Get started

WorkJob

The Book of Job

A ruined man refuses his friends' verdict that suffering proves sin, and demands that God himself answer him.

by Job64 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
אִיּוֹב (Iyov)
First published
450 BCE(aged 100)
Original language
Hebrew

Report a rights issue

Overview

Eliphaz the Temanite, the first of three friends who come to sit with a ruined man, asks him to name one innocent person who ever perished; the whole book is written against that question. The Book of Job is an anonymous Hebrew poem set inside a short prose tale, and it argues that suffering is no proof of guilt. Job is its hero, not its author: a rich and blameless man of the land of Uz. The LORD allows Satan — in Hebrew "the adversary", a member of the heavenly court — to strip him of his children, his herds and his health, to test whether his piety was ever more than a bargain. Through three rounds of speeches Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar insist that Job must have sinned; Job refuses to confess what he did not do and demands a hearing before God. Most scholars think a later hand added the speeches of Elihu, a younger bystander angry that Job justified himself rather than God. When the LORD at last answers from the whirlwind, he speaks of the making of the world and says nothing of the test; in the closing prose he tells Eliphaz that the friends have spoken wrongly of him and Job rightly. Scholars date the poem after the Babylonian exile, between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE; a Talmudic passage credits the book to Moses and records a sage who held that Job never existed and the story was a parable. The Letter of James later held Job up as a model of patience, yet the poem opens with him cursing the day he was born. In an essay of 1791 on why every philosophical defence of God's justice fails, Kant took Job's side, preferring his sincerity to his friends' reasoning.

Key concepts

Why do Job's friends assume his suffering proves he sinned?

They hold the doctrine of retribution: God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked within this life, so misfortune is evidence of guilt. Eliphaz puts it as a harvest — those who plough wickedness reap the same. On that reckoning Job's ruin can only mean hidden sin, and the friends' kindest advice is to confess it. The whole poem tests that rule against one blameless man.

What is the test in heaven that sets Job's story going?

It is a challenge from Satan, in Hebrew "the adversary", a member of the heavenly court who comes among the sons of God. When the LORD praises Job, Satan asks whether Job fears God for nothing: touch all he has, and he will curse God to his face. What is tested is whether piety can exist without reward. Job is never told of the wager.

What does Job mean by his integrity?

Integrity is the wholeness of Job's life — a blamelessness he can describe in detail and will not deny to buy peace. "Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me," he swears, and in a final oath he lists what it covered: a covenant with his eyes against lust, his bread shared with the fatherless, the poor never refused. It is the one thing his losses could not take.

What does chastening mean in the Book of Job?

Chastening is suffering understood as God's correction rather than his verdict: pain sent to teach a person and turn them back. Eliphaz first offers it, calling happy the man whom God corrects. Elihu builds it out, saying God opens people's ears through affliction and delivers the poor by it. It softens the friends' rule without leaving it, since it still assumes Job needs correcting.

What are behemoth and leviathan?

They are the two great beasts with which the LORD's second speech closes. Behemoth eats grass like an ox yet is called the chief of God's ways; leviathan cannot be drawn out with a hook, has no equal on earth and is king over all the proud. Both are creatures God made and Job cannot master, set before him as the measure of a power beyond human reckoning.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Suffering Is No Verdict

Does pain prove that the one who suffers has done wrong? If it does, every ruined life is a confession, and comfort turns into accusation.

Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar hold the old reckoning that God prospers the upright and ruins the wicked, so Job's losses must hide a sin. Job answers with what anyone can see: the wicked grow old in power, and the blameless perish beside them. He calls his friends miserable comforters who speak wickedly for God, defending heaven with lies. The closing prose settles the quarrel against them, when the LORD says they have not spoken rightly of him, as Job has.

  • suffering
  • retribution
  • wickedness
  • innocence
  • prosperity
  • justice
  • friendship
  • grief
  • guilt
  • compassion

Enter a dialogue

A Case Brought Against God

May a man who knows himself innocent demand that God appear and answer? Job will not confess a guilt he does not have, even when holding to the truth leaves him nothing.

Lament turns into a lawsuit. Job wants to find God's seat, order his cause before him and see the charges written down, and he mourns that no umpire stands between them to lay a hand on both. Against the wager in heaven that his piety was a bargain, he keeps his integrity with nothing left to gain by it. Between the pleas he faces his own end: a felled tree may sprout again, but a man lies down and rises not.

  • integrity
  • divine justice
  • faith
  • hope
  • despair
  • mortality
  • death
  • innocence

Enter a dialogue

The Voice from the Whirlwind

What kind of answer is it when God replies to a ruined man with the making of the world? The speech never mentions the wager in heaven, yet Job lays his hand upon his mouth.

Questions are the LORD's whole reply: where was Job when the earth's foundations were laid, who sends rain on a desert where no one lives, who can draw out leviathan with a hook. Before it, a poem on wisdom found it in no mine and at no price, only in the fear of the LORD, and Elihu argued that God speaks through affliction. Job ends having heard of God by the ear and now seeing him with his eye; he repents in dust and ashes, prays for his friends and is restored twofold.

  • divine power
  • divine sovereignty
  • creation
  • nature
  • wisdom
  • human knowledge
  • human limits
  • repentance
  • restoration

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
64
distinct concepts
113
by passages held, corpus-wide
#604

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine justice” and “suffering”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 52 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine justicesuffering8
divine justicewickedness7
divine justicemortality4
divine justicerepentance4
divine justiceretribution4
retributionwickedness4
justicesuffering3
mortalitysuffering3
mortalitywickedness3
repentanceretribution3
divine justicedivine power1
divine justicejustice1
divine powerjustice1
divine powersuffering1
justicemortality1
mortalityretribution1
repentancesuffering1
sufferingwickedness1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -450 The Book of Job (אִיּוֹב (Iyov)) you are here EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works