Writings
אִיּוֹב
Job
A sustained argument against the idea that suffering is deserved.
What is in it
A prose frame opens and closes the book; everything between is poetry, and some of the hardest Hebrew in the Bible. Job's friends defend the standard view that suffering follows wrongdoing, and Job refuses it for thirty chapters.
When God finally answers out of the whirlwind, the answer is a series of questions about the natural world rather than an explanation, and the friends are told they spoke wrongly while Job spoke rightly.
If you read one chapter
Job 38
The answer from the whirlwind, which answers nothing and changes everything.
Passages worth knowing
- Job 1 to 2The frame, and the wager.
- Job 3Job curses the day he was born.
- Job 28A poem asking where wisdom is to be found.
- Job 38 to 41The whirlwind speeches.
- Job 42:7The friends are told they did not speak rightly, and Job did.
Questions to sit with
- 01
God never tells Job why. Is the book satisfied with that, and are you?
- 02
The friends say what much of Proverbs says. Why are they condemned for it?