Yesterday’s Monday School lesson prompted me to re-read the Book of Job. Although I could wait until next Monday to share my thoughts and discoveries, I’d rather set them down here while they’re still fresh. And it wouldn’t really be sporting to make you wait 6 days for them, would it? Enjoy! :-)

Point 1: Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance tells me that “Satan” is mentioned just 19 times in the Old Testament. The Book of Job contains 14 of those references. (The other 5 references can be found in 1 Chronicles 21:1; Psalms 109:6; and Zechariah 3:1-2.)

Point 2: According to Theodor H. Gaster’s Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (Harper & Row: 1981), “The satan in this narrative is not the archfiend, perpetually opposed to God. Such a conception, again, belongs to later thought, when Iranian [Persian] dualism had made inroads into traditional Hebrew thinking. Here the name denotes simply a member of the pantheon who happens on this particular occasion to ‘throw a monkey wrench’ into the proceedings, but who is subject to God. The word simply means ‘obstructor’” (pp. 785-786)

Point 3: According to Peter Stanford’s The Devil: A Biography (Henry Holt and Company: 1996), the Book of Job translates the Hebrew stn as “Satan”; elsewhere in the Old Testament, stn is translated in other ways. In 1 King 11:14 it’s presented to us as “enemy” (“Yahweh raised an enemy against Solomon”). In Numbers 22:22, it is translated as “the angel of Yahweh” (“His [Balaam’s] going kindled the wrath of Yahweh and the angel of Yahweh took his stand on the road to bar the way”). According to Stanford, stn literally translates as “opponent” or “someone who obstructs.”

Point 4: Like many of the stories in the Old Testament, the story of Job seems to have been based on older, non-Hebrew sources. Gaster says that the Job we know is derived from “an ancient pagan legend”; Job’s sufferings and protestations “find a striking parallel in a Mesopotamian poem often styled The Babylonian Job…. From the fact that all of the principle characters are said to come from Arab lands, that Job’s estate is raided by Arabian Sabaeans, and that many words are used in a sense common in Arabic but unparalleled in classical Hebrew, it has been conjectured that the book emanates from Edom….” (p. 784).

The Encyclopedia Britannica agrees: “Although the book dates from the 6th or 5th century BC, its author sets his poems within the prose framework (1:1-2:13 and 42:7-17) of an ancient legend that originated outside Israel.”

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible (Wings Books/Random House: 1969) also agrees, saying “The original legend must be ancient (there is even a form of it existing in Babylonian literature)….” (p. 474).

Point 5: Satan first appears in Job 1:6 – “Now it fell upon a day, that the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.”

According to Gaster, “The opening scene of the book is set in the court of God, which is portrayed in terms of ancient pagan belief, since the story itself is of pagan origin. The ‘sons of God,’ therefore, are not angels – which belong to a much later theology; they are simply the junior members of the pantheon, this being their common designation in the Canaanite texts from Ras Shamra-Ugarit, and again in a magical inscription of the eighth century B.C., from Arslan Tash in the Upper Euphrates Valley. The same style recurs, as a mythological relic, in such ancient passages of the Old Testament as Genesis 6:2, 4… Psalms 29:1 and 89:7″ (p. 785).

According to Asimov, “The Persian influence is shown in the picture of God as the head of a numerous court of assisting spirits. The difference from the Persian view rests in the fact that Satan is not the coequal head of a band of evil spirits but merely a single spirit, as much subject to God as are the others… [H]e acts only with God’s permission and only as far as God permits” (p. 478).

According to Stanford, “In espousing the idea of a heavenly court in the prologue to the Book of Job, its writer was taking another step along the path of insulating the theoretically omnipotent Yahweh from the messy business of evil. While the text is impeccably monist in tone, the debut in Job of Satan as a character hints at a new focus for the torment and temptation of humankind…. His role, sitting in the heavenly court, is to play what we might today call Devil’s Advocate, though his powers are a shadow of those enjoyed by the Devil of the New Testament. Satan is absolutely loyal to Yahweh, but has taken upon himself the role of chief antagonist to humankind” (pp. 42-43).

Point 6: As with virtually all the books of the Bible, no one knows for sure who wrote the Book of Job or exactly when.

The Encyclopedia Britannica indicates that it’s something of a mess and a hodgepodge. It says that the prologue and epilogue are probably derived from an old folktale, that other parts date back to the 8th century BC, and that others date to the 6th century BC. Chapter 28 and the speeches of Elihu are considered by most scholars to be later additions. “The conclusion of the dialogue is in serious disorder, with speeches placed in Job’s mouth that could only have been uttered by the friends. The final speech of Zophar, which is omitted, seems to be represented by a fragment preserved within the third reply of Job…. The speeches [of Elihu] merely reiterate the dogmas of the friends and unduly delay the appearance of Yahweh.” (As happens so often when I read the Bible, I came away from the Book of Job feeling that God sure could benefit from the services of a competent human editor.)

According to Stanford, “The fact that its central text has been added to at the start and finish has led some to argue that it is dangerous to include it in the Old Testament at all” (p. 46).

Point 7: Whatever the exact origins and history of the various parts of Job, it seems to have taken on its final form relatively late in Jewish history.

Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (Ballantine Books: 1993) dates it to after the Babylonian Exile (6th century BCE) when the Hebrews were starting to question the answers given by their traditional theology (p. 65).

Stanford reminds us that hell and judgment at death aren’t explicitly described in the Bible until the Book of Daniel, which is believed to have been composed around 165 BCE, making it one of the youngest parts of the OT.

Point 8: The story told by the Book of Job is odd, to say the least. Job is very devout and very prosperous. Satan says to God, hey, I bet Job is only devout because he is prosperous. God tells Satan to take away Job’s prosperity and see what happens. God even allows Satan to kill Job’s seven sons and three daughters – just to see what Job’s reaction will be. When Job remains as devout as ever, God allows Satan to afflict Job’s body with pain and disease. There are numerous problems with this account:

A) A genuinely omniscient God would not need to test Job – He’d simply know what Job’s reaction would be in any given circumstances;

B) My research indicates that the poorer and sicker people become, the more devout they tend to be, not less – how is it that an all-knowing God and a Satan who allegedly has just been out wandering the earth aren’t aware of this? If they had the power to survey a broad cross-section of people, wouldn’t they have been able to come to some conclusions about the relationship between prosperity and devoutness without having to run any test at all? Wouldn’t such a broad-based study have been far more meaningful than a test involving a single, quite possibly atypical human being?

C) Exactly why should God care whether or not Job remains devout in the face of disaster? Isn’t it enough that he is devout? Why pick at him? Why not pick on those who aren’t devout under any circumstances?

D) What kind of God allows a man’s seven sons and three daughters be killed just to see how he’ll react? It seems extremely sick and sadistic – especially when one remembers that Job (and the author) apparently believes that the soul does not survive death.

Point 9: Much of the Book of Job amounts to an examination of why innocent people suffer (or why evil exists). A series of friends repeatedly try to tell Job that he or his family must somehow be at fault, but Job is adamant in his innocence. In the end, God appears and tells them Job is right – he is innocent – but He’s God, dammit, and He has the right to do whatever He wants. “Who are YOU to question ME?” God basically bellows, like a caricature of an overbearing Italian patriarch (or some tyrants and presidents I could mention).

God also seems to say “I’d tell you, but you’re too stupid to understand, so just shut-up and worship me.” As Karen Armstrong dryly remarks, “Job submits, but a modern reader, who is looking for a more coherent and philosophical answer to the problem of suffering, will not be satisfied with this solution” (p. 66).

Stanford sums things up this way: “After all the debate, the prevailing view is that God is all powerful, that evil is from him and somehow part of his plan… despite Job’s effort to highlight the shortcomings of such an approach. The Book of Job is in that way a lament at the weakness of the system, without proposing a new way forward” (pp. 46-47).

Gaster is perhaps blunter. In his view, the point of the Book of Job is that “there can be no rational discourse between him and God, so that all attempted justifications of God’s dealings with him are necessarily futile…. We have in this book the direct antithesis of Greek moral philosophy” (p. 784).

Point 10: It seems to me that there is a fatal flaw in what God says to Job – a flaw which makes it logically impossible for Job to submit to God (or for God to accept Job’s submission as anything other than the amoral action of someone scared shitless). That flaw is this: If Job is too stupid to question, criticize, or understand the ways of God, he is also too stupid to accept, praise, or worship those ways. What God says isn’t grounds for agreement or acquiescence – it’s grounds for moral agnosticism and doing nothing at all. After all, if we can’t understand God’s ways – if we can’t even tell God apart from Satan – how can we possibly determine what the proper response to those ways is or whether or not God deserves our respect rather than our condemnation?

For all we know, the God of Job might be utterly evil and the only righteous course might be resistence (however hopeless).

For all we know, the God of Job might be nothing more than the evil mask of a good God who is testing whether or not we improperly reject logic and morality and bow down to that mask in a gutless attempt to save our own asses in the face of overwhelming might. Perhaps only those who reject the evil God of Job will win the approval of the real God. Given what God tells Job, there’s simply no way to rule that out. By denying us the right to call God immoral, the author isn’t imposing his (or her) version of morality on us – he (or she) is in effect taking away our ability to reason and act as moral creatures at all. That would seem to be a most unfortunate outcome, even if there was a lot of evidence and logic to back it up; it is an absurd, reprehensible outcome we should reject and resist with all our might, given the utter absence of evidence and sound logic that the anonymous author of Job gives us to work with.

BONUS VIEWPOINT: William Harwood summarizes his understanding of the Book of Job in a couple pages of his book Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus (Prometheus Books: 1992). What he has to say strikes me as sharp and to the point:

“The Book of Job was a moral fable that promoted acceptance of the unacceptable as the surest way to Yahweh’s favor. Its theme, that a man who stoically accepts undeserved misfortune without questioning his god’s justice will eventually be rewarded, paralleled the Sumerian ‘Lamentation to a Man’s God,’ written a millennium earlier. The Sadducee author of Job, typical of his age, was a believer in palmistry, for he wrote: Allah implanted signs and marks in the hands of all humans, that we may know their deeds (JOB 37:7), thereby setting the stage for another Sadducee who elaborated: Length of days in her right hand, and wealth and status in her left hand (PROV. 3:16). Those lines are often quoted by palmists as evidence of the validity of their superstition, but they are better viewed as evidence of the invalidity of Job and Proverbs.

“Job’s portrayal of the Satan as a male clearly indicates a date of composition later than Ezekiel, for not until the Jews had been under Babylonian and Persian domination long enough to assimilate the Zoroastrian Prince of Darkness, Ahriman, did Yahweh’s prime antagonist cease to be the goddess Ashtaroth. Despite Job’s inclusion in the Judaeo-Christian bible, few mythologians categorize it as nonfiction. Yahweh’s capricious murder of Job’s children is much more acceptable to Yahweh-worshippers who can console themselves that the story is a mere parable.

“Job was written as acknowledged fiction. Nonetheless it contributed significantly to Judaism’s transformation from a monistic to a dualistic mythology…. It has been mentioned that it was ultimately Yahweh himself who caused Job’s torments, since it was Yahweh who gave Satan permission to carry them out. That was the essential weakness of monism in a culture that in post-captivity times had begun to develop a concept of morality that veered toward the objective. In the days when there had been no such concept as objective evil, and even the destruction of a whole city by an erupting volcano-god could be seen as a just punishment for crimes known only to god, monism, the crediting of everything that happened to a single creative force, had presented no problems. But with the recognition that there were injustices in Yahweh’s world, continued monism would have involved the recognition that Yahweh must be unjust.

“Dualism, first conceived by Zarathustra, offered a solution. Zarathustra had divided the creative force into two beings, a good god responsible for all justice, and a bad god responsible for all injustice. However, in relieving the good god, Ahura Mazda, of any guilt for destructive ‘acts of god,’ Zarathustra had also relieved him of his omnipotence; for clearly if the god of light possessed the capacity to destroy the god of darkness and thereby end his evil influence, he would have done so already.

“Continued monism was unacceptable to a nation with an evolving sense of morality. But dualism was equally unacceptable to a nation whose tribal monolatry was evolving into pseudomonotheism (many immortals, but only one designated ‘God’). Job offered a compromise: The Satan was responsible for all evil and injustice; but he could do nothing without Yahweh’s consent, and Yahweh only granted that consent to test his worshippers’ faith. To this day Judaism and Christianity retain the rationalised dualism of Job; whereas Islam represents a reversion to the monism of the pre-captivity Jews.” (pp. 203-204)

Any questions? Comments? Be sure to pass them along!