The Problem of Evil

The Story and Interpretations of the Book of Job

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 20: The Problem of Evil. This is the sixth of ten episodes that we'll do on the Old Testament. And in this show, we’re going to talk about the Book of Job.

My generation of literary critics were trained to be cautious relativists. We don’t talk any more about timeless truths. We don’t hold authors up any more and say that they are not for an age, but for all time, as Ben Jonson once said of Shakespeare. We don’t build pyramids, and talk about “great works,” or “masters,” these mythic, heroic figures who stand outside of time and illuminate the unchanging realities of the human condition. We understand, now, that one person’s doggerel is another person’s James Joyce, and vice versa. We understand that something like Macbeth is only intelligible within the register of a very specific culture. And we’re all the better for it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But, occasionally, something like the Book of Job walks into the room. And for the western culture that grew out of the Iron Age Fertile Crescent, and Asia Minor, and the lower Balkans – particularly for the heirs of Ancient Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and Canaan, the Book of Job asks questions that were central to our culture 2,500 years ago, and questions that are central to our culture today. When for the first time you read any version of the Old Testament, you cover over 400 chapters before the opening words of the Book of Job, and as you turn its pages, you find yourself in the ultimate plot twist. And as I said last time, that plot twist is that one of the most powerful critics of the theology in the Old Testament is, in fact, the Old Testament itself. [music]

The Book of Job is not loved by everyone. Thousands of years of critics have found it dark, or unsightly, or dissatisfying. But to anyone who accuses the Old Testament as a whole of being one dimensional, or theologically simplistic, or philosophically unselfconscious, the Book of Job is conclusive proof otherwise.

Over the past few episodes we’ve been deep in history, and archaeology, and literary scholarship, and legalistic sections of the Bible that don’t always make for a very good story. But today’s show is about a story, a story that dares to pose the ultimate question to monotheism. I could tell you this show’s main idea now, but I think that by the time we reach the end of the Book of Job, you’ll have a pretty good sense of what that idea is. And so sit back, and relax – or keep jogging, or driving, or brewing beer, or herding your goats – whatever – you know – and enjoy the story, probably written in Jerusalem, some time between the 600s and 300s BCE, and set during the united monarchy of David and Solomon in the 900s BCE.[music]

The Framing Narrative of the Book of Job

The Adversary's Initial Goadings

The Book of Job begins with these words.

There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. He had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants; so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. His sons used to go and hold feasts in one another’s houses in turn; and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. And when the feast days had run their course, Job would . . . rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, "It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." This is what Job always did. (Job 1:1-5)

Although Job lived in the land of Edom, southeast of Israel, Job was always good in his deeds, and steady in his belief, and God knew it. One day, as God presided over a gathering of his sons, a being called the Accuser joined this gathering. His name in Hebrew is ha-satan, and he’s commonly called Satan in translations, but he’s not the devil of Christian theology – just an “accuser,” or “adversary” of mankind. So this Adversary, which is what we'll call him, showed up at this assembly of gods, and God bragged to the Adversary about Job.

“Have you considered my servant Job?” God asked. “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8).

The Adversary was not convinced. “Does Job fear God for nothing?” he asked. “Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all the work that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions you have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (1:9-11).

God accepted the challenge. Not long thereafter, misfortunes fell on Job in four waves. His oxen and donkeys were stolen, and servants were killed. Then fire fell from heaven and consumed Job’s sheep, and more of his servants. Next, his camels were stolen, and more of his servants were slaughtered. Finally, Job learned that his children were killed when his oldest son’s house collapsed on all of them. Facing the horror of all these misfortunes all at once, Job said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).[music]

The Adversary Goads God Further

God was then satisfied with Job’s piety. God spoke again with the Adversary again, and for the second time bragged about Job’s singular devotion and probity. And the Adversary, again, was dubious. “Skin for skin!” he said. “All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:4-5). And God said, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life” (Job 2:6). And so Job was afflicted with gruesome sores, and he scraped himself with scraps of pots and hunkered down in an ash pile. His wife, seeing her husband’s misfortunes, asked if he persisted in his devotion. And Job offered subsequent history another one liner. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,” he asked, “and not receive the bad?”

Eliphaz's First Speech

Notwithstanding his steely religious faith, Job’s friends knew that he was suffering greatly. Three of them arrived and were shocked at their comrade’s misery. For seven days, they sat with him, and listened to his lamentations. Job’s previous resolve seemed to have fissured. He wished that he'd not been born – that darkness would overtake the day. He said he was restless, and that his misery was deep.

Job’s friend Eliphaz was the first to console him. Job, said Eliphaz, had once counseled others to be faithful – and Job himself should recollect his own advice. Eliphaz reported having a strange dream, in which a voice asked him whether humans could ever be righteous before God. God, said Job’s friend Eliphaz, didn’t even trust angels – how could he trust mortals, with all of their limitations? He couldn’t. Human beings, said Eliphaz, were destined to limitation. “[M]isery does not come from the earth,” Eliphaz said, “nor does trouble sprout from the ground; but human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:6-7). Eliphaz then said, “As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause. He does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number” (Job 5:10-11). Eliphaz described some of these things, and said the only path to safety and happiness was confidence – confidence that even if God harmed a person six times, on the seventh that person would enjoy unmitigated prosperity.

Job’s response to Eliphaz's speech was complex. He was, more than anything, perhaps, exhausted. Looking at his expectant friends, Job said, “Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh bronze? In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me” (6:12-13). Job told his friends they were doing him more harm than good. He hadn’t asked anything of them, he said. Why were they reproving him? “[L]ook at me,” he said, “for I will not lie to your face. Is there any wrong on my tongue?. . .Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?” (6:28,30; 7:19). He wanted, he said, their understanding, and their pardon. He didn’t want to be their target, or for them to tell him what to do. And Job’s second friend then spoke up. His name was Bildad. And he started telling Job what to do. [music]

Bildad's First Speech

Here’s what Job’s second friend, Bildad, said to him. “If you will seek God,” Bildad advised, “and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place” (8:5-6). Bildad followed this remonstration with cautionary advice. Job, he said, shouldn’t try to ponder things beyond his understanding. “Can papyrus grow where there is no marsh?” Job’s second friend Bildad asked him. “Can reeds flourish where there is no marsh?” The answer to both questions was no, and, Bildad emphasized, Job should not voice such questions, and must not expect to survive if he lost confidence in God’s perfect forbearance.

Job agreed that of course there was no resisting God’s power. When God was angry, there was no persuading him otherwise. But still, Job said, “How can I answer him, choosing my words with him? Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him; I must appeal for mercy to my accuser [but] I do not believe that he would listen to my voice” (Job 9:14-16). There was nothing, Job said, that he could do. “I am blameless,” he said, “. . .therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked” (9:21-23). These were dangerous words. And Job did not stop there. He asked God, “Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked?” He dared to ask God, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as humans see? Are your days like the days of mortals, or your years like human years, that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, although you know that I am not guilty?” (10:4-7). And Job asked God to just leave him alone, and to let him go down to the underworld forever. [music]

Zophar's First Speech

These blasphemies finally drew the attention of Job’s third friend, Zophar. Zophar asked Job how he dared try to understand the mysteries of God. “Can you find out the deep things of God?” Zophar asked Job. “Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?” (11:7). The answer to Job’s disquiet was simple, Zophar said. Job had sinned, and not realized it. Zophar said that God “knows those who are worthless; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it?” (11:11).

Job looked at his three friends. He had heard everything that they had to say. They had told him of the finitude of his own power of reasoning, and the scope of God’s power and knowledge. But still, Job was not convinced. “I have understanding as well as you,” said Job. “I am not inferior to you. . .Those at ease have contempt for misfortune,” he said, but maintained that he was a “just and blameless man” (13:3-5). Job told his friends he well understood all the ways that God was great, and that God’s power could not be denied. He had seen it, and heard it all, and understood it all.

But he wanted to speak to God directly. He wished his friends would be silent, and told them, “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay” (13:12). Making it clear that he would not back down, Job told his friends, “Let me have silence, and I will speak, and let come on me what may. I will take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in my hand. See, he will kill me; I have no hope, but I will defend my ways to his face. This will be my salvation” (13:13-16). [music]

The Second Round of Speeches

Then, Job began directly addressing God. “[T[he mountain falls and crumbles away,” he said, “and the rock is removed from its place; the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so you destroy the hope of mortals. You prevail forever against them, and they pass away” (15:18-20).

Now, Job had made these statements, and far more, accusing God of being unjust, of having no real scheme for rewarding the righteous. Job’s three friends continued to try and persuade him to reconcile himself to God’s will, preparing another round of speeches. His first friend Eliphaz said Job needed to stop talking so much. The wicked, he said, indeed suffered – they suffered the lack of God. They might persist in evil, but eventually they’d answer for their misdeeds.

At this advice, Job only shook his head in disgust. “I have heard many such things,” he said, “miserable comforters are you all. Have windy words no limit?” (16:3). Nothing that they were saying brought him any peace. He made this unequivocally clear – God had viciously, ruthlessly, causelessly hurt him, and shamed him, and killed his children, and his friends quite inexplicably were offering him empty rhetoric when what he really needed was sympathy. But Job did not receive any sympathy from them.

Again, Bildad, Job’s second friend, answered Job’s expressions of grief. He told Job that the earth didn’t stop just because Job was suffering. And indeed, Bildad said, the wicked did get punished – Bildad offered Job a bouquet of metaphors about the wicked answering for their misdeeds – in line after line he painted pictures of the wicked being punished. But the whole speech was a non sequitur – and Job recognized it as such.

“How long,” Job asked his friends, “will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words?” (19:2). Nothing that they had said – no admonishment, no remark of inspiration, no flowery assurance of God’s power, or infallibility, and no figurative speech, or vivid imagery of God’s justice – none of these things – had answered Job’s concerns. “God,” he said, “has put me in the wrong” (19:6). Job deployed his own elaborate speech to convey the extent to which he believed God had acted against him.

His lamentation crescendoed with these famous and theologically significant lines:

O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. (19:23-7)

But, sadly for Job, his impassioned wish went unanswered. His friends continued to treat him piteously, and his old comrade Zophar, like the other two, offered Job a second speech.

Zophar said he was insulted. Obviously, he said, the wicked did not get to exult in their wickedness for long. And like Bildad, Zophar painted vivid and varied portraits of wicked people in order to show that they were indeed punished by God. But these portraits, just as Bildad’s hadn’t, did not answer Job’s single, original concern. His children had been killed. His body was riddled with a horrific disease. And the wicked everywhere were running rampant, gleeful and unrepentant. The wicked, he said “spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol [the underworld]. They say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We do not desire to know your ways. What is the Almighty, that we should serve him. And what profit do we get if we pray to him?” (21:13-15). And Job told his friends that their advice was idiotic. If God withheld punishment on wicked people, and instead punished their children, then the wicked went down to the underworld scot free, not having a single regret, and getting away with everything. “How then,” Job demanded, “will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood” (21:34). [music]

The Third Round of Speeches

Although he had accused his friends of not understanding his simple need for pity, they continued to chastise him for asking questions about God’s plan. Eliphaz told Job that Job's suffering must be because he’d not given enough food or drink to passerby, or perhaps he’d failed to give sufficiently to widows and orphans. In any case, Eliphaz said, Job ought to stop questioning God, and make peace with the situation. And yet again, Eliphaz promised that God’s light would shine on Job.

Job seemed not to hear. He said that he wanted to speak with God himself – “I would lay my case before him,” said Job, “and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me” (23:4-5). Job said yet again that he had been blameless in his conduct, and that he wanted to know from God himself why he was experiencing such suffering. His friend Bildad’s third piece of advice seemed to hearten Job more than Eliphaz’s. In fact, the sheer weight of the rhetoric had had some effect on him, for in a long and figurative speech, Job pondered the mysteries of the world, and miseries of the wicked, and wondered where the root of wisdom was.

Still, though, after a pause, Job could not help fantasizing about his younger days – days when his kids were still alive and life was happier and easier. Reflecting further, Job said he really had been a good man – he’d been philanthropic, and kind, and worked to fight injustice. And with these images of his righteous past in his mind, Job could not help but think – yet again, of his ignominious present. He came full circle, once again arriving at his central question. He’d been a good man. And his family had been killed, and his health been torn away from him. He looked at his friends and said, “Does [God] not see my ways, and number all my steps? If I have walked with falsehood, and my foot has hurried to deceit – let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity!” (31:4-6). He asked God to tell him, specifically, what he had done. He’d been a faithful husband, and a generous giver to the poor. He’d never done anyone violence, or become preoccupied with money. He’d never been vindictive to those who’d harmed him, and he'd always been fair and dutiful with the way that he’d managed his fields. And always – always, Job told them, he’d remembered the might of God. None of them had done a thing to answer his question. All of the back and forth, all of the assurances, and Job was still absolutely unclear on why such unmerited suffering had fallen over himself, his children, and his servants. [music]

Elihu's Arrival and Advice

Now, this had been quite a tumultuous conversation. And a local youth – a boy named Elihu, had heard the lot of it. And Elihu did not like what he’d heard. He told the men that he knew that he was young. And he said he needed to speak up. He said he’d heard it all – particularly what Job had said. Young Elihu said he knew what Job’s problem was. Job refused to pray to God and joyously accept what had befallen him. Mortals suffered to the edge of death all the time. They needed to remember that God was infallible, and have confidence that they would be repaid for their deeds. Yet in spite of young Elihu’s bombastic introduction, soon he was simply repeating things that Job’s friends had already said. People needed to remember, said Elihu, that God was incapable of behaving unjustly. People needed to remember all of the harsh ways that God punished the wicked.

And above all else, Elihu said, returning to his original, and sort of new argument, people needed to not question God’s treatment of them. People needed to accept that God was good to the righteous, and harsh with the wicked. Could anyone understand lightning, or the depths of the sea? Could one understand the snow, or rain? Likewise with clouds, ice, wind, golden sunlight? How could Job question these things?

God and the Whirlwind

And then comes the climax of the story. Young Elihu stopped trying to convince Job that what had happened was just. Elihu stopped, because God himself appeared. “[T]he lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me” (38:1-3).

Now, excepting an epilogue, the rest of the Book of Job is God’s speech to Job, and most of this speech is a long series of rhetorical questions. God asked if Job had seen him lay the earth’s foundations, or set the bounds of the ocean, or put clouds and darkness over it. God asked whether Job commanded the morning and the dawn, or whether Job had been to the base of the ocean. He demanded to know if Job had seen the places where snow and hail came from, or the places where light and wind came from. Had Job thundered and rained over a desert? Had Job moved the Pleiades, and Orion, and the other constellations? Did Job give food to baby ravens, or watch mountain goats give birth? Did wild animals serve Job? Did he give the horses or hawks his might? God demanded response. Side note, by the way, none of this, obviously, answers Job’s questions – it’s not like the fact that Job doesn’t have any experience feeding baby ravens or watching mountain goats give birth has anything to do with the fact that Job’s innocent children and servants were all murdered. Anyway, all the same, God’s talk about oceans and thunder and little goats did seem to strike a chord in poor Job.

“See,” Job said, “I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer” (40:4-5). God was not quite satisfied with this show of submission, for he continued his speech, paired lines of rhetoric frequently underscoring one another. God demanded to know whether Job would actually condemn God’s reason over his own, and reminded Job that he controlled the thunder. God proclaimed that he had created a monster called the Behemoth, and that he had contended with the Leviathan. Could Job ever control a Behemoth? Did Job have any ability to best the Leviathan in combat – a giant monster with an armored hide, flaming breath, and stony heart? The Leviathan frightened all the gods – it didn’t fear iron, or arrows, and it could boil the ocean. God had tamed this monster – did Job think he could? Did he?

Job was cowed. He didn’t dare say another word on his behalf. “I know that you can do all things,” he said, “and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. . .Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . .but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:2-3, 5-6).

God was satisfied. His talk of thunder and sea monsters had subdued Job’s restless querying for a logical explanation. He demanded that Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar sacrifice animals for his sake. Though Job never found out why God had killed his family, as time passed, Job was given “fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys” (42:12) along with a drove of fresh children. He had learned his lesson, and “After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days” (42:16). And that’s the end. [music]

Job and Literary History

Before we talk about the Book of Job as a piece of theology, or a piece of philosophy – and of course it’s both – but before we talk about its hefty religious importance, I want to talk about it as a story. At the core of the Book of Job’s plot is the story of a trial. An innocent man is punished. He wonders why the punishment has occurred. His friends serve as his prosecutors, heaping accusations on him and making suppositions about his motives. Job serves as his own defense, but begins to buckle under the sheer weight of the prosecution’s pummeling. Yet as the defense’s stamina seems about to break, it finds a second wind, and then a third, and from chapter to chapter defense and prosecution go toe to toe, until finally, God shows up, like a judge suddenly taking the bench and deciding the case without bothering about the details. Job, God says, can’t question the jurisprudence of the court. The court is all-powerful, and it’s older, and far more powerful than Job. Job has to accept whatever sentence he has. And so Job has to admit that he’s powerless, and his sentence is mitigated. Though his family, and servants, and animals have all been butchered, and though his physical frame has been ravaged, he’s given a new family, and some new sheep and camels, and the prosecuting attorneys are all given a slap on the wrist for not quite following protocol.

Thinking of the Book of Job as structured like a trial has been a common way to understand it. At one point, Job is particularly flabbergasted by his three friends, he exclaims, “I know my Redeemer lives” (19:23). Now, Christians have traditionally interpreted this line to be about Jesus. It’s a decent way to make sense of the Book of Job, I think – that Job, about a thousand years before Jesus, has a vision of a period of eventual rescue by a divine savior, and the whole reason that the ending of the Book of Job is generally thought to be dissatisfying is that Job lived centuries before Christ. By reading Job in this fashion, Christianity has historically understood him as a sufferer who lived inconveniently early, who has since most certainly received his just rewards.

There are some problems with this Christian approach to interpreting Job, though. One is that it still doesn’t really answer any of Job’s own questions. Even if he’s awaited by choirs of angels and a plush afterlife, his family, and his servants were still slaughtered, and his body was still riddled with boils, and the pain he has experienced is still very real. And the line – Chapter 19 verse 23, so central to the Christian interpretation – “I know my Redeemer lives,” can also be translated as “I know my vindicator lives,” “I know my kinsman lives,” or “I know my advocate lives.” “Advocate” doesn’t have quite the same theological connotations as “redeemer,” but the Hebrew word go’el means one as much as it does the other. So in this famous juncture in Chapter 19, so important to Christian interpretations, Job may be wishing for the coming of Jesus – I can’t say for sure – but what the Biblical Hebrew indicates most clearly is that he’s looking for a “vindicator,” or “advocate.”

When we hear “advocate,” it’s hard not to think of the idea, again, of a trial. And literary history’s most extensive treatment of the Book of Job has been to take the whole thing, and imagine it as a trial. The Czech-German writer Franz Kafka, at the time of his death of tuberculosis in 1924, left two novels incomplete. One of them, The Trial, is certainly a masterpiece, taking the story of Job and setting it in the grimy alleyways and smoky warrens of a 20th-century European city.¹ The main character, Job - Josef K., has much in common with Job. Josef, a financial officer at a bank, is arrested on his thirtieth birthday for an unspecified crime. Chapter after chapter of Kafka's The Trial pass like the 41 chapters of the Book of Job. Kafka’s character Josef is warned by a succession of people – his lawyer, the arresting officers, the judge, another downtrodden defendant named Block, a painter named Titorelli, a priest, and others – all of these people tell him to simply accept the court’s sentencing. A shadowy and morally questionable government lurks behind the officials and prosecutions of Kafka’s novel, and across the board, the poor Josef – again, the Job character – is told that he is powerless to resist. Just as in the Book of Job, dialogue takes up a large portion of Kafka’s The Trial, and the dialogue in each narrative is similar. A main character, regardless of his objections, regardless of his certainty of his innocence, is told again, and again, and again, and again, and again that protesting is futile, and that submitting to a central authority is the only possible course of action.

The Book of Job, Kafka's The Trial, and Social Conditioning

I think that the Book of Job and Kafka’s The Trial are both at their most tragic in these dialogue scenes, when you start to see each character begin to break down under the sheer weight of the counterarguments that are deployed against them. Imagine that you had incurred a terrible punishment, and in spite of your crystal clear certainty of your innocence, everyone you knew, and whole parades of authoritative strangers, day after day, began telling you that you were actually mistaken, and that you deserved the punishment, after all. Maybe some of us could withstand that onslaught of counterargument. Many of us couldn’t.

I put it into a thought experiment. You’re at work. You need to make some photocopies. But the copy machine is broken. You tell a coworker. “Dude, the copy machine is busted. What’s the number for facility maintenance?” And the coworker says, “Oh, we won’t be using the copy machine any more. We’re going back to copying by hand.” And at first you say, “Yeah, good one, goofball. Now what’s that number?” And he says, “There is no number. We will all be copying by hand from here on out.” So you go to another coworker, and you say, “Hey, Anna, Fred said we’re not making photocopies any more. He’s being silly. What’s the number for the repair department?” And she says, “Oh, there is no repair department. We’ve chosen to go back to copying by hand.” And you say, “What are you talking about? I have a meeting in ten minutes. I need to make some copies.” And she says, “And you didn’t start making your manual copies early enough?” Then the first guy Fred hears the conversation and they gang up on you. “Photocopying,” he says, “just won’t do here. We’ve gone back to copying all documents and diagrams by hand.” “It’s much nobler," Anna says, "it makes you value your own work. Why would you let a machine anywhere near a document that you’ve written?” And Fred says, “All of your work deserves a human touch – your touch. Come on, now, you should know this.”

Well, maybe you’d laugh them off. And then maybe two more employees would tell you the same thing. And you’d go home and tell friends and family about the annoying practical joke, only they’d tell you the same thing. Photocopying? They’d say. How outrageous! Everyone knew you had to copy documents by hand now. Your superiors at work, and the facilities people – they’d all say the same thing. All documents needed to be handmade. Copy machines were barbaric. And you’d endure week after week of this, month after month, and the copy machines wouldn’t ever be repaired. Now, granted, this wouldn’t be life and death, like the stories of Job and Josef. But how long would it be before your sense of normalcy would begin to deteriorate under the sheer, quantitative weight of argumentative opposition? How long?

Hopefully, we will never have to find out the answer to this unsettling question. But Job and Josef have to, and both men, facing a diverse and rhetorically capable series of debaters, show signs of buckling beneath social pressure. So, in addition to the many huge questions the Book of Job broaches, one of the biggest isn’t even a religious question at all. It’s a question about just how much social conditioning can meld our sense of justice and propriety. And the Book of Job’s answer is that social conditioning can affect this sense quite a bit. [music]

The Book of Job and the Problem of Evil

Well, appetizer over. It’s time for the main course. The main course in the Book of Job is, as you probably knew before even listening to this episode, or just as likely have figured out, called the Problem of Evil, as is the title of this show – Episode 20: The Problem of Evil.² You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? If God is just and good, then why do innocent people – like Job, or like pious victims of natural disasters, or innocent children slain in wars and genocides – if God is just and good, then why does all of this horror exist? This is one of the most massive questions in religious history. There are many compelling answers to it, and while the answers are legion, and range from iffy to decent to robust and watertight, the question is always the same. If God is just and good, then what’s with the century after century of undeserved misery? What’s with tsunamis obliterating villages, or Ebola wiping out innocent children, or plagues, or – on the opposite side of the coin, really selfish, terrible people living like kings and dying peacefully of natural causes?

The Book of Job asks, but does not answer this question. Instead, it closes with God telling Job not to question him. After all, God created a Behemoth. He bested the Leviathan in combat.³ He fed the little ravens, and watched mountain goats give birth to young. That’s the answer. We, like Job, wait for a divine verdict – something as overwhelmingly powerful as the rest of the Book of Job. And instead we hear about sea monsters and baby goats. Now, man, I like sea monsters and baby goats. The speech that God gives at the end of the Book of Job is a magnificent piece of writing, bringing to mind everything that the Bible’s creator deity did to set everything up. But it doesn’t answer the questions that Job has been asking for almost forty chapters. It doesn’t answer those questions at all.

The Book of Job is the first time this question - the question of the problem of evil - is allowed to surface decisively in the Old Testament. In prior books, it’s there, bubbling beneath the Pentateuch and Historical Books. If God is just and good, then why do the Israelites from Exodus to Esther keep getting battered by huge adversaries on all four sides and God from above? The most consistent explanation offered up until Job is that the Israelites bring it on themselves, breaking their covenant again and again. For hundreds of chapters, this is the answer. The Israelites are a collective. All have to answer for the misdeeds of some – particularly the misdeeds of wayward kings and upstart idolaters. Breach of contract by any member of the Israelites warrants divine punishment of the lot of them.

Then the Book of Job shows up. Its narrators and characters are interested in different issues than those of the Historical Books. Specifically, they are interested in the fate of the individual, and not the collective. No one tells Job that his king, or some distant patriarch, has sinned and thus Job is being punished due to his political or familial affiliations. He is never deemed guilty by association, as thousands of Israelites under, say, Manasseh in the Historical Books. Job makes his own choices, and they are virtuous choices, and then, for reasons only disclosed in a framing narrative, Job is brutally punished. I can’t tell you the right way to interpret the story. But I can tell you some of the main ways that it’s been interpreted. [music]

Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Book of Job

Okay, let’s talk about the way readers have historically understood Job’s undeserved suffering. The Midrashim, or post-exilic rabbinical interpretations, on Job, written after 539 BCE, were the first known works of scholarship on this key book of the Bible. Midrashim, a core part of the Jewish canon, are writings which perform often elaborate analyses and interpretations of a section of the Old Testament. The midrashim on Job try to understand why his story is in the Bible in the first place. Job is not an Israelite, and so maybe the question of his suffering is a moot point, since God had no covenant with gentiles, according to the midrashim. Provided you accept the idea that divine justice only extends to a single ethnic group, this early solution to the Problem of Evil in the Book of Job is reasonable in its own way.

Early Christians also worked to make sense of the problem of evil in Job. Pope Gregory I, who lived from about 540-604 AD, spent a lot of time analyzing passages in which Job scraped his boils with a piece of pottery. It’s a bit of a gross passage, but in it, in a book called Morals in Job, Pope Gregory I saw the boils as people’s sins, and the scrap of pottery as Jesus, scraping them away. Ah, incidentally, if you think this interpretation is strange, you have yet to be introduced to the wacky world of the midrash and medieval scriptural gloss – this great Pope’s interpretation of the boil-popping pottery scrap as Jesus Christ is actually par for the course in the theology of the Middle Ages. We’ll see a lot more of it in the next couple episodes.

Anyway, to Gregory, Job’s hitting rock bottom in his sorrows and lamentations is a precursor to his salvation. Only through being ravaged by loss, as Job is, Gregory says, can we truly become detached from the material world and be ready for the spiritual one. It’s not a faultless interpretation, but it makes sense in its own way.

In general, early Christianity drew extensive parallels between Jesus and Job. Both had to endure great suffering. Both were misunderstood, and persecuted. And then there’s that hugely famous line in Chapter 19: “For I know that my go’el lives” (19:23), go’el being translated as “vindicator,” “kinsman,” “advocate,” or, as Christianity has preferred, “redeemer.”⁴ To early Christian interpreters, Job was an early sufferer whose life paralleled Christ’s, who in an impassioned moment seemed to glimpse the coming of Christ.

But these early Christian interpretations still don’t really do that much to explain the Problem of Evil as it’s depicted in the Book of Job. We can certainly understand that both Job and Christ suffered at the hands of persecutors. But while Christ’s persecutors were the Sanhedrin council of Jerusalem and the angry mob they fomented, and to a lesser extent the Roman provincial government, Job’s prosecutor was – um – God. If Job is an early Christ figure, then the God of the Book of Job is structurally akin to the Temple functionaries and the enraged mob they stir up in the Gospels. While most Christians have readily seen the parallels between poor Job and strong, enduring Christ, they have been less quick to point out the parallels between Job’s god and the temple priests and credulous throng of Jerusalem in the Gospels. Job might well suffer some of the privations of Jesus. But the problem of evil in Job, after the early Middle Ages, as of yet had no solution – only add ons, and workarounds, and interpretive gymnastics. By the 1100s and 1200s, the Christian world had yet to come up with a sturdy interpretation of the Book of Job that actually made sense of God’s unwarranted cruelty. [music]

Maimonides and Aquinas Respond to the Book of Job

The high Middle Ages saw Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish philosopher from Spain, and Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century Catholic theologian, directing their efforts to the interpretation of the Book of Job. Though their theological backgrounds were quite different, they shared an old theory about the Problem of Evil that actually went all the way back to the early Middle Ages. Their solution to the Problem of Evil was simple. Evil didn’t exist. Evil was simply the absence of good, a whirling vacuum that thrives when goodness and virtue aren’t there. In this fashion, Maimonides, and particularly, Aquinas, dispensed handily with any notion that evil existed in a just universe, governed by a beneficent God.⁵ There wasn’t a bit of evil out there. It was just that sometimes, a dearth of good existed in certain places, and all sorts of suffering occurred as a result. Think about that. Where good doesn’t exist, not-good rushes in and does its thing.

So, did Aquinas successfully answer Job’s questions? Was the solution simply that Job hadn’t experienced any evil at all, but only an absence of good? Of course not. Job had still been a good man, and always honored his God, and God, in a sort of divine horse race with a being called The Accuser, had killed everyone close to Job, and then The Accuser convinced God into giving Job a second round of punishments. There had been plenty of good in Job – not an absence of it – and God was right there on the scene when everything happened. Whether we call suffering the result of evil, or the result of “not good,” suffering still suffuses the Book of Job. Aquinas’ argument is little more than semantics.

John Calvin and the Book of Job

So, did anyone ever satisfactorily answer the troubling questions implicit in the Book of Job? Are they answerable? Let’s look at one more MVP in the history of Christianity. His name is John Calvin. When people learn about John Calvin, the 16th-century French theologian, the first thing they learn about is his doctrine of Predestination. God has a predetermined population of people called the “elect,” and these are the folks who are going to heaven, and the rest of us are out of luck. Along the way, you’d better look for any sign that you can find that you’re among the “elect.” And that’s the story, in a couple of sentences. At first it seems bonkers. Christianity grew and diversified for fifteen hundred years, partly because its doctrine of merit-based salvation was so logically appealing in a chaotic world. As long as you did the right thing, you’d go to heaven. This gave people a sense of agency and control over their fates. And then along came Calvin, with the seemingly bizarre notion that God had it all configured ahead of time, and that even the most saintly and moral person, if she weren’t among the elect, was going to hell. Why would people want to believe that they were utterly powerless to do anything about what God had in store for them? Well, let me take a stab at an answer.

I don’t know what your religious beliefs are – but you and I both know that sometimes people pray for things – silly things, trifling things. Dear God, let me do well on this math test. Oh lord, please let me find some Pop Tarts in my glove box. Mighty God, please let my smart phone not be out of batteries. You know. That kind of thing. As though a being that controls the universe needs to be informed that you don’t have enough milk for your cereal. I think the doctrine of predestination – John Calvin’s doctrine – is a reaction to a long history of people wheeling and dealing – partly through the intercession of the Catholic Church, of course – anyway, that Calvinism is in part an austere, angry reaction to the idea that a creator deity cares about the nitty gritty of his subjects’ lives. So let’s get back to Calvin and the Book of Job.

Calvin’s was a religious philosophy much closer to Iron Age Judaism than, say, medieval Catholicism. And not surprisingly, Calvin’s vision of God as merciless and incomprehensible fits the Book of Job like a glove. Calvin wrote a whole series of sermons on the Book of Job, and for our purposes the most important points he made were that indeed God did not care about any of Job’s good deeds, and – equally importantly, Job’s sufferings and earthly punishments were nonetheless no sign that Job was damned. For Calvin, it was all about God’s power. Job could yammer all day about how good he’d been, and how little he deserved it all. In the end, whatever Job did or said, God would still swing the sledgehammer in the way he’d planned from the beginning. For some, Calvin’s interpretation of the Book of Job might not be the definitive way to understand it. But theologically, you can see that Calvinism isn’t really troubled with the issues in Job that have traditionally proved prickly to other interpreters. Calvin, with his doctrine of predestination, may well have authored the best interpretation of the Book of Job. [music]

The Other Solution to the Problem of Evil

Of course, there’s another solution to the Problem of Evil. It’s a ridiculously simple one. It came into common use around the Enlightenment, and we've had it with us ever since. You know what it is, don’t you? Gregory didn’t say it. Thomas Aquinas didn’t say it. John Calvin austere as he was, didn’t say it. And this solution is that God doesn’t exist, and that it's all made up. And there, similar solutions that think outside the traditional Judeo-Christian box – in addition to atheism, people have answered the question of the Problem of Evil by proposing that B) God is evil, C) that multiple Gods exist, or D) that God exists but we are not on God’s priority list. Any of these explanations – take your pick – can be used in various ways to untangle the difficult knot of the Problem of Evil. Whether or not you want to use them, or you’re partial to the Hebrew midrashim, or Christian interpretation, or you have your own, naturally, is up to you. Whatever you choose, now you know the Book of Job.[music]

Final Thoughts on the Book of Job

There’s a lot I wanted to get to in this episode that I don’t have time for. I wanted to explore the textual history of the Book of Job. From the work of Marvin Pope in the 60s to the scholarship of modern writers like Harold Kushner, careful readers have noticed that the framing narrative and various parts of the Hebrew text of Job show telltale signs of being composed by multiple authors.⁶ The speeches of the tardy young Hebrew Elihu have been singled out particularly as likely insertions by a later writer, and various uncharacteristic portions of Job’s speeches are thought to have been spoken by Bildad and Zophar.

There were other subjects I wanted to cover in this hugely important book of the Old Testament. But my shows have been getting a bit long lately. That last one on the Historical Books of the Bible was a real doozy. So I want to wrap things up with a quote from Elie Wiesel, and a last word about the religious climate that produced Job. The two are connected.

For Jews, after the Holocaust, the Book of Job, which was already important within the history of Judaism, took on an even more powerful role. Unmerited suffering, as had been Job’s curse in the Old Testament, was visited on millions. Whether it led 20th-century Jews to secularization or a renewed sense that even the horrors of concentration camps were evidence that a God with an incomprehensible plan had singled them out for something – either way, the Holocaust brought the Book of Job to the forefront.

Mark Larrimore’s recent book on Job – it’s called The Book of Job: A Biography contains a powerful summary of the new resonance of the Book of Job after Auschwitz, and he quotes Elie Wiesel extensively.⁷ Wiesel wrote that at certain moments of World War II, Job “could be seen on every road of Europe.” ⁸ And in his Nobel peace prize, Wiesel described Job as “our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. . .He demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”⁹

This was the last thing I wanted to get to. It’s not a happy note to end on. And that’s the point. A whole genre existed in the Ancient Near East called the lamentation. The Book of Lamentations in the Old Testament, along with dozens of Psalms, and hundreds of chapters of the Prophetic Books belong to this tradition. As the name implies, these are texts that, collectively or individually, express deep sadness about a terrible loss. They are not meant to be consolations, or answer your questions about your own life. They don’t invite you to sing, or clap your hands. Lamentations are not meant to tell you that the good will be rewarded and the bad will be punished, nor that you will enjoy an eternity of heavenly bliss. Lamentations are dark. They look the horror and chaos of the past in the face and they don’t blink, and that’s it. One of Judaism’s late summer holidays, Tisha B’Av, is a 25-hour fast on which the Book of Lamentations is read, a book about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE.

I think it’s very reasonable to consider Job as a sort of lamentation. Heaven and hell don’t really exist in the Old Testament. In the tenth chapter of the Book of Job, the title character sees his own death and says, “I [will] go, never to return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness.” (10:20-2). Job is going to Sheol, the underworld, the abode of the dead in the Old Testament. Throughout most of the Book of Job, this is all he knows. He has lost everything, there will be no afterlife, and all he can see in his future is that “mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep” (14:11-12). This is Job’s reality. If there’s one thing that biblical literalists and secular readers alike can agree on when they read the Book of Job, it’s this. Sometimes, things aren’t fair. Sometimes, things get pitch black. You can’t do anything about it – no more than you could challenge a creator deity. And that’s it. And as Elie Wiesel said, we remember such moments of suffering, and because we survived them, we cannot lose ourselves to despair. We know that we have the power to endure going to the brink of annihilation, and any story about that power brings honor to us all. [music]

Why Do English Teachers Teach all that Sad Stuff?

Well, I was going to end there. But I can’t help myself. I have to say something a little bit more cheery. So check this out. I was at a faculty party once. Bunch of scientists and me. It was all fun, lots of eating cherry tomatoes and little sandwiches and stuff. And beer. Anyway, an engineering Ph.D. asked me the funniest question. She said, “You teach English, right?” I said I sure did. She said, “Okay, I’ve always wanted to ask an English teacher this question.” I figured I was going to be hit with some fine point in grammar. Subordinating conjunctions, apostrophe use, that kind of thing. Instead, she said, “Why do English teachers assign all those depressing books? I mean, who wants to read those? They just make you all sad!” Well. My jaw dropped a little. I didn’t know what to say. I was ready to bust out an explanation of past participle, or lay vs. lie, or whatever. Instead, I just stared at her. I had no idea of what to say! No idea!

All that came to mind was, “Uh, because they exist.” But that was a stupid explanation. Anyway, a physics professor came to my aid. He said, “Well, I think it’s because English teachers understand that literature captures all phases of the human condition – happy, sad, everything in between. You can’t pick and choose. You have to expose students to some of everything.” And then he looked self conscious and said I could probably provide a better explanation. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “He hit the nail on the – yeah, that says it. He's - he’s right.” I later became friends with that dude. What a weird question, though! It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, for God’s sake. There are Jobs out there, and Lamentations.

Coming Soon and a Special Thank You

Whew. Next time, we’re going to look at the Psalms. Through the past six shows, we’ve been going through some of the darker parts of the Old Testament. Sorry, Engineering Professor Lady, but they’re there. But as we move into Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs and Solomon, fortunately the subject matter of the Old Testament starts to pick up a bit, and even if it’s not a pop song, we’ll at least be in much happier places than the boil scraping depths of the Book of Job. Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, which we’ll cover in the next few episodes, are some of the most beautiful books in the Old Testament, and have far more hope in them than they do lamentation. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and for all of you who like the songs, I’ve got one for you – otherwise, skip it and I’ll see you next time!

Right. Ready for a song? So I got to thinking. God never answers Job’s questions. I mean if he did we wouldn’t have Pope Gregory, and Maimonides, and John Calvin all scrambling to explain what the Book of Job means. God never answers the questions, and instead the book ends with a bunch of braggadocio about God putting the Leviathan into a full nelson, and God making the behemoth, and all of that. You know, you think, “Great, obviously you’re all powerful, your speeches are wonderful, but what about Job’s questions, man?”

I got to thinking, what if Job put all of his questions into a song? And what if, in that same song, God answered those questions? And also, what if the Job part was like – an orchestral musical – and the God part was – like a house or dub step song? I’m sure you’ve wondered the same thing. And even though the orchestral musical slash dub step song about the Book of Job is certainly a very, very crowded genre of music, I figured I’d add my contribution, and wrote the following song, which is called “Boom Boom Boom Sea Monster.” I hope it makes you smile, and I’ll see you next time.





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