Job

In Job 1 and 2 the figure who proposes the test is never called Satan. He is called ha-satan, with the definite article, which in Hebrew means the phrase is a title and not a personal name. You cannot put the article in front of a name, in Hebrew any more than in English; nobody says the Peter. The word comes from a root meaning to oppose or obstruct, used of ordinary human adversaries in 1 Samuel 29:4 and 1 Kings 11:14, and used of the angel of the LORD who blocks Balaam's road in Numbers 22:22 (the Hebrew uses the same root in all three, which English renders adversary, adversary and oppose). The BSB prints Satan in Job 1 and 2 as though it were a name, and its footnote at 1:6 says this means "the Accuser" or "the Adversary", so even the translation concedes the title. So the term describes a function: the opposer, the accuser, the one whose job is to press the case against.

The setting is the divine council, the same scene as 1 Kings 22 and Psalm 82. The sons of God present themselves, and the accuser comes among them and reports that he has been roaming through the earth and walking back and forth in it. The picture is of a patrolling official filing a report, and scholars have sometimes compared the inspectors of a great empire, though that comparison is an illustration and not evidence of a date. He acts only with permission, twice, and his permission is limited each time. He is a member of the court under authority, not a rival power.

The same figure appears with the article in Zechariah 3, standing to accuse the high priest, and is rebuked. In 1 Chronicles 21:1 the word appears without the article, which many read as the point where the title hardens into a name, though even there some argue it still means an adversary. By the time of the New Testament the consolidation is complete and the accuser has become the devil. The honest teaching point is that the Old Testament shows a development, and that reading the finished New Testament figure back into Job 1 flattens what the chapter is actually doing.

What the chapter is doing is asking a question about the nature of piety. The accuser's challenge in 1:9 is, in the BSB, "Does Job fear God for nothing?" The Hebrew word is hinnam, freely, for no return. Is there such a thing as love of God that is not an investment? That is the question the whole book is built on, and it is why the wager can never be revealed to Job: telling him would ruin the experiment. Job is never told. He dies not knowing why any of it happened.

Watch that word hinnam once more, because the narrator sets a trap with it. In 2:3 God uses the same word back to the accuser: in the BSB, "you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause," and the Hebrew behind without cause is hinnam. The word for disinterested devotion and the word for gratuitous ruin are the same word. The book is barely two chapters old and it has already conceded that Job's suffering has no justification. Everything the friends say for the next two dozen chapters is trying to supply one.

Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite sit in silence with Job for seven days, which is the last thing any of them does well. Then over three cycles of speeches, chapters 4 to 27, they argue a single case with rising heat. God is just. God prospers the righteous and ruins the wicked. Job is ruined. Therefore Job has sinned, and his only hope is to admit it. Bildad appeals explicitly to tradition in 8:8-9: "Please inquire of past generations", because "we were born yesterday and know nothing."

Here is the point most teaching on Job misses. The friends are not straw men and they are not heretics. They are reciting the mainstream theology of Israel's own wisdom tradition, and they recite it accurately. Read Proverbs 10 to 15 straight through and you will hear their voices. Read Deuteronomy 28, with its blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. Read Psalm 37:25, where the psalmist has never seen the righteous abandoned. Klaus Koch argued in a well-known essay of 1955 that what the Hebrew Bible mostly describes is not a courtroom verdict handed down from outside but a connection built into the world between a deed and its consequence, so that actions ripen into their own results. The friends believe in that connection. So, mostly, does the Old Testament.

Which is why 42:7 is the most unsettling verse in the book. God says to Eliphaz, in the BSB, "My wrath is kindled against you and your two friends. For you have not spoken about Me accurately, as My servant Job has." The men who defended God's justice are condemned. The man who accused God of destroying the blameless and the wicked alike in 9:22, who demanded a trial in chapter 23, who swore a formal oath of innocence in chapter 31 that legally obliged God to answer, is commended. The book does not deny that the friends' theology is generally true. It denies that a generally true rule can be used as a diagnosis on a particular sufferer, and it treats doing so as a sin against God, not merely a pastoral misjudgement.

Job's own speeches are not patient. He curses the day of his birth in chapter 3. He wishes for a mediator "to lay his hand upon us both" in 9:33, since God is not a man he can summon to court. He insists in 16:19 that his witness is in heaven. In 19:25 he says he knows that his redeemer lives, using go'el, the word for the kinsman whose duty is to buy back a relative's land or avenge his blood. Christian tradition has heard Christ in that verse for centuries, and Handel put it in the Messiah. In its own context it is more likely the vindicator Job has been demanding all along, an advocate who will finally take his case. Be aware that the BSB has printed its own choice here: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end He will stand upon the earth," with capital letters that read the go'el as God. Hebrew has no capitals, so that is the translators' decision. It is a respectable one, since many readers, Jewish and Christian, take the vindicator to be God himself; the other live reading is that Job is appealing over God's head to a heavenly advocate, as in 16:19, or simply to a vindication he expects to see. Teach the Christian reading as a legitimate development and be honest that the verse in Job is asking for a defender, whoever that defender turns out to be.

Then Elihu, chapters 32 to 37, arrives from nowhere. He is not in the prologue, he is not mentioned in the epilogue, God never addresses a word to him, and he talks for six chapters. Many read him as a later insertion by a writer dissatisfied with the friends. Others read him as deliberate: the best available human answer, delivered with maximum confidence, immediately before God speaks and ignores him. His closing storm imagery in chapters 36 and 37 runs straight into the whirlwind, which suits either explanation. The uncertainty is real and a student should hold it as uncertainty.

God answers. That fact alone should not be passed over: Job asked for a hearing and got one, which is more than the friends said he could expect. But the content is not what anyone in the book has been arguing about. Four chapters of questions, beginning with "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4), and running through snow and hail and the constellations into a long tour of wild animals: the lion, the raven, the mountain goat, the wild donkey who scorns the noise of the city, the wild ox who will not plough, the ostrich who treats her eggs carelessly, the war horse who laughs at fear, the hawk. Then Behemoth and Leviathan, at length, with evident relish.

Notice what is not in the tour. No human beings, except as spectators. No temple, no covenant, no law, no Israel. Rain falls on a desert where no man lives, in 38:26, and God appears to think this is a fine arrangement. The wild donkey is praised precisely for being useless to farmers. The message carried by the shape of the speech, before any sentence of it is analysed, is that the world was not built as a machine for distributing human deserts, and that a great deal of it has nothing to do with us at all.

So do the speeches answer Job? Read the positions at full strength. Carl Jung, in his Answer to Job of 1952, said no in the harshest terms: God overwhelms Job with power while saying nothing about justice, and Job is morally the greater of the two. Some modern commentators reach a restrained version of the same conclusion, and David Clines, whose commentary is the standard technical work in English, stresses that the speeches simply decline the question Job asked. Carol Newsom argued in 2003 that the book is deliberately polyphonic, setting rival moral imaginations against each other without resolving them into one voice, and that readers who demand a single answer are asking the book for something it refuses to be.

Others find a real answer, differently shaped. The one verse that does engage Job's case is 40:8: "Would you condemn Me to justify yourself?" That names the actual choice Job had been forced into, which was to prove God unjust in order to prove himself innocent, and it declines the binary. On this reading the speeches do not explain suffering because no explanation was ever available; they establish that a world this wild, this excessive, this full of creatures made for no human purpose, is not a world whose logic a sufferer could have been expected to deduce. And they answer by presence. Job wanted God in the witness box. He got God in a storm, addressing him by name for four chapters. His own summary in 42:5 is about seeing, not about understanding.

Job's reply in 42:6 is one of the hardest half-verses in the Hebrew Bible. Traditional English, the BSB included, has "I despise myself, and I repent in dust and ashes", with no footnote offering another reading, but the first verb has no object in the Hebrew and the second can mean to be comforted as easily as to repent. Dale Patrick, in a short article in 1976 that is still cited, argued for something closer to I retract my words and am comforted concerning dust and ashes. Other proposals read the line as submission, as withdrawal of the lawsuit, or even as Job's rejection of the whole frame of the argument. What you decide here determines whether the book ends in a penitent's confession or a plaintiff's dropped case, and the Hebrew genuinely permits both.

Then the poetry stops and the folk tale resumes. God rebukes the friends, tells them to bring sacrifices and have Job pray for them, and restores Job's fortunes twofold: fourteen thousand sheep where there had been seven thousand, and so on down the inventory. Seven more sons and three more daughters are born. The daughters are named, which the sons are not, and they are given an inheritance along with their brothers, which was not the normal arrangement. Job lives a hundred and forty years and dies old and full of years.

Three objections, all fair. First, the ending appears to hand the friends their case back: righteousness pays after all, just later than they thought, and a reader who skips the poetry will close the book believing exactly what God condemned in 42:7. Second, the arithmetic of the doubling is obscene when applied to people. Sheep can be replaced. The ten children who died in chapter 1 are not restored, they are succeeded, and no number of later births addresses that. Third, the seams are visible: the prose frame reads like an older traditional story, in different Hebrew from the poetry, about a patient sufferer who never says any of the things the poetic Job says. Ezekiel 14:14 names Job alongside Noah and Daniel as a known righteous figure, and the letter of James commends Job's perseverance (James 5:11), which is the prose Job and not the poetic one. Many scholars conclude that a poet took a familiar tale and split it open to put an argument inside.

Now the defences, also fair. The restoration comes after Job has already dropped his case, which makes it impossible to read as payment for anything; nothing Job did earned it and the text never says it did. The step that comes just before the restoration is Job interceding for the men who wronged him, which makes him the mediator he had spent the book demanding, and that is a strange note to strike if the point were reward. The named daughters with their inheritance suggest a world that has become more generous than the one the story started in, not merely a ledger rebalanced. Some commentators point to the Torah's rule of double restitution for a wronged party and suggest the doubling is compensation to a plaintiff rather than wages to a servant, which is an attractive idea that the text does not itself state.

It is also worth telling students that the ancient translators were uneasy too. The Greek version of Job adds an appendix after the last verse saying that Job will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up, and attaches him to a genealogy from Esau. Somebody in the Greek tradition thought the Hebrew ending needed help, and reached for resurrection to supply it. The Hebrew book does not, which is part of its integrity: it will not solve the problem of a righteous sufferer by moving the accounts to the next world.

Teach the book, then, as the canon's own refusal to let a true generalisation become a weapon. Proverbs is right that wisdom usually pays. Job is right that when it does not, the sufferer is not to be told he must have sinned. Both are scripture, and the friends' fault was not bad theology but theology applied to a man whose case they did not know and could not have known. That is the sentence to hand a student who will one day sit in a hospital corridor with someone.