He wounds me much for no cause.
He does not let me catch my breath,
But sates me with bitterness. . . .
It is all one; therefore I say,
“He destroys the blameless and the guilty.” . . .
He mocks as the innocent fail.
The earth is handed over to the wicked one;
He covers the eyes of its judges.
If it is not He, then who?
—Job 9:17–24
The question stemming from the “problem of evil” has plagued some of the greatest human minds since ancient times. In its classic formulation, it goes as follows: If God is all knowing, then God is aware that innocent people suffer. If God is all good, then God must not want innocent people to suffer. If God is all powerful, then God is capable of preventing innocent suffering. Why, then, do innocent people suffer?
One easy solution is to say that God does not exist. A second easy solution is to say that there is no such thing as innocent suffering. In other words, since God is all good, just, and merciful, all who suffer deserve what they get, or will be compensated for their troubles at some future time. To my way of thinking, both of these solutions are facile, and one of the merits of the book of Job is that it shows us why.
Although the storyline of the book of Job is simple, there are a number of sudden turns and enigmatic speeches. The prologue says that Job is a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil. He has seven sons and three daughters and has acquired great wealth. When God says to Satan that Job is a faithful servant, Satan replies that he has good reason to be: look at all God has done for him.1 What if all that he has is suddenly taken away? Would he remain faithful or become despondent and curse God?
Upon hearing this, God allows Satan to take away all that Job has but not to touch Job himself. Soon thereafter Job learns that all his children have perished and all his livestock have been carried off in a violent storm. Though Job is distraught, he does not curse God. Instead he utters the famous line (1:21): “The LORD has given, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” Again, God tells Satan that Job is a faithful servant. Undaunted, Satan says that if he could touch Job himself, then Job would in fact curse God. God decides to allow Satan to afflict Job but not to take his life. Satan proceeds to afflict Job head to toe with painful sores. Although his wife asks him to curse God and die as a way of ending his suffering, he refuses.
Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, then come to comfort him. Much of the book is taken up with their speeches and Job’s replies. As the story progresses, the friends propose versions of the second easy solution mentioned above: There is no such thing as innocent suffering. For example, at 4:7 Eliphaz asks: “What innocent man ever perished?” But as the reader knows, and Job continues to insist, they are mistaken. Job has done nothing to deserve his fate.
Rejecting the advice of his friends at 9:17–24, Job accuses God of wronging him (“He wounds me much for no cause”); of paying no attention to innocence or guilt (“He destroys the blameless and the guilty”); and of showing favor to the guilty (“The earth is handed over to the wicked one”). Above all, he continues to proclaim his innocence: “Until I die I will maintain my integrity. / I will persist in my righteousness and will not yield; / I shall be free of reproach as long as I live” (27:5–6). From this point on, we don’t hear from the friends again. After they leave the story, Elihu, a younger friend, enters it and delivers a long discourse on divine providence (“Surely it is false that God does not listen”) and urges Job to submit to God’s superior wisdom (“The case is before Him; / So wait for Him”) (35:13–14). Job listens but does not answer.
Then God appears again and addresses Job out of a whirlwind. “Who is this who darkens counsel, / Speaking without knowledge?” (38:2).2 God asks a series of rhetorical questions intended to belittle Job’s importance: Where were you when the earth was formed? Can you measure it? Have you plumbed the depths of the sea? Have you seen the gates of the netherworld? Can you order the heavenly bodies?
Finally Job answers God in a spirit of remorse, indicating that he spoke without understanding and recants what he said (42:4–6,). Exactly what Job is recanting is unclear. Is he now denying that God lets innocent people suffer? Or that God lets innocents suffer more than the guilty? Or that he is even in a position to question God? All we know is that Job repents and says nothing more.
In the epilogue, God does not respond directly to Job, and never mentions the wager with Satan. Rather, God proceeds to criticize Job’s friends, saying they did not speak the truth, whereas Job did. Again, we are not told which truths or untruths these are. Following this, God restores Job’s fortunes twice over, doubling what he had before.
Clearly, the story leaves a number of questions unanswered. Why would a just and merciful God enter a wager with Satan that will afflict harm on an upright man? Why doesn’t God answer Job’s question about innocent suffering? What point is the story trying to make by having Job repent after hearing God speak? What point is it trying to make by having Job be rewarded twice over in the end?
Our sense of puzzlement is all the more pronounced because the book does not appear to be the product of a single author but an assemblage compiled by different authors with differing points of view. The prologue and epilogue are written in prose, the middle sections in poetry. Some commentators think the prologue is a later addition because the story of God’s wager with Satan offers a credible explanation for Job’s suffering and therefore exonerates God. This interpretation is consistent with God’s failure to mention the wager with Satan when answering Job later on. While the reader is informed of God’s reason for allowing Job to suffer, Job himself never is.3 Other commentators think the epilogue is a later addition because it provides a happy ending to the story and restores faith in divine justice.
The prologue and epilogue are not the only passages that raise questions of authorship. Zophar’s third speech is missing. Job’s speeches at 24:18–25 and 27:13–23 sound more like the view of his friends, since they seem to say that the wicked are punished after all. Chapter 28 is not attributed to anyone and reads like a freestanding poem. The fact that Elihu does not appear until three-quarters of the way through the book has led many biblical scholars to believe his oration is also a later addition. Because God’s speech from the whirlwind completely avoids the question of innocent suffering, some scholars suspect that it too was added later on.
There are even problems with translation. It has not escaped the notice of scholars that when the Bible was translated into Greek, the Job who appears in that text is not nearly as rebellious as the one who appears in the original Hebrew.4 For Christians (James 5:11), Job is a model of patience or endurance who is rewarded by God for his perseverance in times of distress. But as the biblical scholar Marvin Pope remarks, this view ignores more than nine-tenths of the book and is based only on the prologue and epilogue.5 In fact, the Hebrew text presents a more complicated figure than the ever-patient Job. For example, the oft-quoted remark of 13:15 (“Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him”) says something quite different in Hebrew. According to the NJPS translation: “He may well slay me; I may have no hope.”6
By the same token, Job’s reply to God at 42:6 has long been disputed.7 The NJPS translation renders it: “Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes.” But as the commentary points out, we are not told what Job is recanting, and the Hebrew cannot support the phrase “Being but dust and ashes.” The Christian New Revised Standard Version has “Therefore I despise myself, / and repent in dust and ashes.” But it points out in its commentary that “repent” should not be understood as repentance for a sin, but rather as a change of heart.
Though it is clear that Job is confessing some kind of resignation in the face of God, it is not clear that he is admitting guilt. The uncertainty over Job’s status carries over to Rabbinic literature too. According to one interpretation, Job, like Abraham, feared God, but unlike Abraham, his fear was not coupled with love.8 According to another, Job did serve God out of love.9 As to Job’s anger at God and near blasphemy, one rabbi defended Job by saying that a person is not responsible for things said under duress.10
All these difficulties raise an obvious question: What is this book trying to teach us? If it has an answer to the problem of innocent suffering, what is it? If it does not, what are we supposed to do when we see it or experience it ourselves? It is to these questions that we now turn.
In assessing the nature of Job’s protest, it is important to remember that the Hebrew prophets enjoyed greater latitude in their relation to God than people generally suppose.11 Abraham did not stand idly by when God threatened to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; nor did Moses when God threatened to destroy the entire Israelite nation. According to a famous Rabbinic interpretation, Moses grabbed on to God’s cloak and would not let go until God forgave Israel.12 In fact, the idea that God can be held to account by humans is a recurrent theme in biblical literature. We have already encountered the protest of Jeremiah (12:1):
You will win, O LORD, if I make claim against You,
Yet I shall present charges against You:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why are the workers of treachery at ease?
Similar words are spoken by the prophet Habakkuk (1:2):
How long, O LORD, shall I cry out
And You not listen,
Shall I shout to You, “Violence!”
And You not save?13
In these prophets’ minds, something is wrong with God’s rule of the world. It is not only that innocent people suffer but, in these cases, that guilty people do not. Importantly, these and other such protests are not considered blasphemous. In fact, it may be that God wants people to protest when questions about justice are on the line, given that God backs down after listening to Abraham and Moses. It is in this light that we should approach the protests of Job.
On the one hand, Job’s speeches contain moments of great devotion. Note how closely the following lines (9:2–10) resemble God’s speech from the whirlwind at 38–39:
Indeed I know that it is so:
Man cannot win a suit against God.
If he insisted on a trial with Him,
He would not answer one charge in a thousand.
Wise of heart and mighty in power—
Who ever challenged Him and came out whole?—
Him who moves mountains without their knowing it,
Who overturns them in His anger;
Who shakes the earth from its place,
Till its pillars quake;
Who commands the sun not to shine;
Who seals up the stars;
Who by Himself spread out the heavens,
And trod on the back of the sea;
Who made the Bear and Orion,
Pleiades, and the chambers of the south wind;
Who performs great deeds which cannot be fathomed,
And wondrous things without number.
Still, Job does evince other reactions, some of which could be characterized as rebellious:
Though Job utters these words under duress, they are nonetheless authentic reactions to his plight. Why, indeed, should Job have to suffer so that God can prove a point to Satan? The book does not provide a direct answer to this question. Rather than discuss the problem of innocent suffering in the abstract, it exhibits the thoughts and feelings of an innocent person in pain. This is another way of saying that the book deals with suffering at a human rather than a theoretical level. As the biblical scholar Jon Levenson points out, the overwhelming tendency of writers as they confront undeserved evil is not to explain it away, but to call on God to take it away.14 The question, then, is not “Why is there evil?” but “How should one respond to evil?”
It is therefore a mistake to concentrate on humility or rebellion alone and fail to see that both are legitimate responses to the situation. A completely humble Job would close his eyes to what he perceives as injustice and accept whatever God hands out. A completely rebellious Job would feel nothing in the way of reverence. Neither is true to the character in the book, and it is important to see why.
The word “theodicy” derives from the Greek theos (God) + dike (justice) and means the vindication of God’s goodness in a world that appears to contain evil and suffering. Thus theodicy tries to show that there is a reason why God allows evil and suffering to occur. Philosophers and theologians have proposed numerous and varied explanations, including suffering is needed now so that we will better appreciate goodness later on; suffering and evil are needed to give us the opportunity to rise above them; the suffering of some people is needed to achieve a greater and more inclusive good for others; suffering may seem unjustified now, but eventually the innocent will be rewarded and the guilty punished; and finally because we are all sinners, we all deserve to suffer.
There are, of course, circumstances in which some of these explanations are true. Many parents would gladly suffer if it meant their children would be better off as a result. A martyr may undergo suffering to call attention to social ills. Recall that Jeremiah knew he would suffer if he carried the word of God to Jerusalem. Note, however, that these examples involve a choice and are directed to a purpose, whereas Job is never given a choice and never told why he is suffering. In general the problem with theodicy is that it treats every instance of suffering as justifiable, so that even when a child is stricken with cancer or people are killed at a mass shooting, it assures us that all is well with the world.
Though it may provide solace, the trouble with theodicy is that also leads to complacency. Against this, Kant argues that theodicy represents a case where the intended defense (of God) is worse than the original charge.15 As discussed in relation to the Holocaust in chapter 3, it is unacceptable to say that the murder of innocent children serves a higher purpose. With this sort of consideration in mind, Kant concludes that theodicy should be detested by anyone with the slightest spark of morality.
Nowhere is this truer than in the book of Job. Called upon to comfort a sick and bereaved man, Job’s friends do exactly the opposite. In fact, their “comfort” is more like an indictment. Suffering, they argue, is the consequence of sin; therefore, if Job is in pain, he must have transgressed somewhere along the line—if not openly, then secretly. Their charge flies in the face of God’s assertion in the prologue that Job is a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil (1:8). It also explains why God is angry with the friends in the epilogue.
As the book develops, the indictments against Job become ever more severe. By chapter 22, Eliphaz tells Job that his iniquities have no limit, that he has committed some of the most egregious sins imaginable, including everything from stripping clothes from the needy to assaulting widows and orphans. The fact that neither Eliphaz nor anyone else has seen such behavior from Job is irrelevant: It is required by the view that suffering is always a punishment for sin.
So Kant is right: Here, theodicy has gotten in the way of Eliphaz’s seemingly natural feelings of compassion toward his friend. Otherwise, Job’s suffering would have become his suffering. Earlier Job had told him that if their situations were reversed, “I would encourage you with words, / My moving lips would bring relief” (16:5). It is not that Eliphaz is incapable of empathy. The problem is, he has committed himself to a theodicy at odds with the facts before him. In the end, because he cannot feel compassion for his friend, Eliphaz comes across as contemptible.
Similarly compelled to face the facts, Job’s two other friends try out a number of diversions. Suffering brings one closer to God (5:17). No person is truly innocent (25:4–6). God is such a mystery that we cannot know anything (11:6–8). Yet these responses effectively belittle the seriousness of Job’s predicament. Blatantly missing is a sense of outrage: How horrible! How could this happen, especially to you! We need to do something! None of the friends seems troubled by Job’s predicament or willing to plead on his behalf. Job’s comment that “the upright are amazed at this” (17:8), meaning that decent people would be disturbed by the sight of an innocent person in pain, also fails to elicit empathy. We have seen that Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah all spoke out when they thought they saw injustice. The friends resort to theodicy.
What is more, the friends never come to grips with the essential question Job has posed: How can a just and merciful God allow this to happen? It is important to recognize that Job never denies the existence of God. On the contrary, it is because God exists and is just and merciful that he cannot make sense of his situation. Without such a God, there would be no court in which to argue his case (9:15–16, 13:20–23, 23:1–6), no avenger (goel, 19:25) to right his wrong.16 The issue, then, is not “Is there a God?” but rather “Why has God not acted to right an obvious wrong?” As Job says at 13:24: “Why do You hide Your face, / And treat me like an enemy?”
When Job finally encounters God in the voice from the whirlwind, there is no mention of theodicy—on Job’s part or God’s. This may seem confusing to some readers because, like Job’s friends, they are so committed to theodicy that its absence from God’s speech has led them to think the speech must not be genuine. If the various attempts at theodicy are sound, how could God not invoke them? But let us ask: What would be gained had God had answered Job the way these people would have wished? Suppose God had said that Job’s suffering is needed to realize a greater or more inclusive good. Would his plight be any more bearable?
I suggest that it would not. In my view, it would only allow another generation of “comforters” to look human misery in the face and explain it away. Not only does God not resort to theodicy, God expresses anger at those who do—Eliphaz and the other friends (42:7). Note too that God never refers to “chastisements of love,” the view that God metes out punishment as a corrective intended to make us better people. In fact, God never generalizes from Job’s suffering to anyone else’s.
According to the theologian Rabbi Robert Gordis, God does not deny that there is innocent suffering—and in some passages, for example, 40:9–14, where God basically says to Job “See if you can do any better,” comes close to admitting it.17 What is more, in the prologue (2:3), God admits that Satan has inflicted suffering on Job “for no good reason.” If a solution to the problem of evil means that we must find some good in every instance of pain, then, I submit, a solution cannot and should not be found.
At this point, it would appear that the book leads us into a dilemma. On the one hand, we are shown the inhumane consequences of appealing to theodicy. On the other hand, we are encouraged to regard Job’s plight as unjust. We, too, want to know why a blameless and God-fearing man is now sitting on an ash heap with sores all over his body. How does the book help to resolve this tension?
Although God’s response to Job may not offer much in the way of comfort, there is no question that it changes the tenor of the discussion. The man who protests loudly against God now withdraws in chapter 42 on the grounds that he has spoken of things too great for him to understand. Has he been intimidated by the thunder of God’s voice? A more charitable explanation would be that Job experiences awe both in the face of God and the vast, mysterious universe God describes to him:
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? . . .
Have you ever commanded the day to break, . . .
Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deep? . . .
Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth? . . .
Can you tie the cords to Pleiades
Or undo the reins of Orion? (38:4–31)
Maimonides thought this explanation was enough. In his interpretation, Job is called righteous at the beginning of the story, but not wise. After God’s speech, Job gains wisdom by coming to see that the things he valued before—health, wealth, friends—are of little account. Now, he sees what really matters: the greatness of God and God’s creation, as well as the smallness of his own place within it.18
While this interpretation has some textual support, we should keep in mind that it is based on a controversial premise: Theoretical wisdom is the only thing in life valuable as an end in itself. There is no question that Maimonides himself believed this. The subject at issue is whether this is the point the story is trying to make. I find it hard to agree with Maimonides in large part because his reading plays down the importance of the rebellious Job, and with it the indignation we feel on his behalf. Does Job’s insistence that his plight is unfair completely give way to his acceptance of the smallness of his position? It is to this question that we now turn.
When their theodicies begin to crumble, Job’s friends question the efficacy of human knowledge and take refuge in a form of skepticism. At 8:9 Bildad says that humans “are of yesterday and know nothing.” Later, foreshadowing God’s final speech to Job, he says:
Would you discover the mystery of God?
Would you discover the limit of the Almighty?
Higher than heaven—what can you do?
Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? (11:7–8)
So, too, Elihu counsels:
Stop to consider the marvels of God.
Do you know what charge God lays upon them
When His lightning-clouds shine?
Do you know the marvels worked upon the expanse of clouds
By Him whose understanding is perfect? (37:14–16)
Job utters similar sentiments himself in the disputed speech of chapter 28:
But whence does wisdom come?
Where is the source of understanding?
It is hidden from the eyes of all living, . . .
God understands the way to it;
He knows its source;
For He sees to the ends of the earth,
Observes all that is beneath the heavens. (28:20–24)
Strictly speaking, this sort of skepticism is incompatible with most attempts at theodicy, which claims that divine justice can be inferred by looking at earthly events. If, on the other hand, human wisdom is as limited as these passages say—if, when it comes to God’s final purpose, we know nothing at all—how can we infer anything?
We saw that when God speaks in the epilogue (38:2), the limits of human knowledge come into play again with the question “Who is this who darkens counsel, / Speaking without knowledge?” In fact, God is not above sarcasm, because some of the questions put to Job are followed up with the taunt, “for surely you know.” The picture that emerges from God’s speech is that of a universe in which an omnipotent ruler controls terrifying forces that defy human comprehension and dwarf human capability. At 40:15–24, God refers to a monstrous creature called Behemoth, whose bones are like tubes of bronze and whose limbs are like iron rods—a description is followed by the claim: “Only his Maker can draw the sword against him” (40:19).
Shortly thereafter God refers to Leviathan, a creature so frightening that flames shoot from its mouth and even divine beings are afraid of him (42:13–17). The God who has made these creatures and exercises control over them asks Job: “Would you impugn My justice? / Would you condemn Me that you may be right?” (40:8). What is Job supposed to say in the face of such a challenge? Of course, his knowledge and power are as nothing when compared to God’s. Hence the reply: “I spoke without understanding / Of things beyond me, which I did not know” (42:3).
An easy lesson to draw from Job’s reply is that because we have no comprehension of what it is like to control natural forces on a cosmic scale, all we can do is submit to divine rule, whatever it may involve. But, I admit that this, too, is overly simplistic. Although the humble Job who acknowledges divine sovereignty may replace the angry Job who demands an explanation of innocent suffering, simple humility is not the end of the story.
Both are replaced in the epilogue by Job the prophet. Like other prophets before and after him, Job has experienced God speaking directly to him—and furthermore, despite Job’s earlier protests, God acknowledges that Job spoke the truth and continues to refer to him as a servant. This puts Job in a class with Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah. While all three trust in the saving power of God, they also dispute certain divine decrees. Their relationship with God allows for questioning, arguing, pleading—in short, whatever is necessary to uphold the cause of justice as they understand it.
We also see Job the prophet in how he responds to his friends throughout the course of the book. Had Job listened to his friends, he would have thrown himself on the ground, confessed to sins he did not commit, and begged for mercy. One might argue that a little servility, even an omission of guilt, never hurts in the face of misfortune. And yet, in defiance of everything he has heard from his friends, Job stands up like a hero and speaks the truth:
As long as there is life in me,
And God’s breath is in my nostrils,
My lips will speak no wrong,
Nor my tongue utter deceit. (27:3–4)
It is significant that while God rebukes Job for speaking about cosmic forces he does not understand, God never rebukes him for proclaiming his innocence. The challenge, then, is to see how Job can maintain his moral integrity at the same time that he admits his intellectual fallibility.
Kant argues that when Job humbles himself before God, he is confessing not that he has spoken sacrilegiously, but that he has spoken unwisely about things beyond his comprehension.19 According to Kant, humans cannot infer God’s intentions by looking at earthly events. Good people sometimes suffer, and bad people sometimes flourish. Job’s friends are the ones who falsely assume that every aspect of human experience must be in harmony with God’s wishes. Citing Job’s speech at 27:3–4, Kant takes an opposing position to Maimonides: “Hence only sincerity of heart and not distinction of insight; honesty in openly admitting one’s doubts; repugnance to pretending conviction where one feels none, especially before God. . . . These are the attributes which, in the person of Job, have decided the preeminence of the honest man over the religious flatterer in the divine verdict.”20
For Kant, then, Job’s faith is founded on the uprightness of his heart, rather than on his knowledge of God and the cosmos. Kant’s interpretation presumes that morality, not theoretical wisdom, is the most valuable thing in human life. In the last analysis, though, Kant’s Job is still a version of the patient hero who endures pain with stoic resolution. Still, Kant is right to call attention to Job’s honesty. Unlike Eliphaz, who accuses Job of crimes he did not commit and argues that God would never let an innocent person suffer, Job does not try to flatter God by asserting that all is well with the world. Instead, like the other prophets, he finds much that is wrong with the world and says so without hesitation.
In my reading, Job’s great virtue is twofold: honesty coupled with righteous indignation. Though he repents in the end, this does not negate his protest against innocent suffering earlier on nor his conviction that theodicy is bogus. Looking at the book as a whole, he is both a servant of God and an adversary who takes it on himself to question God. Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah served as adversaries too, but they were not protesting injustice done to them. Instead of seeing honesty and indignation cancel each other out, it would be better to see them together, each legitimate in its own way. In the end, Job can view his suffering in a larger context, but this does not mean that his suffering was justified. To repeat: Even God admits that Job suffered for no good reason.
As we have seen, the book of Job offers no answer to the question “Why does God permit innocent people to suffer?” It tells us only that we are a small part of a large and often terrifying universe overseen by an omnipotent creator. If anything, modern science has shown that the universe is much larger and even more terrifying than anything biblical authors could have imagined.
Still, I believe our study of Job has left us with other vital lessons. The customary theodicies that people use to try to defend God do not work. Whatever misfortunes may befall us, we ought not to attempt to appease God by pleading guilty to false charges. Whenever we find injustice, we are to condemn it and speak up for those who suffer from it. When decent, law-abiding people are afflicted with sickness or misfortune, we should never tell them that they are only getting what they deserve. There is yet another lesson. When the Psalmist asks, “What is man that You are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:5), the book of Job answers by showing us a man who even in the depths of agony can rise to heroic proportions. While such heroism does not provide a justification of innocent suffering, it does provide a model for how we should respond to it.