They will also complain that the book’s speeches are rather long-winded, repetitive, and tedious. On the whole, many readers are expecting logically expounded religious doctrine and philosophical discourse, and what they encounter is more like the highly stylized drama of classical Greek tragedy, in which human character and the underlying dynamics of human conflict represented in highly poetic language play such an important role. The formality of the stylish rhetoric is strange to the contemporary ear, although the turbulent human drama once perceived should not be. In general, the book of Job is not intended to offer merely religious teaching; the chief parts that can be called “religious doctrine” are found in the failed dogmatism of Job’s friends concerning the retribution principle but not in any insightful, theological propositions that Job offers in response. Probably the last word that one would use to characterize the God-speeches at the end would be doctrine, although there is certainly a highly spiritual self-revelation of Jehovah to be found there. Instead, the book offers a view of one man’s personal experience of being drawn into an encounter with the living God and the intensely religious environment that misunderstands and opposes such a man when he is being stripped of all the cultivated finery of his righteousness and wisdom before God and human society. In that sense, it brings to light the mysterious purpose of God’s heart toward Job in denuding him of his achievements and self-glory.

Among scholars, the book often suffers the common fate of ancient Hebrew documents that are adjudged to be lacking in logical consistency and thematic unity, not to mention veracity. A common scholastic consensus, begun in the main in the nineteenth century and still current, although less dominant today, is that the book of Job derives from an amalgamation of a “fairy-tale” account in prose of Job’s encounter with Satan’s oppression and Jehovah’s deliverance found in the prologue and epilogue, to which our nameless author added the debate with his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.2 To this must also be added the strange appendage of the discourses of Elihu—the “buffoon,” as he is sometimes called—and Jehovah’s final speeches. Not only are these stylistic disjunctions difficult to understand as contributing to a unity, but within the various sections there are gaps and problematic passages that raise difficult questions of interpretation and attribution. To a great many learned and careful readers, the book appears as something of a hodgepodge of disparate parts, desperately in need of fixing and rearranging, which when accordingly repaired is then interpreted in strikingly different ways, not surprising when such extensive emendations have produced a “new” text.3 Accordingly, there is a common view that the book, as it stands in our Bible, is neither the work of one author nor of a single coherent theme, a supposition that the reading offered here will vigorously challenge.

Another striking tendency of interpretation, both secular and religious, which is a distraction, I think, from the core issues in the book, would make Job a hero of different sorts. For many secularist-minded scholars, he is heroically a rebel, in the mold of the Romantics’ view of Prometheus vis-à-vis Zeus, who voices loud and righteous protest against the injustice humankind feels at the hand of a tyrannical God. Although it is doubtful that the book of Job was included in the Hebrew canon because of this kind of reading, such interpretations nevertheless demonstrate that no small amount of the material of the book concerns itself with deep-seated human dissatisfaction with the world order and the God who presides over it.

On the other hand, the canonical view of Job, though brief, is clear enough. In the Hebrew Bible, Job is categorized with Noah and Daniel as being an exemplar of righteousness (Ezek 14:14, 20), while in the New Testament, James commends his “endurance”: “You have heard of the endurance of Job and you have seen the end of the Lord, that he is full of compassion and merciful” (5:11).4 Thus, the important New Testament lesson usually drawn from Job’s story is the need to persevere. That is often extrapolated in Sunday sermons to mean that believers should have faith during times of suffering that test the faithful and should hold to the deep conviction of the Lord’s compassion and good will toward his people. Many religious readers, therefore, will easily attribute to Job a perseverance in faith and, like James, not be overly critical about his long complaints. The “faith” of Job (a word that James specifically does not use) that is often held up as a model to such believers, however, never is one that brings one directly into the presence of the glory of God, but merely commends hope for a better tomorrow through perseverance, which actually falls far short of New Testament faith and does not differ in the slightest from the faith of Job’s friends. They, too, have a faith every bit as zealous and stubborn as Job’s is! It’s the kind of “relationship with God,” however, that Christians often resign themselves to, with a lukewarm fatalism that someday God will set things right. At least it can be expected that heaven is such a place, even though that provides little comfort for Job or anyone else suffering through human life.

Nonetheless, while it is part of the classical tradition to glorify the “heroism” of epic characters, and it is part of the medieval tradition to exalt the servants of God with “sainthood,”5 I find such concepts inappropriate to the major figures of the Bible whose failures are distinctively noted; and especially is it inappropriate to Job. No doubt he suffers greatly, as much as any afflicted servant of God in the Bible; and while, significantly, he does not directly curse God, he nevertheless gives voice to long and bitter complaints, for which in the end he is rebuked by both Elihu and Jehovah himself (38:2; 40:8). Even his defiance, so much admired by the modern Prometheans, has nothing so heroic about it that it will not collapse completely and understandably before the living voice of Jehovah. Job desires to serve God—utterly unlike Prometheus—and yet insists that he will do so only on his own terms, which he naïvely believes reflect God’s own desire for righteousness in his people. Yet he is misguided and, in fact, deeply ignorant of God, let alone the righteousness of God. In his final words, he is brought to repentance under the light of who he actually is before God, not the hero who boasted in his own wisdom and righteousness in chapters 28–31 but an ordinary man, even “dust and ashes.”

Thus, if there is any “hero” to be praised in the book of Job, we must acknowledge Jehovah himself as such, who, by his timely, even saving, intervention, brings Job, a man who is more than religious enough by conventional standards but utterly lacking by the standards of the kingdom of God, to become his servant in truth, and not merely in Job’s own limited, self-referential way. I read this book, therefore, not as a tribute to Job but to God and his righteousness, the God who has condescended to intervene in such a mysterious yet far-reaching way in the life of an ordinary man in order to make him his servant in truth and not just according to customary religious practices and thinking. Jehovah’s very first words to describe Job tell us that he is Jehovah’s “servant” (1:8), but that is not at all the case in first appearances; for a servant is in one accord with his master’s will, not a spiteful resister who talks back to God upon provocation and who is living stubbornly according to his own religious traditions and concepts. Hence, in these first words, Jehovah signals prophetically to the reader his intention in this narrative, which will be fulfilled in its course, to bring this paragon of religious devotion to the real knowledge of himself as God and of his righteousness, which is of a higher order, that Job might serve him—as God, in fact, desires for all his people, not just a few heroic and strong types. This desire on God’s part for all his people could not be clearer in the Scriptures, but it is little taken to heart. Thus, for example: “And now, O Israel, what does Jehovah your God ask from you except that you fear Jehovah your God, that you walk in all his ways, and that you love him, and that you serve Jehovah your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut 10:12). Among a multitude of other verses setting this matter forth, see these excellent examples: Exodus 20:2–5; Ezekiel 20:40; 1 Samuel 7:3; 12:20; Zephaniah 3:9.

Hence, the relevance of the book of Job could not be more urgent. And why? In brief, I would say because we face the essential dilemma that Job’s complaints and the friends’ nasty censures reveal: a great scarcity of the knowledge of God that dissipates and exhausts his people, even as religious activities, books, sermons, and various theologies all swell to a flood of spiritual numbness. Many God-believers no doubt ponder over their personal sufferings and God’s graciousness, as well they should; but very few, I believe, consider or ever realize the actual dimensions of Job’s problems with God and his deep-rooted ignorance of the divine will. The religious world of today so closely mirrors the one Job and the friends walk through that one scarcely flinches at the many affronts to the divine glory that continually obtrude through their conversation. It is easy to sympathize with Job; he has been, to his own way of thinking, harshly and unfairly treated—that is, denied the happiness he and people everywhere, in their own minds, deserve. The friends are overly critical, unfriendly friends, though it is hard to find fault with their basic theology, namely, that God punishes the evildoers but shows mercy to those who repent. This is exactl...