Reading: Job 1-3, Psalm 135

Don’t go looking for trouble, and no trouble will come to you. Do good things, and good things will come to you. Think good thoughts, and you’ll have a good life. What goes around comes around. These are the hallmark moral heuristics of our world. I would say our modern world, but all these ideas are as old as humanity. Of course, the problem with heuristics is they are not always true, just generally true. Guidelines, not laws. In the Biblical story, these would be in the category of a “proverb.” There is a whole book of them, but we haven’t gotten there yet. The answer to such proverbial statements is the purview of the skeptic, who sees all the exceptions, points them out, and tries to build a view of the world based on all the corner cases. The Bible also has a book by one of these: the book of Ecclesiastes. But we haven’t gotten there yet, either. The book we have in front of us, the book of Job, is a story where these points of view meet in the real world. Where what goes around doesn’t come around. Both the proverbial and skeptical responses fall flat in the face of the reality of desperate suffering.

Job opens with a short narrative that is deeply troubling. Not so much the man Job himself. He’s actually kinda great. He’s righteous, rich, and famous; but at the same time he is well thought of, cares about his children, and has a reputation for generosity (which we will learn about later in the book.) But then there is this oddball scene in which God holds court, and Satan shows up. Then God brags on how righteous Job is. Satan isn’t having any of it, though. He tells God that Job is only righteous because his life is good and he has a bunch of stuff. So God lets Satan take away his stuff. This is really bad for Job, but it does not change his righteous behavior. So Satan goes back and says sure, Job is righteous because he is healthy. So God says fine, go make him as sick and injured as you want, so long as you don’t kill him. It is in the context of this awful downturn that the book of Job takes place.

Okay, so let’s talk about this. First, what does this have to do with the story of the Bible we have been reading? Even the most bizarre pronouncements of the prophets were within the historical framework that we read in the books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Those were the history, and the prophets fit that history. But there is none of that in Job. This is some guy who lives in the land of Uz, which appears nowhere else. There are some hints in the book that he is a contemporary of Abraham, though they are certainly not conclusive. Whoever wrote the book of Job seems to have left it deliberately vague when and even where exactly this happened. The story being told is general on purpose. It is not tied to a specific time and place, because the subject is not specific to a time and place. Suffering, and the attempt to understand and respond to it, appears in all times and all places. Job is meant to be applied as wisdom, not read as history. The community formed by the story of the Hebrew Scriptures read Job to understand their own suffering.

Now, what is this about God’s conversation with Satan? Let’s go ahead and discard the medieval and modern concepts of “Satan” as some red, horned devil-man and take a look at the Hebrew concept. The name “Satan” is a transliteration, not a translation, of a Hebrew word that means “accuser.” While in this case it is certainly a specific character, it is also a title, sort of like prosecutor in a modern court room. By calling the character “Satan” the author of Job is telling us his role in the story. He will accuse righteous Job. There is more to the character of Satan, but it comes much later in the story, so we won’t discuss it here. These scenes between God and Satan are there to set up the source of Job’s suffering. The whole point of the book is to deal with suffering that comes from an unknowable source, so it has to set up the story in such a way we, the reader, have no doubt that Job did not do something to deserve what happened to him. It instead tells us the opposite: it is Job’s righteousness that is getting him into trouble.

As good post-post-moderns, it is our instinct to question the motives of all the characters in a story. We have been so heavily influenced by the idea of the untrustworthy narrator that we have a hard time accepting as real the expressed motives of characters and leap to psychologize them. God couldn’t really just be proud of Job and bragging about him, could he? Satan must really have deeper motives we can dig out, right? No. We need to resist doing this when reading this kind of literature. The set up for the main material of the book, the dialogues between Job and his friends, is set up by these scenes, and if we start adding material that is not there, they won’t set it up right. The author knew what they were doing, let’s do them the service of reading the book that is there, not the one we construct around it. This is good advice for reading old books in general, but especially in a book with a complex emergent purpose like Job.