First things first.
Here are some reasons you may not want to study the book of Job:
It’s a hard book to read.
It seems to go on and on, with the characters saying the same things over and over. To read it, I’d say you have to have “the patience of Job,” but that’s just plain corny.
It’s a hard book to understand.
It’s filled with allegory, simile, and metaphor based on culture and setting. For example, to them, death is a moth and people are plants. All that certainly made sense to them but often may not make sense to us.
You may not find what you expect.
The common thought seems to be that the book of Job is about how to deal with suffering. But if you are about to delve into Job looking for “five steps to deal with pain and loss,” I think you’ll come up short. There is only one.
Likewise, if you are looking for an explanation of why Job went through what he went through, you’ll leave dissatisfied. There is none.
If you’ve come to Job to learn more about God, you will certainly learn this: He doesn’t feel obliged to answer your questions.
But if you are looking for the key to transformation in the middle of a world that doesn’t make sense, you’ll find a treasure in the book of Job.
Job basics.
Tucked between the Torah and the Prophets is a set of books called the Writings or the Wisdom books: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Job.
For those of you who, on the advice of well-meaning friends, have skipped over Job in your “Read the Bible in a Year” program to catch up with the calendar, Job is the account of a man wrestling with God to find the answer to the age-old question of “why.”
Who recorded the book of Job?
Many say it was Moses. But some say it wasn’t written until long after Moses died, and others say it was written long before he lived. The wise say it’s hard to know.
Why is that?
Those familiar with ancient languages tell us it was written in a very strange language: Hebrew of course, but not like the Hebrew of the other scrolls.
The writings are heavily influenced by Aramaic, a language that had no influence on the Hebrew language until much later. The book of Job also contains more unique words than any other book in the Old Testament.
So, with so many theories circulating about who wrote the book of Job, I’m most comfortable with this one: we just don’t know.
When did Job live?
Most think Job lived around the time of Abraham — the 18th century BCE. If so, like Abraham, he had no opportunity to read about God: there were no scrolls or stone tablets to be passed around.
He must have heard about God from others — through what we call “oral tradition” — the careful mouth-to-mouth transmission of cultural information whether it be narrative, songs, poetry, good jokes — anything worth remembering.
Just think about it. The knowledge of God, preserved from the time of Adam and Eve, faithfully passed from generation to generation to the time of Noah.
Then, when Noah’s descendants were scattered throughout the world after the flood, they must have taken it with them wherever they went, because Job, living long after, heard and believed.
Where did Job live?
That one’s easy. The book of Job itself tells us: “In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job.” (Job 1:1, NIV)
Uz is somewhere around here:
Виктор В, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
It is most often associated with Aram in modern-day Syria, or Edom in modern-day Jordan, or somewhere nearby. But it most definitely was not in the land of Israel, and Job, unlike Abraham, was never told to pick up and go there.
Yet he knew the God of Israel and His people who wrote about him later recognized that the God he knew was the same God they knew — YHWH, the God of all the earth.
Is Job a real account or a parable?
Because of all the unknowns and arguments mentioned above, many think the story of Job is a parable. But the early church father Eusebius, for one, asserted that the scroll of Job was an accurate transcription of actual conversations.
Job is also mentioned in the book of Ezekiel, right alongside Noah and Daniel (Ezekiel 14:14, 20), two books most conservative Bible scholars accept as recorded accounts of actual events.
And in the New Testament, James, who, I believe, most who believe in Jesus believe was a real person, refers to “the perseverance of Job.” Some say that expression itself is drawn from a parable, but parables don’t usually use names. So, if it were indeed a parable, it would say something like this: “There was a man who…”
But when all the arguing is over, does it really matter?
See?
Job is not really a book of answers.
But those who gave us the Torah and the Prophets, the Psalms and the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, determined that the story of Job had wisdom that God would have His people know.
That alone, I think, makes it worthy of study.
The one answer I promised:
Job is a portrait of a man who makes the painful journey from a life of ease into a life of suffering and finally to a place of acceptance that life on earth really doesn’t make sense.
If you study the writings of the Jewish sages, both ancient and modern-day, you’ll find they embrace uncertainty far more easily than Western Christians do.
Their study of the Scriptures is not driven by a desire for answers, but by their curiosity about the One whom all the questions are about.
That’s the one reason you might want to study Job.
So, if I haven't talked you out of it, and you do want to take a closer look at the book of Job, check back here about once a week, and we'll see what we can find.