Here we are in Job. I finished it last week but was in the middle of all the Holy Week blogging, so I thought I’d wait a few days before posting.

Anyway, I’ve read Job a few times and I used to think it was a tricky book, because it’s so long and there’s lots of speech which is hard to work out. But then I read some of the other Old Testament books and realised that Job is positively a work of art in comparison. So, let’s dive in.

This book is the Bible’s attempt at answering the question,’Why do bad things happen to good people?’, also known as, The Problem Of Evil. Various characters try to answer why Job has experienced so much suffering. None of them have a satisfactory answer. But then again, no human has answered that question satisfactorily yet!

In a nutshell, Job was a great guy and at the beginning of the book, he had so much good in his life. In the divine courtroom, Satan said to God ‘Job wouldn’t love you anymore if he lost all the good things in his life’. God said: ‘wanna bet? Do your worst Satan, Job will never curse my name!’ (Poppy Paraphrase). So Satan took all of Job’s family, his house and his land. The book is about Job’s response to what happens to him.

In the end, Job has the chat with God he had been longing for, and God speaks through the whirlwind, pointing out how much He knows, how much He sees and how much He has done. There are all these references to creation and animals, and a laviathan, which I think is like a crocodile. I imagine if God was in front of you saying ‘Did you make a crocodile? Did you?!’. You’d be trembling in your boots. It’s an amazing couple of chapters, and in my opinion, makes the rest of the book, which is a bit of a slog, worth it.

Throughout the book, I noticed various places where the words sounded a bit like a negative version of the beautiful Psalm 139. For example Job 23.8 ‘Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him’, and ‘You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.’ (Psalm 139.5)

I learned something new from The Bible Project video. Job isn’t set in any particular time or place. It doesn’t really fit into the narrative of the rest of the Bible (hence the genre being wisdom literature). I think this gives the book a kind of universality. We’ve all seen people suffer, and we’ve all asked why.

My favourite verse: Job 41.1 & 8: Can you catch Leviathan with a hook or put a noose around its jaw?… If you lay a hand on it, you will certainly remember the battle that follows. You won’t try that again!’

Sophia fell asleep twice listening to me read Job.

With thanks to Wildfaces on Pixabay for the image.