Episode 7: the Book of Job

(Originally posted on Facebook on 24 November 2016)

Oh this one was so hard! But not for the reasons I thought it would be hard!!

For one, I hate taking stands, but here’s one: I cannot believe in the Bible as a stand-alone source of revelation. Sacred, yes. Collected wisdom, yes. Cornerstone of faith, yes. But magic book, you pick it up and read it and anything you take away will be Truth? No. Just, no. Particularly for the Old Testament, which is a translation of a written recording of oral traditions – origin stories and cultural history and morality tales that just don’t make sense without additional context.

I say this now because I didn’t understand the excerpts from Job in the course material, so I read the whole chapter before class. In English, even. Which helped a bit, but not nearly enough. And I got the impression that my classmates had had very similar experiences – each of us came to class with some idea of what was going on, but all of us were, to some extent or another, just wrong. Which seems like a cautionary tale all by itself.

But in any case, here’s what we learned. The Book of Job is a story within a story. The framing story was a legend well-known across the Middle East, and it’s the one I would have dug out of the depths of my brain if I had been forced to say something about Job before this class. It goes something like this: God and Satan (who is one of God’s deputies in this case, not the devil, though I’m not sure why this makes a difference) have an argument: God says that Job is an upright guy who will always remain faithful to Him; Satan says yeah right, he’ll crack as soon as something hard comes along. God says fine, I’ll show you. Terrible things are sent – Job loses everything he has, and then endures horrible physical torture on top of that – but Job doesn’t renounce God. God wins the argument, Job is restored to health and prosperity. Moral of the story: be like Job. Problematic conclusion: God is kind of a jerk.

Except that’s all of three of 42 chapters. What actually takes up the bulk of the Book of Job is an expansion/meditation on the core story, and it involves Job’s friends. They’ve heard what happened and come to offer him support. It goes down something (kind of) like this:

Job: This really, really sucks. I wish I’d never been born.
Friends: Well ok dude, but we know God is righteous. He rewards good and punishes evil. You must have done something terrible to deserve this.
Job: Maybe…but if that’s the case, I don’t know what I did.
Friends: Like, maybe, it wasn’t you, but your kids did something bad, and you’re responsible for that? You really should repent.
Job: I would repent if I had any idea what I did wrong, but as far as I know, I didn’t do anything. 
Friends: Right…but God is all powerful and sees everything. Maybe you did something bad and didn’t even know it? Think harder.
Job: I’ve been thinking, trust me. To my knowledge, I didn’t do anything wrong.
Friends: Well but we’re sure about this. God punishes evil. Or ok, maybe he’s just testing you to, you know, make you a better person.
Job: I was already a good person! You know what? I am so done with this. THIS SUCKS AND YOU AREN’T HELPING.
God: Hey, Friends.
Friends: Oh, hi God, what’s up?
God: Job was right. He didn’t do anything wrong.
Friends (to Job): Oh. Dude. We didn’t know.

Moral of the story: don’t be like Job’s friends. Disappointing conclusion: the Book of Job doesn’t actually offer an answer to the “why” of suffering. It says, you don’t get to understand this. Are you going to get distracted trying to rationalize what you see, or are you going to show up for your friend?

So right in the middle of the holy text of a major world religion, there’s a story promoting humanism...?

And even as we think we’ve moved (way) on from the pre-Christian understanding of God, there’s such a strong human impulse to rationalize the problems we see others having. It lets us off the hook, reassures us that they probably did something wrong, and as long as we avoid that particular pitfall, we’ll be safe.

It's all over. Black people are poor because they don’t have a sense of pride. Those people in red states don’t have good jobs because they’re too lazy to move out of their small towns. Aunt Martha died of lung cancer because she smoked. My cousin lost his home because he’s an addict. And what can be distracting, I think, is that occasionally these things are in fact true. Job, the perfectly righteous man who deserved nothing bad, was just a legend, an ideal, a thought experiment. In reality, people *are* imperfect and *do* sometimes bring suffering upon themselves. But even so, maybe the question we need to ask is still not “why?” so much as “what now?” We can't change what happened, we can only decide how to respond.

So here I am, all comfy in my Swiss apartment, thankful that this Thanksgiving I don’t have to listen to anyone talk about politics. Score one for moving abroad! But tomorrow, even here, there will be a sale for “Black Friday.” This is what my country has exported to the world – not the tradition of giving thanks for what we have, but the one of crazed consumption the day after.

What now?