By Gary Topping–
Scholars think the Book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible, based on the lack of any mention of the Mosaic law or the historical saga of God’s dealings with his chosen people, the Children of Israel, which occupies so much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible. If it fits into the Old Testament at all, it would be with the Poetic books rather than the Law and the Prophets. Although it is strongly monotheistic, its thinking otherwise seems deeply rooted in the rigid and primitive ideas of the ancient Near East, where justice, for example, is simply the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” retribution system of the Code of Hammurabi. The idea of God giving Job a second family which was supposed to compensate for the loss of the first one is repugnant to the modern mind.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the Book of Job has a greater continuing relevance to the knottiest of all theological problems than any other book in the Hebrew Bible. That problem is what to think, in the words of Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s magnificent explication of the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. There is, according to Kushner, no ultimately satisfying answer to the problem. As he boils it down, the Book of Job suggests three propositions:
- God is just.
- God is omnipotent.
- Job is a good man.
Presented with each of those propositions separately, most of us would affirm them as axiomatic. But taken together, Kushner points out, one can only affirm any two of them, and only at the expense of denying the third.
The premature death of a loved one is the worst of the bad things that can happen to us, and the point at which we are most desperate to find a satisfying answer (Kushner lost a young son; I myself have lost a stepson and a younger brother). But the Book of Job bluntly points out that God’s ways are not Man’s ways and the ultimate resolution of the problem simply cannot be made available to us in this earthly order.
A conundrum like this, in other words, bursts the bounds of both philosophy and theology. The author of the Book of Job wisely understood that only poetry can deal with something so huge. Some of the most sublime poetry in world literature occurs when God makes that point directly to Job, speaking to him out of a whirlwind in chapters 38-41:
Were were you when I founded the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its size; do you know?
Who stretched out the measuring line for it?
Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone,
While the morning stars sang in chorus
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Even the constellations, the ever-present nightly companions of pastoral people, proclaim the transcendent power and wisdom of God:
Have you fitted a curb to the Pleiades, or loosened the bonds of Orion?
Can you bring forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or guide the Bear with its train?
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens; can you put into effect their plan on the earth?
If true maturity requires of us, as I think it does, that we learn to live with ambiguity and incomplete or complicated answers, the Book of Job forces us to confront that reality. But if it necessarily leaves us a bit up in the air, at least it assures us that we are not the only people to have had to deal with an insoluble issue, and that has to be some consolation in itself.
