I like this one:
Sort of makes hash of the arguments that the devil did it. This puts the blame right square on the Magical Sky Pixie himself - never mind moral responsibilty for Satan’s actions, the big guy did it personally.
How do you know that they went to Heaven? All we know is that Job is the only really God fearing (Hah! love that expression) man around. Their faith is obviously not as strong as Job’s, else God wouldn’t have said that only Job was a good man. If they aren’t good enough, they get toasted.
Yeah, let’s stick our heads back in the sand and pretend that God is great.
Well, it looks to me that both the end and the beginning are tacked on. The main body of the text seems to be an attack on the idea that good and evil things happen to people as reward or punishment. It’s satire, it looks like to me. Lets look at just the middle part of the story. Bad stuff has happened to Job. His friends say, “Bad stuff happened to you, this must be a divine punishment because you did something wrong without realizing it.” Then somebody else comes in and says, "Suffering has nothing to do with good or evil. It’s the way G-d tests us. Stop assuming you can understand why G-d does anything. Then G-d comes and says, “He’s right. It’s imposible for you to understand why I do what I do, or why you suffer, so all of you stop bitching about suffering and take it, because you can’t do anything about it.”
Of course, that’s not a really satisfying story, so an ending is tacked on, where Job is rewarded for being good, and a beginning is tacked on where G-d lets bad things happen to him for a stated reason. And both the beginning and the end of the book contradict the message in the middle of the book.
To me, there’s three stories going on in Job, not two, IMO.
#1) Satan and God’s “Let’s see how much we can f*ck with this poor schmuck’s life” bar-bet.
#2) Job vs the assh*le neighbors from hell (“You musta sinned to get screwed like this!”)
#3) Job’s talk with God
Story #2 is an important story and has two valid and valueable moral lessons: “Bad things happen. Not 'cause you did something wrong, either. They just happen.” and “There’s no situation so bad that jackasses can’t make it worse by being smug about it.” 
Story #1 is just creepy and it undermines the lesson of #2. If you accept #1, then the moral of #2 is “Bad things happen 'cause God is a sadist playing games with your life for sh*ts and giggles”
Story #3 has, at it’s core, the lesson “It’s ok to be cruel if you’re more powerful than your opponent.”
And the worst part of story #3 is that it contradicts Genesis. We ate from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”, not “the tree of knowlege of good and evil, except when God does something.” The God I believe in (and C.S. Lewis believes in, for that matter) plays by the rules he sets for us (there’s a scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Aslan specifcially states that). I refuse to offer my belief to a God who gleefully torments without explaining. I can accept the story of Noah (not geologically, but as a parable) 'cause the idea is the wicked perish so that the good might live. Harsh, but explained. Fair enough. I can accept the story of Abraham for reasons given above. I can’t accept the story of Job.
Fenris
Well, except the world’s not like that. Evil people aren’t neccesarily punished and good people aren’t neccesarily rewarded.
It seems to me that what story #3 says, “Look, I’m G-d and you’re not. I understand everything going on in the world, and you don’t, so you can’t say that this bad stuff that is happening to you is senseless.” It’s not just “I’m stronger than you so I can do what I want.” It’s “You’re ignorant of why bad things happen.”
- There once was a man named Job who had 7 sons, 3 daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 oxen, 500 donkeys and lots of servants. Life was good: Job could live with that.
Meanwhile, back at Celestial HQ, G-d said to his Chief Investigator, “What about that Job fellah? So pious! So proper! So upright! So fearful of me!”
Now, Detective S’s opinions tended towards the skeptical; it came with the job, I suppose. He pointed out, quite reasonably, that it’s easy to be worshipful of Providence when Providence, um, provides.
DS: “But take away Job’s goodies, and he’ll sing a different tune!”
G-d: You’re on. Just don’t touch Job himself.
The Detective descended to earth. Wealth was destroyed; carnage ensued. Job’s kids passed on to the next world during one of their parties. Job took all of this in stride.
- DS: “Ok, ok. But if you strike Job with disease, he’ll change his tune!”
G-d: Let’s find out: but don’t kill the man.
The Detective gave Job a horrible skin condition. Job calmly treated it with ashes and scraping. Marital problems occurred.
- Job’s friends came by to console him. After 7 days and 7 nights of this Job declared, “Woe is me”, and then some.
1-2-3. That, my friends, has the pattern of a joke. It’s a sick joke to be sure, but a joke nonetheless. Job loses it not after his children are killed by a hurricane, not after his eczema acts up, but after his useless friends drop by to cheer him up. Furthermore, given the age of this work, I suspect that it was originally intended to be performed (or rather, recited). And like many Hollywood productions, The Book of Job contains a tacked-on happy ending.
Job’s debate with his friends is interesting. Methinks his friends offer some fairly defensible excuses for why sh*t happens, arguments which our boil-encrusted hero demolishes with gusto. This middle poetic section apparently had much in common with the Babylonian Theodicy, written centuries (?) earlier.
During the last prose section, G-d’s wrath is directed against Job’s friends, who ironically praised their Lord earlier in the text as Job railed against Him. As for Job, his wealth is doubled and “…his brothers and sisters… ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him…” No mention of Job’s newly acquired skin condition is offered.
The point, as I see it:
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Job can usefully be read as 2 separate works joined together. It also can be read as a whole. Regardless, it is difficult to see how the author of the first prose piece came across the Celestial records detailing that particular meeting where G-d discussed the Job issue with his board. Of course, we might interpret that part as providing a narrative structure whereby evil is inflicted on Job for reasons wholly unclear to him and only partly revealed to the audience.*
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Evil happens. Humanity’s task is to face it squarely, condemn it and fight it, regardless of its origin. The alternative smacks of complacency.
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Frankly, I’m going to evade the topic of G-d’s mystery or culpability. The Problem of Evil has no answers that are both easy and valid. The fact that it is addressed at all in the Bible reflects a certain maturity, IMHO.
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I concede that if the BoJ reflects the typical behavior of the Supreme Deity, then that would be deeply disturbing. To that extent, Deism is a relatively attractive POV.
- (Perhaps the nature of human virtue is a genuine and urgent mystery for a less than omniscient Supreme Deity).
If God is going to bother to talk to Job at all, why stop at saying, “You’re ignorant of why bad things happen.”? God can do anything, even explain very clearly to Job, and through him to everyone, why bad things do happen - Or can’t He? - Or is that He just doesn’t want to?
Except that God (via the Bible) told us what his motives were: a bet. Yuks and giggles. So God is portrayed as a liar for telling Job that he couldn’t understand. WE understand and we don’t have the benefit of chatting one-to-one with the supreme being.
Except that the beginning and end of Job…the bet and then the “and Job got everything back”, are usually considered to be later additions to the text, added to give the thing some narrative structure and to attempt to give some reason that the bad stuff happened. You’re right though. The beginning and end weaken the middle. Try reading it again, cutting out the last and most of the first chapter, so it starts "One day, when Job’s sons and daughters… ", and ends with “Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
I don’t think He can…I think the message is that people are just too limited to understand it.
I don’t think He can…I think the message is that people are just too limited to understand it.
Don’t ask me to cite things as I am horrible at backing up what I say, but if it’s any comfort I wouldn’t say it if I knew the verse didn’t exist somewhere. Anyway, it’s said (somewhere) in the bible that God chooses the complex things to baffle the fools and the absurd to baffle the wise (paraphrased)…one thing I’ve learned over time is that the Bible is extre-mely interpretive. You folks can fiddle within the confines of your small minds and tell yourselves you understand if it makes you feel better, but humility and love is by far a more credible teacher. There’s no winning this if that’s the route ya’ll are aiming for, however if it’s just a discussion that’s intended, by all means. I have to say I"m quite impressed by a most answers and witnessing the constant struggle for understanding… it’s just nice to know not everyone has given-up on thinking. kudos folks
I see. People can come up with good explanations about the internal structure of an atom all on their own. And people can teach that to others who understand it and even go on to teach still others. Yet even with God’s help they can’t understand why Alzheimers or children getting leukemia is part of the “intelligent design?”
Has God even tried? Unless it has been tried I don’t see how it is possible to maintain that people are too limited to understand. Why do you think people are too limited to understand?
The speech was tactically brilliant, IMHO.
For months, various European governments and (Republican) domestic critics have urged GWB to give a clear and public rationale for attacking Iraq.
(It’s been my opinion that Iraq should be attacked due to Hussein’s obsession with weapons of mass destruction, but that doing so without international assent is nuts, for reasons I won’t go into here. Basically, I’m sympathetic with my understanding of Kissinger’s position.)
W’s response as interpreted by Stratfor:
Checkmate. Stopping Saddam is a matter of reinforcing multilateralism, since the latter cannot exist if agreements can be repeatedly broken with total impunity.
Oops, wrong forum. :smack: :smack: :smack:
Well, I’m not saying that I think people are too limited to understand. I’m saying that the book of Job says that people are too limited to understand. It’s the same sort of message that’s in Ecclesiastes. See:
and
The messenge is somewhat happier in Job, but it’s the same sort of thing…there’s a lot of stuff we’re not able to understand, and one of those things is why evil happens. We just need to trust that it happens for a good purpose.
This is a different sort of portrayal on G-d than you see in a book like Genesis, where He rewards the good and punishes the bad. When good or bad stuff happens to somebody in Genesis, it’s because they deserved it. When good or bad stuff happens in Job or Ecclesiastes, it’s just because it does.
As a sidenote to Flowbark, about the book of Job and deism, Thomas Paine noted that he considered the book of Job to be one of the few books of the bible that had any conception of what G-d was. As he put it
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that smiley used to fit the post so perfectly
I like the posts by Captain Amazing (very nice Paine cite, BTW) and Flowbark, but I want to respond to this too.
Fenris, for what it’s worth, I agree with you that a god that cruelly and capriciously intervenes as a test, breaking the rules of the world, is not a god worth worshipping (which was precisely what we would also have had in Genesis if God hadn’t intervened about Isaac), but the cruelty is only in part 3 if we keep the bar bet. (The appeal of Judeo-Christian tradition is that it has an ethical core. One of the reasons the Greek/Roman gods don’t resonate in the same way was because they were capricious, which made it difficult to posit an ethical system in which gods and men could rationally co-exist.)
Note that the only person in the thread to say that a capricious/betting god is an acceptable thing is dreamer–no offense whatsoever is intended to dreamer by this observation–but there are other thoughtful people here who agree with you and still find worthwhile discussion in Job.
To do this we do have to dismiss the “bar bet” part and read Job for the other, what I think are more important, parts. (Dex’s staff report calls the bet with Satan a “folk-tale;” as I said before, I view it as a traditional story-telling technique.) How does a non-literalist pick and choose? We can try to read things as parables (as with the Flood), if possible, but, IMHO, this doesn’t always work. We can look to scholarship or tradtional explanations/readings, we can look to our own consciences, with full knowledge that this will result in varying/sometimes contraditory interpretations. There’s lot of stuff in the Bible that is opaque or contradictory (we can talk about how it has lots of different takes on issues that may appeal to different groups of people in different ages or is correct when read sympathetically as a whole if we want, but I’m okay with calling it flat-out contradictory)–there’s still lots of interesting ideas/images. Again intending no offense to anyone, the traditional position of a non-literalist is that God or an ethical life, not the Bible, is the point–the Bible is inspired, perhaps, but only points to God or an ethical system to be lived in reality.
I wanted to quote this part, with the God as architect/intelligent designer language, because, right here in Job, it supports your desire for rules–once created, the world is ordered and set upon a solid foundation. This says the world is built in an ordered way, without capriciousness and uncertainty in the way the physical world operates. This implies we can have knowledge of the world (and of good and evil, if you will); it says, however, that we cannot know the builder.
To get this out of Job, I have ignored the part that talks about the bar bet–but I can read the middle, poetic section of Job to say the opposite of the bar bet and to concur with your Lewis reference.
So we’ve got an earth that, while it operates regularly according to physical laws (again, I’m ignoring the first and last parts of Job so I can have this, to me, very interesting discussion), let’s bad things happen to good people (and where nature is beautiful–God in Job luxuriates in describing it–remember, this section is poetry). God never answers Job as to why this is the case–just says gird your loins and get on with things and, if you want, believe that there is a creator great enough to make this world.
Let’s hijack a bit on Lewis, 'cause he tries to answer this question even though the author of Job cannot. The world is “a dangerous place” so that moral issues can “come to the point. Courage is the form of every virtue at its sticking point. Pontius Pilate was merciful until it became risky.” [Those are paraphrases from IIRC The Screwtape Letters–be merciful to me if I’ve screwed it up.] If we could live safely and happily, getting our just desserts, we might act in a seemingly virtuous way not out of any conviction, but only out of self-interest. This attempt to answer the problem is not entirely satisfactory, IMHO–couldn’t the “danger” required be less horrific for innocent children and still teach us this point?–but then, the question is one that has troubled people since before Job.
Captain Amazing: Um, no. If God can create realities, he can explain things. Even if we are fundamentally limited in our understanding, it’s because God made us so. Why did God make us incapable of understanding? We can’t understand that, either.
It’s turtles the whole way down from here…