Job, or the suffering of God

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Frieda Clark Hyman

THE BOOK OF THE BIBLE THAT IS MOST concerned with the nature of faith and the anxieties that it engenders, is Job. In direct contradiction to the conclusion of the Pharisee, R. Yannai, that "we cannot understand the flourishing of the wicked, nor the suffering of the righteous" (Pirke Avot, 4: 19), Job is explicit or almost explicit about the latter. Immediately we know the cause, and we recognize the injustice of Job's suffering. How can we not, when God, Himself, asserts that He has destroyed without cause. So stunning is this admission, the Rabbis commented, that if it were not part of Scripture, they would not dare say it.

But it is precisely this admission that defines the dilemma of Divinity. The calamities which befall Job, and for which there can be no justification, and which, indeed, God does not justify, nevertheless have a rationale which transcends Job's condition. It is this dilemma which we shall address later.

Job, a righteous man, so designated by God Himself, is brought low: everything that he owns or cherishes -- oxen, asses, sheep, camels, servants, and, most agonizing of all, seven sons and three daughters -- are either stolen or destroyed. As a final fillip, he is ravaged by a loathsome disease, a kind of black leprosy.

His wife, all that he has left, advises him to "bless" (curse) God and die, a suggestion that he rejects with scathing:

You speak as one of the impious ... what, shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the evil? (Job 2:10)

She may be silenced -- at least, we don't hear from her again. But we can be sure that she was not satisfied. She, not Job, bore those sons and daughters.

With this rebuke, Job seems to put his wife down. But what can he do with his three friends and, yet, a fourth who will appear toward the end of the Book? The first three converge upon him to mourn with him and to console him, tearing their clothes, casting dust upon their heads, and sitting silently with him for a full week.

But when they console, or think that they are consoling, they only exacerbate Job's pain. He now suffers, they assert, because he has sinned. Moreover, to fulminate against his punishment is an act of rebellion against God and man, for reward and punishment are central to society and Divine Law.(1)

At the very outset, Eliphaz, one of the friends, makes this stance clearer. In 4:7, he asks: "Whoever perished, being innocent? Or where were the righteous destroyed?" Indeed, they remind Job that he, too, accepted this dogma. Had he not comforted others with the very words that they, his friends, now use?

Shall he now deny this truth?

Job does. He knows that he does not deserve such anguish. To be sure, in 7:20-21, he concedes the possibility of transgression: "I have sinned; what shall I do unto You, O Preserver of men? Why have You set me as a mark for You, so that I am a burden to myself? And why do You not pardon my sin and take away my iniquity?"(2)

The bitterness is patent. The Preserver of men is bent on destroying man. And even if that man were genuinely debased, is not God the fount of mercy? Why, then, does He not forgive?

But it is the very first of Job's questions, "What shall I do unto You ...," which is crucial to the unfolding of this Book. Indeed, as we shall see, it is one of the keys to its explication. This same challenge reappears in 22:3, when Eliphaz will demand of Job: "Is it any advantage to the Almighty that you are righteous? Or is it gain to Him that you make your way perfect?" As though this were not enough, Elihu, the fourth friend, will also scoff at man's seeming importance to Divinity.

Theophany, as we shall see, will answer Job -- and, in accents so magisterial, that they will reduce this militant Job to humility.

The hitch, of course, is theophany. Must revelation take place in order for faith to strengthen itself? Must we see and hear to believe? Yet, we know, it is not that Job does not believe in the existence of God. On the contrary, it is that belief which forces him to demand, as did Abraham, that God be an ethical God.

But confrontations of this kind are not for Job's friends. Job's upbraidings are, in their eyes, brazen. Nor, to their dismay, is this the end of Job's huzpah. For, so driven is he by knowledge of his guiltlessness, and so exacerbated is he by the cliches of conventional wisdom, repeated by the three, that his protest and indignation are vented, throughout the Book, not only against these three so-called friends, but against God. Chapter 9 contains the nadir of Job's bitterness and despair. In verses 22-24 he declares:

He destroys the innocent and the wicked. If the scourge slay suddenly He will mock at the calamity of the guiltless. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the face of the judges thereof.

To the tutored ear, the first of these statements must strike a perversely familiar note, replying, as it were, to Abraham's challenge of Genesis 18:25: "Far it be from You to slay the righteous with the wicked."