While looking for Bible verses to discuss, I found an article by Dan Barker on the Freedom from Religion Foundation website. Barker wrote a book, GOD: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, which, if I get my hands on a copy, I will review. But after writing that book, he ended up putting together a top-ten list of what he deems the worst passages in the Old Testament.
His main criterion was that each passage had to show us something about the character of God. They had to be passages in which God Himself was the one either commanding, committing, or condoning the brutality. I thought this would be a great list to really go over.
Number 10, God destroys a good family ‘for no reason.’
What Barker is referring to here is the story of Job. Now, I’ve done quite a bit of work on Job in the past, as it’s one of my favorite books in the Old Testament.
The specific verse Barker is looking at, though, is Job 2:3, which really gets at the core idea most people have when they think of Job. It’s where God tells Satan that there is this guy named Job who is blameless. You can do whatever you want to him, and he will never turn his back on me.
God clearly is the one in control here, and is pushing for brutality in order to prove a point. But we run into a problem, and that really deals with taking verses out of context.
In the book of Job, we really have two Jobs. We have the one in the prologue and the epilogue, which portrays Job as most people see him. This blameless figure, who is tormented by Satan because God says Job will never turn his back. Job remains faithful and, in the end, is rewarded greatly by God.
But then we have this other Job, in the heart of the book, in the prose section. A Job who criticizes God. A Job who has friends who are trying to comfort him, but are quite clear that Job had to be sinning and that’s why he is suffering, to which Job says no. We have a Job who gets angry and calls God unfair, and even challenges God.
This juxtaposition is what the author is trying to play up to make a theological argument. The entire situation is fictional. There may have been a Job at one time, and we do see him mentioned elsewhere, but for the author of Job, it doesn’t matter.
What the author is doing is taking this old fable about Job, which we see in the prologue and epilogue, and he uses it to set up a situation. The traditional wisdom at that time, and we see the friends of Job voicing this, was that suffering was caused by sin. If you were suffering, it was a sign that you were sinful, and thus deserved the punishment.
The author of Job argues against this idea, using a fable people would have been familiar with to set up his argument. Someone reading through the prose section of Job would have had this fable in mind, and they would have known that Job was supposed to be blameless.
Yet here he is anyway, suffering. That is why the author introduces Job’s friends, so that the argument really can take shape. He has Job’s friends serve as the voice of traditional wisdom, and this all really sets up the argument the author is trying to make: that sometimes people suffer, and it has nothing to do with sin. Sometimes we suffer, and there is no clear reason why.
In this prose section, Job really isn’t taking the power out of God’s hands, and while he uses the fable to set up his argument, he also showcases why the image that is presented in the fable isn’t real. The author does this by having Job complain and wish to die. He accuses God of a number of things. He is lamenting and is in no way praising God. He is attacking God and challenging Him by implying that God is a coward or simply doesn’t care, as He won’t meet with Job.
So the picture of Job we get is very different from the stereotypical portrayal of him.
The view we get of God is quite different as well. As opposed to the fable, God isn’t shown to have anything to do with the suffering of Job. It isn’t because of some bet with Satan. Job is simply suffering because sometimes, that is what life brings you. There is chaos in the world, embodied by Leviathan, which even God struggles to control.
This chaos is just part of the world. It’s from which creation is made. It can bring about great marvels and wonders, but it also leads to suffering. That suffering is at times no fault of our own, and God isn’t raining it down on us, but it happens nonetheless.
The issue that Barker faces here is that he has stripped away the context of the story of Job. He completely misses what the book is saying, as it rejects the idea being presented in the fable that Barker partially quotes. Job is a theological treatise. Not reading it in that sense really misses the point.