What Is the Book of Job About? (3 of 15)

Everyone knows it is about suffering. It is more precisely about whether anyone serves God for nothing.

That is the question asked in the opening scene, and Job never hears it.

When Is Job Set?

In the patriarchal period, on internal evidence rather than any stated date.

Job’s wealth is measured in livestock. He offers sacrifices himself as head of his household, with no priesthood, no tabernacle, and no mention of the law or Israel. He lives in Uz, outside the land.

That places the setting in the world of the patriarchs, and it means the book asks its question outside the covenant framework entirely. Nobody in it is Israelite.

When the book was written is a separate question and a debated one.

What Happens in the Heavenly Council?

The sons of God present themselves before the Lord, and the accuser comes with them.

Job 1:6-12. The Hebrew is ha-satan, with the definite article, which functions as a title rather than a name. The accuser, or the adversary.

The grammar is doing real work. A definite article marks a role rather than a personal name, and the same construction appears in Zechariah, where the figure again functions as a prosecutor in a heavenly courtroom and is again rebuked. In both books this being stands inside the divine council, travels on assigned errands, and operates entirely within God’s authority. It is not yet the independent power of later tradition.

Whether and how that figure relates to the fully developed adversary of the New Testament is a real question. It is not one this book answers.

God raises Job unprompted: have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth.

The accuser’s reply is the whole book in one line. Does Job fear God for nothing? He asks whether the piety is bought, and proposes removing the hedge to find out.

Two waves follow. First everything Job has. Then his health.

Why Does Job Never Learn About the Council?

Because if he knew, the test would be meaningless.

The reader is given the frame in chapter one. Job never is. He argues, protests, demands a hearing, and receives an answer, and at no point is he told what happened in the council.

That gap is the design. The reader knows the suffering is not punishment. Job does not, and he holds on anyway.

It also means the book is not primarily addressed to sufferers looking for reasons. It is addressed to readers who now know that reasons exist and are not always disclosed.

What Do Job’s Friends Argue?

Retribution theology, consistently and with increasing cruelty.

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arrive and sit with him seven days in silence, which is the best thing anyone does in the book. Then Job speaks and the cycles begin.

Their position is simple and it was the standard wisdom of the time. God is just. The righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Job is suffering severely. Therefore Job has sinned severely, and the remedy is repentance.

It is airtight and it is wrong, and by the third cycle Eliphaz is inventing specific sins to fill the gap, accusing Job of stripping the poor of clothing and withholding water from the weary.

Job’s counterargument is empirical rather than theological. He points at the world and observes that the wicked frequently prosper and die comfortable, which contradicts the theory.

What Does Job Actually Say?

That he has done nothing to deserve this and he wants his day in court.

He does not curse God, which was the accuser’s prediction. He does something the friends find nearly as shocking: he insists on his innocence and demands a hearing.

Job 19:25-27 contains the famous declaration that his redeemer lives and that he will see God in his flesh, delivered in the middle of his darkest speeches.

Chapter 31 is his final defence and it is a remarkable document. He goes through the charges systematically: he has not looked lustfully, has not denied justice to servants, has not withheld from the poor or the widow, has not trusted in wealth, has not rejoiced at an enemy’s ruin, has not concealed sin. He ends by signing his name to it and demanding an answer.

Who Is Elihu?

The fourth man, who appears without introduction and leaves without comment.

Chapters 32 to 37. He is younger, has waited out of respect, and is angry at everyone: at Job for justifying himself rather than God, and at the friends for condemning Job without answering him.

His contribution is that suffering can be disciplinary and instructive rather than only punitive, which is a genuine advance on the friends.

He is also never mentioned again. God rebukes the three friends at the end and says nothing about Elihu.

Many scholars treat the speeches as a later insertion, and the case is not weak. Elihu appears nowhere else in the book, his arrival interrupts the flow, his style differs noticeably, and his argument that suffering can be disciplinary partly duplicates ground already covered.

Others read them as integral, and the strongest point on that side is the silence itself. Elihu is pointedly excluded when God condemns the friends, and his speeches announce the theophany that immediately follows.

Both readings are held by serious people and the question is open.

What Is God’s Answer From the Whirlwind?

A tour of creation, and it never mentions the reason.

Chapters 38 to 41. God answers Job with questions. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation. Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea. Do you know when the mountain goats give birth. Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom.

Then two creatures at length, Behemoth and Leviathan, described in terms that exceed any ordinary animal.

The common identifications are the hippopotamus and the crocodile, and both run into the text. Behemoth has a tail like a cedar, which no hippopotamus does. Leviathan breathes fire and has multiple heads, which no crocodile does.

Walton and Longman propose reading them instead as quintessential creatures, the most potent land animal and the most potent sea animal imaginable, functioning as embodiments of the forces that resist order rather than as entries in a field guide. That reading fits what the speeches are doing, which is not zoology.

What is absent is the answer to the question. God never tells Job about the council, never explains the suffering, and never defends himself.

What he does instead is put Job inside a creation he does not manage and cannot fully comprehend, and the effect is not humiliation. Job is being shown that the world is larger and stranger than the accounting system his friends were using, and that its governance is not a transaction.

How Does Job End?

With repentance that is not confession of the sins he was accused of, and a double restoration.

Job 42:1-6 has him saying he spoke of things he did not understand, and that he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear but now his eye sees him, and that he repents in dust and ashes.

That is not an admission that the friends were right. God says so explicitly in 42:7, telling Eliphaz that his anger burns against him and his two friends because they have not spoken of him what is right, as his servant Job has.

The friends, who defended God, are rebuked. Job, who accused God of injustice, is vindicated. And Job is told to pray for them.

Then the restoration: everything doubled, except the children, who are replaced in number rather than doubled. That detail has been noticed for a long time, and one reading is that the first ten were not lost in the way the livestock were.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Job 1-42, especially 1:6-12, 19:25-27, 31, 38-41, and 42:1-8.

Chad T. Pierce, “Satan and Related Figures,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Eerdmans, 2010), 1197. Supports the reading of ha-satan as a functional role inside the divine council in both Job and Zechariah.

J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation (John Knox Press, 1985), 217-218. Supports the case for the Elihu speeches as a secondary insertion and the grounds on which it rests.

John H. Walton and Tremper Longman III, How to Read Job (IVP Academic, 2015), 80-81. Supports the objections to the hippopotamus and crocodile identifications and the reading of Behemoth and Leviathan as quintessential anti-order creatures.

Stephen J. Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World (Wipf and Stock, 2006). Supports the range of proposed composition dates and the observation of two distinct characterisations of Job across prose and poetry.

Where the sourcing stops: the date of the book’s composition is disputed and separate from the date of its setting. Whether the Elihu speeches are original to the book or a later addition is a genuine scholarly question and I have not adopted a position. The identification of Behemoth and Leviathan is contested and deliberately not settled here.

Footnotes

1. That ha-satan in Job carries the definite article is worth stating carefully. It is functioning as a title, the accuser, rather than as a personal name, and the figure operates within the council rather than outside it. How that relates to the fully developed adversary of later Scripture is a real question and not one this book answers.
2. God’s rebuke in 42:7 is the most underused verse in the book. The men who spent thirty-five chapters defending God’s justice are told they did not speak rightly about him. The man who accused him of injustice did. Whatever the book is teaching, it is not that God prefers to be defended.