“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked?” (Job 10:1–3)
“The patience of Job” —we’ve all heard it, but it really takes only a brief look at the poetry that makes up the majority of the book of Job to realize that “patient” is probably not the best word to describe Job’s attitude. “Angry,” “betrayed,” “righteous,” there are many emotions behind Job’s poetic discourse; but how, then, do we account for his final speech in 42:2-6? Is he, as seems to be the common Christian interpretation, shamed for having spoken thus to God, even though his complaint was entirely justified? Or, as suggested by alternate translations, is he simply frustrated by God’s lack of response? I propose a third reading, based more on 42:3b (“Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”) than on the contentious verse 6: Job does not just “give up,” or repent for what he said, but rather steps back and reprioritizes, recognizing his place within the whole of creation and the inadequacy of his claims on God.
Job’s social location changes dramatically during the narrative, as he expresses in painfully clear terms in chapters 29–31, and I believe this is one of the keys to understanding his change of heart in the final chapter. At the beginning of the story, Job is at the very top of the social heap. He has sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys, servants (whose inclusion on this list is telling), “so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.” (Job 1:3) Everything is going his way; he has no reason not to be the most generous, holiest man he could be, for as the satan says to God, “Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.” (1:10) As Job describes his previous life in chap. 29, he was truly righteous within the hierarchical, paternalistic structure of his society: he was on the side of the poor and marginalized (29:12–16) and for this he was honored and respected and treated with deference. (29:7–11)
Now, in addition to losing his wealth and children, he has lost his status. He has lost the esteem and companionship of his friends, relatives, and servants (19:13–19), and, more shocking to him judging by the vividness of his language, he has lost his patriarchal position in the community and is shunned by the very poor to whom he was so benevolent. (30:1–19) It is this loss of status that has prompted him to cry out to the Lord about justice. Though he spends chap. 24 bemoaning the injustices of mistreatment of the widow and orphan, we can only assume that this is the first time he has spoken to God on their behalf. The social structures of that community meant that he was on top, and they were on the bottom—charity was essential, but that structure was the way things always were and presumably always would be. Job cannot conceive of a world of which he is not the master, and it is this “injustice” about which he laments so eloquently. No, he did not “deserve” his fall from glory, but he, like Jonah, is crying about the loss of something that was given to him, a social position, a bean plant for which he did not work.
Job’s outrage about this particular injustice demonstrates the power of this social structure, and the way he chooses to argue to God reveals the conception he has of divine justice. He feels that God should “behave toward him as Job behaves toward his own dependents,”(1) and thus that his legalistic argument should be enough reason for God to restore his fortune. His discourses represent an assumption that God holds the same priorities he does, specifically that he is meant to be at the center of his society unless he has done something sinful warranting his downfall. His friends are operating in this same paradigm, with the only difference being that Job recognizes a disconnect, a flaw in the system. He knows that he has done nothing sinful, and by that reasoning the only proper solution is that he be restored to his former social position. It is on this basis that he challenges God—Job’s conception of justice is not sufficient to explain the situation. “He could not escape the dilemma so cogently presented by his friends: if he was innocent, then God was guilty.”(2)
It is this paradigm of Job’s to which God responds, not simply to the legal challenges he has presented. It may appear on first reading that God “dodges” Job’s arguments—he is right that he has not sinned, and so God chooses to answer some other question—but perhaps it makes more sense to consider that God is operating under a different schema in which there are more options than simply “guilt” and “innocence.” Job is completely correct to point out that his friends’ theology of retribution is inadequate, but he is unable to propose a different one. Of course, God is fully able to answer this question, and God does so by sharing God’s joy in creation. God has no use for the morality of Job’s community, in which one is guilty or innocent; “God’s love, like all true love, operates in a world not of cause and effect but of freedom and gratuitousness.” (3)
God does not try to explain Job’s suffering. In the same way as Job’s previous stature in the community, it just was. We can only put it into the category of things “I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (42:3b) God’s answer is, rather, along the lines of Jesus’ parables about the laborers in the vineyard and the prodigal son(4): God’s generosity is not subject to the human rules of “fairness,” but rather is freely and generously given. God gives grace and beauty to all of Creation, because God takes joy in it. The health and well-being of humans are important to God, because we are part of the creation in which our Creator takes such pleasure, but they are by no means the most important Divine concern. All God’s creatures, the lion, the deer, the ox, the hawk, are equally beloved, even as they exist outside the service of humanity. Perhaps one reason many readers do not immediately see that God is addressing Job’s concerns at all is the fact that God’s speeches are pointedly free of human influence. God talks first of the birth of the cosmos, long before humanity, and then about the creatures of the earth, who are pointedly wild, not “useful” to humans:
Is the wild ox willing to serve you?
Will it spend the night at your crib?
Can you tie it in the furrow with ropes,
or will it harrow the valleys after you?
Will you depend on it because its strength is great,
and will you hand over your labor to it?
Do you have faith in it that it will return,
and bring your grain to the threshing floor?
The only explicit mention of anything human in all of God’s speech comes in 38:26(5), where God describes the rain, sent to fall “on the desert, which is empty of human life.” God does not say, “You, Job, are insignificant in the face of my glorious might,” but rather, “You are a small part of my beloved creation, which does not revolve around you.”
Job’s conception of a just and correct social order was more or less Job-centric, because his community’s “moral consequence” theology allowed him to believe he deserved his influential social position. This translated into a concept of God that was equally anthropocentric—“both Job and his friends had assumed that God primarily reacts to human conduct, a view of the world that puts the individual human at its center.”(6) God reminds Job in these discourses that Job is a “living being” (nepeš hayya) just like all the other animals in creation.(7) It is a drastic and disorienting thing to be reminded of, particularly when one comes from the highest tier of society, and I think Job handles it the only way he can; by acknowledging that he spoke too broadly, and giving up his lamenting.
But what of the poor in Job’s city, the ones who performed such rhetorical acrobatics in Job’s dialogue? Will Job’s treatment of them change in any way as a result of his experiences? It is hard to say, particularly because previously, he did all that could have been expected of him in his particular context. (29:12-17) However it is noteworthy that while servants were listed as a part of Job’s fortunes in chap. 1 (1:3), they are conspicuously missing from the list of property restored to Job in chap. 42. (42:12) It is possible that Job’s experiences of first losing his wealth and status, and then being told—by God—that he does not have the cosmic centrality he imagined himself to have, might have some effect on his social outlook. Perhaps the absence of servants from his estate at the end of the story can be viewed as synecdoche for a more thorough change of heart on Job’s part.
Job is a beautiful and many-layered book, full of complex characters, beautiful poetry, and an ending which could be interpreted in multiple ways. Its common flattening into platitudes about “patience” does not do it justice, and deprives congregations of a powerful role model in Job—he is suffering, and he speaks his mind. Job speaks out of his experience, speaks against the conventional wisdom of his community, and is not afraid to cry out to God. He also learns an important lesson, one which all humans, particularly privileged white humans, can stand to learn again: he is not the center of the world. While his suffering is significant, it is no more so than the suffering of the poor and abandoned within his own community, none of which is any more important than the well-being of the rest of God’s creation. He did not deserve his suffering, but neither did he deserve his privilege.
Notes
1 Newsom, Carol. “Job,” in ed. Newsom, C. A. and S. H. Ringe (1998). Women's Bible commentary. Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press.
2 Gutiérrez, Gustavo. (1987). On Job : God-talk and the suffering of the innocent. Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books.
3 Gutiérrez, 87.
4 Gutiérrez, 90.
5 McKibben, Bill. (1994). The comforting whirlwind : God, Job, and the scale of Creation. Grand Rapids, Mich., W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. 36.
6 Newsom, 143.
7 Hiebert, Theodore., “The Human Vocation: Origins and Transformations in Christian Traditions” in ed. Hessel, D. T. and R. R. Ruether (2000). Christianity and ecology : seeking the well-being of earth and humans. Cambridge, Mass., Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.
