Most of us are scandalized by the suffering of the innocent. We don’t mind if the guilty suffer. In fact, we tend to believe that the guilty ought to be punished, just as the just ought to be rewarded. The book of Job considers a man who is not just innocent but virtuous, and who is nevertheless afflicted with every sort of suffering. Most of the book is written in poetry and contains Job’s defense against his “friends,” who want him to admit that his suffering is deserved, and his outraged complaints against God, who has allowed him to suffer unjustly. It also includes a response by God, who claims that a mere mortal like Job cannot possibly understand why the universe is the way it is. The poetic body of the poem is sandwiched between a prose prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces Job and a story about why God allows him to suffer. The epilogue provides an unsatisfactory happy ending that “undoes” all the suffering.
The prologue begins on earth and introduces Job as a very good man, who fears (i.e., respects and obeys) God and turns away from evil. He is also very rich in land, livestock, and children. The story then moves to heaven, where God appears as a monarch who holds court with his “sons” (officials). An exchange ensues between God and one of the officials called “the Satan” or the accuser, whose job is to bring accusations against wrongdoers. The exchange begins with God’s claim that Job is a really good person and the Satan can’t find any fault in him. The Satan bets that Job will stop being good if he suffers. God takes the bet and gives the accuser permission to take away all Job’s wealth. A second bet leaves Job covered in painful and loathsome boils, leading Job to curse the day he was born.
Many people reading this story find God’s action capricious and uncaring; God seems like a cruel gambler and Job simply a pawn that God sacrifices to win a bet. But is the author of this story really claiming that God engages in betting games with his subordinates?Thoughtful people have always seen the story as being not about the character of God but about why the innocent suffer. I believe that the exchanges between God and the Satan are about alternative possible designs for the universe and how good people are treated in each alternative.
The prologue begins by assuming a universe ruled with retributive justice, just the sort of universe we would like to see, in which the just are rewarded and evildoers punished. We’ll call this Universe I. Many of the books in the Hebrew scriptures—especially Deuteronomy, Samuel I and II, and Kings I and II—assume that God operates on the principle of retributive justice. It’s an attractive notion, because it holds people in power to account. It enables God to protect the poor and defenseless, even when, as often happens, human society fails to.
Retributive justice is not obvious in the world around us. Cruel dictators oppress their subjects for decades; unscrupulous business owners cheat employees and customers with impunity; and drug lords live like kings while their customers die. Various tweaks to the theory have been advanced to explain these anomalies. For example, reward and punishment may be delayed, possibly until an afterlife. Another possibility is that punishment will fall on the children or grandchildren of the wicked; the historical books of the Bible sometimes offer this explanation of why God did not punish bad kings. But, the retributive justice theory claims, retribution will surely come.
Universe I of Job is a just world that exhibits retributive justice. In the beginning of the prologue, we are told that Job is both terrifically good and also immensely wealthy and successful. This is just what we would expect in a just world that reliably rewards virtue. God is justifiably satisfied with Job’s performance and points him out to the Satan as a stellar example of how good human beings can be. But the Satan is not satisfied with apparent goodness. He tells God that retributive justice has a downside. Sure, Job acts like a good person, but what is his real motivation? Maybe he is being good not because he cares about justice, generosity, and so on, but because he wants to be very rich. Since he’s doing well by doing good, he has no reason to do anything wrong. This is obviously not the same thing as being truly good, and God cannot know why Job behaves so well. In fact, it’s not clear that even Job can know his own motivation; he may be subconsciously motivated by what has worked in the past. In other words, in Universe I, it may not even be possible to be good. If being good didn’t bring rewards, the Satan argues, Job would soon stop being good and start cheating his neighbors the way other people do. He wants a chance to test Job.
This is presented as a one-time wager in the prologue, but it can be viewed as a design session in eternity for the way the universe ought to be constructed. Myths such as this one are usually not just about something that happened (or not) at some point in the past; they are meant to illuminate deep truths about human nature or the way the world works.
In this story, God has to admit that the accuser has a point. Retributive justice is based on a person’s actions, but it does not test what is in the heart; people might selfishly do the right things just to gain a reward. The only way to test whether a person is truly good is to decouple behavior and retribution and allow at least some bad things to happen to good people. So God gives up Universe I, based on retributive justice, and moves on to the Universe II design, in which some bad things can happen to good people, but good people are safe from still worse things. In God’s Universe II design, the Satan is allowed to take away Job’s wealth, but not to attack his health.
The Satan takes full advantage of the design for the Universe II by arranging the worst possible luck for Job. All of Job’s animals (oxen, donkeys, and sheep) are killed in natural calamities or by raiders, who also kill Job’s servants. All ten of Job’s children are also killed, together with their families. Now, we might think that this is a calamity for the children and servants more than for Job, but in ancient times, people did not think in such individualistic terms. “Job” refers not just to an individual man but to the entire family. People identified with their families; if the family failed, every member failed. Every individual will die, but the important thing in ancient societies was for the family to continue, providing a sort of immortality for all its members. The great loss for “Job”—that is, for the family—is that the family will die out. (The story is not concerned with the servants.)
Job passes this test with flying colors. He has lost everything, including the future of his family, and he is devastated, but he does not complain against God. He was born without possessions and now finds himself without possessions, so he understands that he has no ground for complaint. He knows that everything he had was in some sense a gift—either inherited, or gained through luck, or won using skills that he learned from his elders.
The next time the heavenly beings come to report to God, God points out to the Satan that even in Universe II, Job is virtuous. But the Satan has another argument. It may be true that Universe II does not reward virtue with immunity from loss, but it at least provides a sort of insurance for the just. In return for being good, Job is guaranteed that he won’t suffer physical pain and illness. Losing wealth is nothing compared to living in pain. Satan argues that Job is probably willing to act justly just for the health insurance. That being the case, it is still not possible to distinguish between true virtue and self-seeking. Thus, Universe II has the same drawback as Universe I; retributive “justice” can still reward people who are not truly good, but merely clever as well as selfish.
Again God has to admit that even he can’t tell by Job’s actions whether he is truly good and deserving of a reward, and thus even this modified level of retributive justice is not really just. So God changes the design of the universe again, to Universe III. In Universe III, the Satan has the power to destroy Job’s health. God makes one curious exception: the Satan must not kill Job. Note that this is not insurance for Job. God’s purpose is evidently to make sure Job has an opportunity to pass the test. But it also plays into Satan’s hands: many people afflicted with pain and sickness wish they were dead—and Job will, too—but this release will be denied him.
The Satan afflicts Job with painful and loathsome boils all over his skin, making him repellent to others and a misery to himself. To anyone who thinks we are living in Universe I, Job must seem like a terrible person, because his suffering is extreme. The prologue ends with Job sitting on a dung heap, cursing the day he was born and wishing only to die.
We live in Universe III. There is a certain loose correlation between crime and punishment: many drug dealers and murderers end up dead or in prison. But other evildoers die rich, and many innocents are destroyed in natural disasters or murdered by evildoers. The book of Job was written as a protest against the then dominant belief that God rewards the just and punishes the wicked in this world—that is, that we live in Universe I. Job is a fictional counterexample, but readers in ancient times or modern could easily think of many others. Most of the book consists of Job’s vehement protestations of innocence to his friends and his angry accusations of injustice against God. God does not explain why the universe is the way it is, just says that human beings cannot possibly understand it. In the epilogue, Job’s passion and honesty find favor with God, who tells Job’s friends that Job was right to complain and they were wrong to defend God. Nor does the prologue explain why the universe is the way it is, because we cannot possibly understand it. It points out some problems with the way we think things ought to work, and prepares the stage for the arguments of the poem.