Can any of the Christian dopers on the board please explain detail of the book of Job? Bear with me as I’m going from memory.
After Job has been afflicted with all sorts of awful problems, one of his friends suggests that he must have committed some sin. He advises him to atone for it so that God will stop punishing him. Job rejects the advice claiming that he hasn’t done anything wrong. So far, so good. When Job is restored at the end of the book, God punishes the friend who offered the advice. What I don’t understand is why? Job seems to be comitting a sin of pride by presuming that his slate is clean. This is a fallible human presuming to know the mind of an infinite God. His friend seems to be counseling humility and gets punished for it.
How are these events interpreted by the modern church? Am I misinterpreting or misremembering the book? How is what Job did righteous and what his friend did sinful?
Please resist the urge to get this sent to Great Debates. I don’t care whether the respondent is Christian or not and I don’t want this to turn into another Christian versus Atheist argument.
Well, I can’t quite say how most churches interpret it, but I can tell you the probable intent of the author.
Hebrew literature has many books which are part of the “wisdom tradition.” This is most prominent in the book of Proverbs, but parts also show up in the historical books (or the early prophets, if you’re Jewish). Noncanonical texts like the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (aka Ecclesiasticus) are in the same tradition. Basically, the wisdom tradition holds that the world is just, and if bad stuff happens, it’s your fault, or at the very least your father’s fault.
Job’s friend clearly represents the wisdom tradition. He is so convinced of its correctness that he insists that Job must have committed some sort of sin to warrant punishment, even if Job himself is unaware of it.
Clearly, the author of Job disagrees with the wisdom tradition. He realizes that bad things do happen to good people. As such, Job is meant to present an alternative interpretation of human suffering. It occurs not because we deserve it but because, uh, well… None of your damn business! Seriously, this is pretty much God’s explanation to Job.
As far as Job’s pride in assuming his sinlessness, remember that the author is writing from the perspective of an omniscient third person narrator. He knows that Job is sinless, and he makes sure that the reader knows it too, even if this requires Job to know something he couldn’t possibly know. If there is even the slightest doubt in the reader’s mind that Job is really sinless, then the author’s point is lost.
This is the standard scholarly interpretation. I will let others comment on how various churches interpret it.
Not a Christian doper, but I can try. You’ve got the story pretty much right, except there are 3 friends and not just one, and G-d doesn’t really punish them, so much as he says, after he’s done yelling at Job, “Look, you morons. I’m angry at you, because all that stuff you said, like that it was Job’s fault that he was being punished, was false, and you said Job did things wrong, and he didn’t. So, go sacrifice to Me and ask Job to pray for you because you wronged him.”
Like Opus said, Job isn’t being proud when he says he’s sinless. He really is sinless, so his defense of himself is just the truth.
BTW, this is the only book of the bible, I believe, with an entirely non-Jewish cast.
One other point to note is that Job repeatedly asks both God and his freinds to show him his sin. i.e., tell me what I’m doing wrong so that I can change it. Nobody does, because it’s not there.
In Christian theology, certainly one important meaning is the importance of Faith. While not being flip, the message is to keep your head down, do your best, and have faith and trust in God that no matter how bad things get, 1) there’s a reason, and 2)in the end it’ll all work out.
One thing that struck me most vividly when I read this as a child (many years ago) was that Job, as one of his “trials”, had his children wiped out (killed in a tornado). At the end of the “trials”, the Lord restores beautiful children to Job, BUT NOT the same ones!! Children are not interchangable, how can this be equitable? To me, this was the most horrific part of the tale. Job, having remainded faithful in the Lord despite the plagues and problems inflicted by the adversary, is restored to his health, greater wealth, and seven sons and three daughters (described as the most beautiful in the land), but not the original ones! It is the same number of children that he before, yes, but they are a new set of children (this is demonstrated by the fact that he has to name them. Job 42.14) And now Job must be thankful to the Lord and praise him. Yes, having a set of beautiful kids is great, but I think deep in his heart Job would always ask why he did not get HIS children back.
I think the take on that is generally this: Note that in all things, Job got twice as much as he had before – twice as many camels, servents, oxen, etc. EXCEPT, of course, children. He got exactly the same number of children as he had before. This is sometimes taken as indicative of an afterlife, ergo, his first children are still alive.
Whether or not this is consolation, YMMV.
Tinker
P.S. Another point that I’ve always gleaned from the story, is that it is OK to question God. His friends attributed to God motives that God may or may not have had – God was pissed about this. Job attributed no motives but questioned why these events were happening – God was OK with that.
I seem to remember - though I can’t find the cite right now - that Job doesn’t consistently argue that he’s completely sinless. Part of his argument, IIRC, is: “Maybe I have sinned, but certainly not in any way that would justify such a horrific Divine punishment, all out of proportion to the crime!”
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Actually, the Talmud (Bava Basra 15b) identifies Elihu - the fourth friend, who appears in chs. 32-37 - as a Jew. It’s not explicated in the text, but the commentaries explain that his family name, Ram (32:2), is either a reference to Ram the descendant of Judah (Ruth 4:19), or an epithet - meaning “noble” - referring to Abraham.
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Actually, it’s a lot deeper and more nuanced than that. To know the full explanation of human suffering is to fully know G-d Himself, and this is something completely unavailable to the human mind. (Or as a classical Jewish philosopher put it, “If I knew Him, I would be Him.”)
To use a weak analogy, the human eye can’t see radio waves, because it has no receptors for them - or to borrow terms from Jewish philosophy, it’s not a “vessel” for such radiation - even though they, like light, are electromagnetic waves; all the more so when it comes to Divine knowledge, which is of a completely different order than human knowledge.
In fact, Jewish tradition teaches that Moses asked G-d to tell him the explanation of human suffering (cf. Exodus 33:13), and that he - despite his position as the greatest of all prophets, and the one who achieved the deepest understanding of G-d of which a human is capable - was not privileged with a full answer to this question.
So G-d’s answer to Job boils down to, “There is a perfectly good reason, but as a necessary consequence of your being human and finite, that reason must remain unknown to you, since infinite Divine knowledge can only be grasped by the infinite Divine mind.”
RedNaxela
I’ve found this thread most interesting, but I’d like to add a question…
Many years ago,when I took Philosophy 100 in college, my professor stated that there were two endings for the Book of Job. In the original ending, Job came to accept his suffering and things just went on from there. But, according to my professor, people found that ending too depressing, and so another ending was written, where Job gets lots of rewards for enduring the suffering and remaining God’s good servant. (I am paraphrasing some 20 years after the fact, so bear with me.)
I have never seen an alternate ending in any bible I have read, but aside from that, I don’t have any reason to doubt my old prof. So, was there really a different ending to Job? If so, where can it be found?
It is not an extant book, but rather a theorized one. Virtually every book in the ancient world was tinkered with numerous times. However, in only a few cases do we have substantially differing extant versions. The ending of Mark is one such case; the Slavonic Josephus another. But in most cases, scholars look at the text, noticing differences in style, tone, voice, continuity, etc. and conclude that parts were added or modified. In some cases, these modifications are so obvious that they are universally acknowledged. But Job is not such an instance: it’s much iffier. For sure, the difference between the prose bookends and the poetic center is a bit jarring, but would not have been uncommon in the ancient world. The interesting thing is just how different the story is if we cut off the ends. Not only do we get the sad ending, but we lose any explanation for Job’s suffering: there’s no bet with Satan, making Job’s experience even more inexplicable. But like I said, this is speculative, not certain.
I believe the current theory is that the Book of Job was written in two parts. Probably the poetic parts were written first, and then someone bookended them with the prose sections explaining the parts of the story that the poem didn’t get into.
I imagine some scribe copying down the poem and noticing that the poem didn’t have the whole story, didn’t explain the context of the poem, so he wrote the bookends. I imagine the poet felt that everyone knew the story of Job already, so he didn’t have to explain who Job was or why he was suffering or what happened afterwards, since everyone would already know the story from the oral tradition.
But I’m just making that up. See how these things work?
In my old Testament class, my professor said that in some of the extra-Biblical texts, Job knows that he is just being tested, and goes so far as to take the worms which fall off his body and put them back in his wounds.
Also, apparently some medieval scribes changed Job’s wife’s line “Curse God and die” to “Bless God and die,” putting in a marginal note that they made this chnge. Interesting, I thought.
Thanks for all of your help on this one. Your explanation was particularly helpful Opus1. The story does make much more sense when you look at it as a story written by someone who is promoting a viewpoint. Things happen the way they do in the story because it supports the author’s take on
Captain Amazing: While it’s true that Job was sinless in the story, Job himself couldn’t really have known that. That’s my point. His friend counselled him to do something that was much more likely to be correct.
RedNaxela: Your response lends weight to the friend being right. We can’t know God’s mind, therefore we may have offended God without knowing it.
Well, theoretically, he could have known it. I think the whole point of the story is that Job does know he didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to him. He says to his friends, who are telling him that this punishment is his fault:
Job knows what he’s done and how he feels, and he knows he’s innocent.
Job’s protestations of innocence have nothing to do with whether or not he actually was innocent. For example, say I get pulled over by a cop. I’m not speeding, driving erratically, unbelted, etc., but I get pulled over anyway. I believe that I’ve done nothing wrong and tell the cop so. He asks me if I saw that stop sign I just ran. Oops. My point in saying this is that it’s possible to do wrong by mistake and never even know that you’ve done so. One of Job’s piddling little minor sins may have had serious effects that he’s unaware of but he arrogantly (in my opinion) insists that if it is punishment, it’s unwarranted or at least out of proportion with the sin.
As a story or an example meant to support a point it makes sense. Opus1 pointed that out earlier. I’m just trying to say as an example of how to live your life, it doesn’t. Job’s example would have us bringing lawyers to the confessional so to speak.
Kinda weird about this showing up in the mailbag, eh?