Job | Atlas | Theologos Media

The man whose theology was right and whose friends were wrong

Job is the canon's most extended argument with God. It is also the canon's most extended argument with bad theology *about* God. The book is forty-two chapters of poetry and prose, structured as a courtroom drama in which the accuser is the Adversary (ha-satan), the defendant is Job's righteousness, the testimony is suffering, and the witnesses are three friends who turn out to have everything backwards.

The opening is the strangest theological scene in the Hebrew Bible. The sons of God present themselves before the LORD, and the Adversary is among them. The LORD asks where he has come from. He answers, "From going to and fro on the earth." (Job 1:7) The LORD points to Job — blameless and upright, fearing God and turning from evil. The Adversary makes the accusation that drives the entire book: Job only fears you because you have protected him and prospered him. Take it all away, and he will curse you to your face. The LORD permits the test. Job loses his possessions, his servants, his ten children, his health. He scrapes himself with a piece of broken pottery, sitting in the ashes.

Job's first response is the line every funeral preacher has quoted: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." (Job 1:21) The narrator adds: "In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong." The text is being precise. Job loses everything and does not curse God. The Adversary's first hypothesis has failed.

The second wave is bodily. Boils head to foot. Job's wife — whose own loss the text does not minimize — says, "Curse God and die." (Job 2:9) Job refuses. The narrator again: "In all this Job did not sin with his lips." The text is naming what the friends are about to spend forty chapters denying.

The three friends arrive and sit with him for seven days in silence. Then Job opens his mouth and speaks the lament of chapter 3 — the longest poem of bitterness in the canon. He curses the day of his birth. He wishes he had not been born. He asks for death. The friends, who have been silent, take this as their opening. They begin to argue.

The friends' theology is what most people actually believe: God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked, so suffering on this scale must be evidence of hidden sin. Eliphaz says it gently. Bildad says it from tradition. Zophar says it cruelly. Across the cycles of speeches the argument gets uglier — Job must repent of what he is hiding, must humble himself, must confess. Job answers each round. He insists he has not sinned. He demands a hearing. He wants to argue his case before God himself. He becomes, by the end, blasphemous-sounding to the friends and faithful to the reader.

The LORD's answer (chapters 38–41) is not the answer Job asked for. He has wanted a courtroom. He gets a tour of creation. *Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?* *Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?* *Have you commanded the morning since your days began?* The questions go on for four chapters. The leviathan and the behemoth are described in terms that exceed any zoology — they are the chaos monsters of the ancient Near Eastern imagination, and the LORD presents them as his playthings. The point is not the answer to Job's question. The point is who is being addressed by it.

Job's response is the surrender Christian theology has held closest: "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:5–6) Job is not repenting of hidden sin. He is repenting of having argued from a position that did not yet know who he was arguing with. The friends, on the other hand, are rebuked by the LORD directly: "My anger burns against you, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has." (Job 42:7) The friends were the orthodox theologians. They were also wrong. Job, who had argued bitterly and insisted on his innocence, had spoken truthfully about God. The book's last word on the prosperity-as-evidence-of-righteousness theology is that it is a lie.

The restoration is the book's hardest part for many readers. Job is given twice what he had lost. He has ten more children. The Christian Scriptures pick up Job's name as the figure of patient endurance: *you have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful* (James 5:11). The patristic reading also holds Job as a type of Christ — innocent suffering, accused without cause, vindicated by the Father. Christ's cry from the cross is in the same theological territory as Job's lament: *my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?* The difference is who answers, and how.