameless, rich, and the father of ten children. In chapter 1 the scene shifts to heaven, where God’s sons come before the LORD and the satan, the accuser, is among them. God points out Job. The accuser says Job fears God only because it pays. God lets him take everything Job has, but not Job himself. In one day Job loses his herds, his servants and all ten children. In chapter 2 the accuser is allowed to strike Job’s body, and Job is covered in sores. His wife tells him to give up on God. Job will not. Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to comfort him and sit in silence with him for seven days.

In chapter 3 Job breaks the silence by cursing the day he was born. Chapters 4 to 27 are a debate in three rounds. Each friend speaks in turn, and Job answers each time. The friends insist that suffering is punishment and urge Job to admit his sin. Job insists that he is innocent, says God is treating him as an enemy, and wants to argue his case before God. The third round breaks down, and Zophar does not speak again. Chapter 28 is a poem asking where wisdom can be found. In chapters 29 to 31 Job makes his last speech. He remembers his old life, describes his shame, and swears a long oath of innocence that ends with a demand that God answer him.

In chapters 32 to 37 a younger man, Elihu, who has been listening, angrily rebukes Job and the friends. He says God speaks through suffering and is greater than anyone understands.

In chapters 38 to 41 the LORD answers Job out of a whirlwind. God does not explain what happened. He questions Job about the making of the earth, the sea, the storms and the wild animals, and describes two great creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan. Job answers that he spoke of things he did not understand, and that now his eye has seen God.

In chapter 42 God tells Eliphaz that he and his friends have not spoken rightly of him, as Job has. Job prays for them, and God restores his fortunes twice over. He has seven sons and three daughters again, and he lives to see four generations before he dies, old and full of days.

Once, my friends and I passed a man who had been blind from birth. They asked me, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? (John 9:2).

They were not being cruel. They were asking the question everyone asked. If something terrible happens to you, you must have done something to deserve it. Or your parents did.

I said, This man didn’t sin, nor did his parents (John 9:3).

That answer is the whole book of Job.

Does Job serve God for nothing?

The book opens in heaven. God is holding court, and among the heavenly beings is one called the satan, the accuser. He is not the devil you picture. He is more like a prosecutor in God’s court, going to and fro on the earth, checking up on people (Job 1:6–7).¹

God points out Job, a man in the land of Uz who is blameless and upright. The accuser asks one question: Does Job fear God for nothing? (Job 1:9).

Take away everything you have given him, he says, and he will curse you to your face.

That is the question of the book. Will anyone love God when it gets them nothing? Is all religion just a deal?

Go deeperHow the accuser became the devil

The book pictures God holding court with God’s sons (Job 1:6), the members of the heavenly court. That picture was not new with Job. The prophet Micaiah sees the LORD on his throne with all the army of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left, and one spirit volunteers to deceive King Ahab (1 Kings 22:19–22). The Canaanites told a similar story of their high god El presiding over a council of divine sons.²

The Hebrew word satan means adversary, and it began as an ordinary word, used even of human enemies (1 Kings 11:14). In Numbers 22:22 the LORD’s angel stands in Balaam’s road as an adversary. In Job and in Zechariah 3:1–2, the satan is an officer of the court who brings accusations.

Then the figure changed. The census of David is told twice. In 2 Samuel 24:1 the LORD’s anger moves David to count Israel. In 1 Chronicles, written later, Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to take a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21:1). Now the word has no the before it, and most readers take it as a name. In the centuries around my birth the figure grew darker. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish book in Greek, says death entered the world through the devil’s envy. The book of Jubilees, written in the 100s BC, has Prince Mastema urge God to test Abraham, much as the accuser does in Job.³

In the gospels I speak of him as a real enemy. I told my friends, I saw Satan having fallen like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18). The old serpent is called the devil and Satan in the last book of your Bible (Revelation 12:9).

Everything is taken

In one day, raiders take Job’s oxen and donkeys and kill his servants. Fire falls and burns his sheep. Another band takes his camels. And a great wind collapses a house on his sons and daughters while they are eating, and they all die (Job 1:13–19).

Job tears his robe, shaves his head and falls to the ground. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the LORD’s name (Job 1:21).

Then he is struck with sores from head to foot. He sits in the ashes, scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery. His wife says, Renounce God, and die (Job 2:9).

The best thing his friends did

Three of Job’s friends hear what happened and come to comfort him. When they see him, they do not recognize him. They weep and tear their clothes.

They sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great (Job 2:13).

That was the best thing they did in the whole book. They sat with him and kept quiet.

Then they started talking.

The friends’ theory

The friends say what everyone says.

Eliphaz: Remember, now, whoever perished, being innocent? (Job 4:7).

Bildad, about Job’s dead children: If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their disobedience (Job 8:4).

Zophar: Know therefore that God exacts of you less than your iniquity deserves (Job 11:6).

Their theory is simple and comforting. The world is fair. Good people prosper. If you are suffering, you did something wrong. Confess, and God will restore you.

Notice what that theory does. It protects the friends. If the world is fair, then what happened to Job cannot happen to them, as long as they are good.

Go deeperOthers who asked Job’s question

The question that drives Job was asked in Mesopotamia long before. Scholars compare three ancient poems.⁴

The oldest is a Sumerian poem often called Man and His God, known from copies made around 1700 BC. A man who has been faithful to his god suffers and is abandoned. He pleads, and the god restores him.

Ludlul bel nemeqi, “I will praise the lord of wisdom,” is a Babylonian poem composed more than three thousand years ago. A rich official named Shubshi-meshre-Shakkan is struck down by disease and shunned by friends and family. He cannot tell what he did wrong, because he does not know what pleases the gods. In the end the god Marduk restores him.

The Babylonian Theodicy, from about 1000 BC, is closest to the shape of Job. It is a dialogue in twenty-seven stanzas between a sufferer and a friend. The friend defends the old view that the gods reward the good. The sufferer answers that the pious go hungry and the wicked prosper, and he ends by asking the gods for help.

None of these poems is the source of Job, and none has anything like God’s answer out of the whirlwind or the verdict that the friends spoke wrongly. But the question was old. My people were not the only ones who asked why the good suffer.

Job will not accept it

Job refuses. He knows he has not done anything to deserve this. And he says so, for thirty chapters, in the angriest poetry in the scriptures.

He curses the day he was born (Job 3). He says God is attacking him like an enemy. He demands a trial. Surely I would speak to the Almighty. I desire to reason with God (Job 13:3).

You may know a famous line from the King James Bible: Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him (Job 13:15). The Hebrew can be read two ways, and many translations now read it as nearly the opposite: Behold, he will kill me. I have no hope. Nevertheless, I will maintain my ways before him.⁵ Job was not being meek. He was preparing to argue.

And then, in the middle of his despair, he says, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25). His go’el, the one who would stand up for him. Job is saying that even if God is against him, someone will vindicate him in the end. The Hebrew of the verses that follow is very hard to translate, and scholars argue over what Job hoped for.⁶ Handel set the line to music, and you have probably heard it sung.

Go deeperHow the book of Job was handed down

Job is one of the hardest books in the Hebrew scriptures to read. Its Hebrew has many words that appear nowhere else, and the oldest translators clearly struggled with it.

The Greek translation is much shorter than the Hebrew, by hundreds of lines. It is debated whether the translator cut the difficult poetry or worked from a shorter Hebrew copy. A later Christian scholar, Origen, noticed the gaps and filled them from other Greek translations. Jerome, who studied his work, said that seven or eight hundred lines were missing.⁷ The Greek also ends with a note that identifies Job with Jobab, a king of Edom named in Genesis 36:33 as the son of Zerah of Bozrah, and so a descendant of Esau.⁸

In the Dead Sea caves, scholars found pieces of Job in Hebrew. They also found a long Aramaic translation of the book (11Q10), made for readers who spoke Aramaic. It was found in Cave 11 at Qumran, so it was copied before the Romans destroyed the settlement there around AD 68.⁹ So long before my day, Job was being studied, translated and argued over.

What Job meant by righteous

Read Job 31, where Job swears his innocence, because it tells you what a righteous man was in my scriptures.

He does not list prayers or sacrifices. He lists how he treated people.

If I have despised the cause of my male servant or of my female servant, when they contended with me … Didn’t he who made me in the womb make him? (Job 31:13, 15).

If I have withheld the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone, and the fatherless has not eaten of it … if I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or that the needy had no covering … (Job 31:16–19).

Job’s whole case before God rests on whether he fed the hungry, clothed the naked and treated his servants as human beings made by the same God. When I described the last judgment, the questions were the same: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat … I was naked, and you clothed me (Matthew 25:35–36).

God answers

At last, God answers Job, out of the whirlwind.

But God does not answer the question. God does not explain the bet in heaven. God asks questions back.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job 38:4).

Then God takes Job on a tour of creation. The sea and the dawn and the snow. The lion hunting. The wild donkey that laughs at the city. The mountain goats giving birth where no human sees. The ostrich, who leaves her eggs in the dust and laughs at the horse and rider. The great beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan, that no man can tame.

And rain, on a land where there is no man, on the wilderness, in which there is no man (Job 38:26).

The world is bigger than Job’s question. God cares for parts of it no human ever sees. It was not made only around us.

I said something close: God makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). The rain does not fall as a reward.

Who spoke rightly

Job answers God humbly. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you (Job 42:5).

And then the most surprising verse in the book. God turns to the friends, the ones who had defended God for thirty chapters, and says:

My wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has (Job 42:7).

The man who shouted at God spoke rightly. The men who defended God with neat answers did not.

That is in my scriptures. God would rather have your honest anger than your tidy theology.

The patience of Job

In the New Testament, the letter of James speaks of the perseverance of Job. The King James calls it his patience (James 5:11).

Job was not patient. He endured, yes. He did not let go of God. But he argued, protested and demanded an answer for most of the book. If that is patience, it is the patience of a man who will not stop knocking.

I told a story about a widow who kept coming to an unjust judge, again and again, until he gave her justice just to be rid of her (Luke 18:1–8). That was the kind of patience I meant.

The ending

At the end, Job’s fortunes are restored, double. He has new children. His three daughters are named, Jemimah, Keziah and Keren-happuch, and the book says their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers (Job 42:13–15). In my world, daughters with brothers did not usually inherit.

Some readers find the happy ending too easy. New children do not replace dead ones. That is true. But notice that even here, at the end, the book does something unexpected for the people at the bottom.

When people told me about Galileans killed by Pilate, and eighteen people killed when a tower fell at Siloam, I asked, Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the men who dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, no (Luke 13:1–5).

That was Job’s answer, and it was mine.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Job 42:7.

You will find: God saying that Job, who argued with him, spoke rightly, and the friends who defended him did not.

Then read Job 31:13–23 and Matthew 25:35–40. Compare what counts as righteous.

The Short Version

• Job asks whether anyone serves God for nothing, and whether suffering is always deserved.
• His friends say it is. Job says it is not, and argues with God for thirty chapters.
• God answers out of the whirlwind with a creation bigger than human questions.
• God says Job spoke rightly and the friends did not.
• When asked whose sin caused a man’s blindness, I gave Job’s answer: neither.