The prophet Ezekiel, writing in the sixth century BCE, names Job beside Noah and Daniel as three righteous men. Even if a doomed land held all three, he says, their righteousness would save their own lives and no one else's. Job's name, in other words, was already a byword for righteousness. The book that carries it is the work of an anonymous poet, an Israelite writing in Hebrew, most likely in the Persian period, between the sixth and the fourth century BCE. Job is the book's hero, not its author, and no record of him exists outside it and the legend it drew on. This page uses the name the book gives, and its years mark an estimate of when the book was written, not a lifetime.
The book opens as a prose tale. Job lives in the land of Uz, a rich man, perfect and upright, who fears God. The LORD praises him before the heavenly court, and the adversary, Satan in the King James Version, asks whether Job fears God for nothing. Permitted to find out, Satan takes Job's herds, his servants and his ten children in a single day, then covers him with sores. His wife tells him to curse God and die. Job answers that the LORD gave and the LORD has taken away, and in all this, the tale says, he did not sin.
Then the poem begins, and the patient man disappears. Job curses the day he was born. Three friends — Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar — come to comfort him and end by accusing him, because their teaching leaves them no choice: God is just, so suffering is punishment, and a man this ruined must have earned it. Job refuses the confession they ask for. He will hold to his integrity until he dies, he says, and he swears an oath of innocence, item by item, then demands that God answer him as a defendant answers a charge. That refusal carries the claim the book is remembered for: suffering is not proof of guilt, and a defence of God that requires the innocent to lie about themselves is a false one.
God does answer, out of a whirlwind, and asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. The speeches range over the sea, the stars, the wild animals and the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan; they say nothing of the test in heaven. Job's last reply is usually read as repentance, but the Hebrew is difficult, and another reading has him retract nothing. Scholars still disagree. In the closing prose the LORD tells Eliphaz that the friends spoke wrongly of God and Job spoke rightly, then gives Job twice what he had before.
Tradition kept asking who he was. The Talmud records rival opinions on when he lived, from the days of Jacob to the days of Ahasuerus, the Persian king. One teaching makes him a pious man from outside Israel; in the same discussion, a sage holds that he never existed and the story is a parable. The Greek Bible ends the book by making him Jobab, a king of Edom and a grandson of Esau. The Testament of Job, a Greek retelling from around the turn of the era, makes him a king whose patience defeats Satan, and the Letter of James holds up that patience as a model. The Qur'an names him Ayyub, a prophet who called on his Lord in his affliction.
Pope Gregory the Great began his long commentary on the book, the Moralia in Job, at the imperial court in Constantinople and finished it in Rome by 595. Kant, in an essay of 1791 on why every philosophical defence of God's justice fails, sided with Job's sincerity against his friends' reasoning. In Repetition, published in 1843 under a pseudonym, Søren Kierkegaard has a young man in crisis read the book aloud at night. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, argued in Answer to Job in 1952 that Job had shown himself more moral and more conscious than the God who tormented him. Many Sephardic congregations read the book aloud on Tisha B'Av, the fast that mourns the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem.