The story
The Book of Job is a work of the Hebrew Bible, a long poem in dialogue set inside a short prose frame. It tells of Job, a wealthy and upright man in the land of Uz, whom Satan, in the narrator's frame, is allowed to test. Job loses his children, property and health. Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, argue that his suffering must be punishment for sin, and Job answers that he is innocent and demands that God explain himself. A younger man, Elihu, speaks next, and then God answers from a whirlwind, not with an explanation but with a display of the vast wonders of creation, including the beasts Behemoth and Leviathan.
Scholars cannot date the book exactly and usually place it between about the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, with the prose frame perhaps older than the poetry, in the period of the exile and after. It belongs to the biblical wisdom tradition, and it echoes older Mesopotamian poems about the just sufferer. By rejecting the claim that suffering is always deserved, Job challenges the view found in much of the rest of the Bible. Goethe modeled the prologue of Faust on its opening, and Carl Jung wrote Answer to Job (1952).
Why it mattered
- Job gave literature and theology a lasting model for questioning divine justice in the face of undeserved suffering.
- Its opening scene of a wager in heaven was borrowed by Goethe for the prologue of Faust.
- Writers and artists such as Blake, Melville and Jung kept returning to its argument.
Sources
- The Book of Job Britannica
- Biblical literature: Job Britannica
Contested history
Consensus: Most scholars date the Book of Job to the Persian period or the late exile, between about 600 and 400 BCE, and see it as a compound work shaped over time.
- The Book of Job Britannica
- Biblical literature: Job Britannica
Community notes
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