And so I see Qoheleth as among the great wisdom teachers of the world. If it is not too bold a claim, I see him as a Jewish Lao-tzu. I do not think the similarities between Qoheleth’s thought and Eastern thought are due to cultural contact with Eastern religions. I doubt that he had any awareness of the Tao-te-ching or Buddhist teachings. Rather, I think the similarities flow out of similar reflections on human experience, perhaps even out of similar experiences of the sacred.
The wisdom of Qoheleth is thus a subversive wisdom. His teaching undermines and subverts “the way” taught by conventional wisdom. It is also an alternative wisdom, for it points to another way, one that leads beyond convention. To use a familiar phrase from Robert Frost, the subversive and alternative wisdom of Qoheleth is “the road less traveled.”
Job
The dialogue and conflict within Israel’s wisdom tradition continue in the book of Job. Radical questioning of conventional wisdom is this document’s central feature—a document whose magnificent language, provocative content, and stunning climax make it one of the most remarkable books in the Bible.
Job has received extraordinary accolades. Martin Luther spoke of it as magnificent and sublime as no other work of Scripture. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a famous poet of the nineteenth century, called it the greatest poem of ancient and modern times. Another nineteenth-century Englishman, the historian Thomas Carlyle, said that nothing that has ever been written, in the Bible or out of it, is of equal merit.37
As mentioned earlier, the book of Job was probably written during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE or shortly thereafter. It begins with a brief prose prologue (the first two chapters) and concludes with an even briefer prose epilogue (42.7–17). In between is the main body of the book, cast in the form of poetry and running almost forty chapters long (3.1–42.6). The prose prologue may be an old folktale adapted by the author of the poetic body as the framework for his work.
There is no scholarly consensus about either the relationship of the prose prologue to the poetic body or the literary unity of the book as a whole. Some scholars see considerable tension between the prologue and the poetic body, and some see the poetic body itself as containing the work of more than one author. Without trying to resolve any of these questions, I will treat the book as a whole in its present form.
It is common to see the book of Job as wrestling with the problem of innocent suffering. This common view is only partly correct. On the one hand, it is true that the main character, Job, suffers intensely and does not know why; he cannot see that he has done anything to deserve the intensity of his pain and loss. On the other hand, I do not see that the author provides any answer to that question—nor, I am convinced, does he intend to do so. His purpose, I will suggest, is quite different.
The Prose Prologue: Chapters 1–2
The prologue introduces the character Job and the situation that led to his predicament. The first verse reminds us of the “once upon a time” of folktales about long ago and far away: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” The next two verses tell us that he was a very good and prosperous man—one who lived the life of wisdom: he was “blameless and upright, feared God and turned away from evil.” Life was going well for him. Not only a paragon of wisdom and virtue, he was blessed with ten children and great prosperity: “seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants.” Indeed, he “was the greatest of all the people of the east.”
With that groundwork laid, the prologue then turns from earth to heaven, where the dramatic action of the book is set in motion. There, we are told, a meeting is held between the heavenly beings and God. Among them is a figure called “Satan”—not yet the evil power opposed to God of later Jewish and Christian tradition, but a servant of God whose task is patrolling the earth as a kind of espionage agent. God brags to Satan about his righteous servant Job:
There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.38
Satan is unimpressed. After all, why shouldn’t Job be faithful—God has given him everything. So Satan says to God:
Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence [a positive image of protection] around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.39
Satan then challenges God to a wager. Take away everything Job has, he says, and see how faithful Job is then. God agrees, and the wager is on.40
Job’s life of blessedness then ends. In two stages, Satan takes it away. In stage one, Job’s flocks are all stolen or destroyed, most of his servants are killed, and his children all die as a house collapses on them. But Job’s response is impeccable:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.41
In stage two, Satan (with God’s permission) goes after Job’s own body, inflicting him with “loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” His possessions gone, his children dead, he is reduced to sitting among the ashes, scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery. But he remains faithful to God: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” The narrator hardly needs to add, “In all of this, Job did not sin with his lips.”42 God has won the wager.
If we interpret the book of Job within the framework of the question, “Why do the righteous suffer?” the answer provided by the prologue is very strange. Job’s suffering was caused by something that happened completely “over his head”: a wager in the heavenly council between God and one of God’s servants. I doubt that Job would have been impressed with this explanation. Neither should we be.
Rather, the prologue and the book have another purpose. That purpose is expressed in the question Satan asks God: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” The question is both provocative and profound, and it signals the author’s probing of conventional wisdom. Why be religious? Why take God seriously? Is it because “there’s something in it for me”?
That is the answer of conventional religious wisdom, ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian, and as found in other religions. Follow this way—it will take you to a good place, whether internally or externally, whether in this life or the next. Its Christian forms are many: believe in God and Jesus and you’ll go to heaven, or you’ll prosper, or you’ll have peace of mind, or you’ll be fulfilled. All of these turn taking God seriously into a means to some other end. But Satan’s question leads us to reflect on the central issue raised by the prologue: Is there such a thing as religion unmotivated by self-interest? What would it mean to take God seriously not as a means, but as the ultimate end?
The prologue has another purpose as well. It sets up the dialogue between Job and his friends that fills most of the poetic main body.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arrive at the end of the second chapter; their purpose is to comfort Job. So shocked are they at his miserable appearance that they sit on the ground with him in silence for seven days.
The Poetic Dialogue between Job and His Comforters
The author has structured the poetic body of the book as a series of interchanges between Job and his friends. Job speaks, then Eliphaz; Job speaks, then Bildad; Job speaks, then Zophar; and the cycle repeats itself three times. Though the language is often magnificent, the content is quite repetitious. Rather than expositing all three cycles, then, I will provide passages that illustrate the depths of Job’s suffering and questioning and the core of his friends’ responses.
Job’s Torment The portrait of Job in the prologue is responsible for the proverbial “patience of Job,” a phrase first used in the letter of James in the New Testament.43
As we turn now to the Job of the poetic main body, we will see that he is anything but patient.
Job speaks first. His suffering is so great that he curses the day he
was born:
Let the day perish in which I was born,
and the night that said, “A man-child is conceived.”
Let that day be darkness! . . .
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year. . . .
Yes, let that night be barren:
let no joyful cry be heard in it. . . .
Why did I not die at birth,
come forth from the womb and expire? . . .
Why was I not buried like a stillborn child? . . .
For my sighing comes like my bread,
and my groanings are poured out like water.44
Job’s suffering is relentless. Even sleep gives him no relief: “When I lie down, I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn”. He accuses God of giving him no rest:
When I say, “My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,”
then you terrify me with dreams and terrify me with visions,
so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body.
I loathe my life. . . .
Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
Why have you made me your target?45
Job cannot understand why he is suffering. He knows that he has done nothing to deserve this degree of torment and accuses God of destroying the righteous as well as the wicked:
I am blameless; I do not know myself.
I loathe my life.
It is all the same. Therefore I say,
God destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
When disaster brings sudden death,
God mocks at the calamity of the innocent.
Then Job addresses God directly:
You know that I am not guilty,
and there is no one to deliver out of your hand.
Your hands fashioned and made me,
and now you turn and destroy me.46
Job’s Friends’ Responses Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar consistently respond with the same refrain: you must have done something wrong. They defend the honor of God by reaffirming the claim that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Eliphaz says to Job:
Think now, who that was innocent has ever perished?
Or where were the upright cut off?
As I have seen, those who plow iniquity
and sow trouble reap the same.
Eliphaz, who sees what is happening to Job as divine discipline, offers his advice. If I were you, he says:
I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause. . . .
God sets on high those who are lowly,
and those who mourn are lifted to safety. . . .
How happy is the one whom God reproves;
therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. . . .
We have searched this out; it is true.
Hear, and know it for yourself.47
Bildad makes the same point:
If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then God will rouse up for you and restore to you your rightful place. . . . God will not reject a blameless person.48
Zophar, the third friend to speak, is beginning to lose his patience. Accusing Job of being “full of talk” and “babble,” he mocks Job and says that Job should suffer more than he already is:
You say, “My conduct is pure, and I am clean in God’s sight.”
But oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you,
and tell you the secrets of wisdom!
Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.49
Like Eliphaz and Bildad, he also suggests that repentance is the way to get back on God’s good side and bring about a reversal of Job’s misfortune.
Not surprisingly, Job does not find much comfort in all of this. He calls his friends “worthless physicians” and “miserable comforters.” About their wisdom and counsel, he says, “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes.”50
The central issue in the long section of the book reporting the exchanges between Job and his friends is the inadequacy of conventional wisdom. The friends are, of course, the voice of Israel’s conventional wisdom. Their point of view, perhaps in hardened form, is the conventional wisdom of the book of Proverbs: the righteous will flourish; the wicked will wither. The friends draw the obvious corollary: if you are not flourishing but withering, you must be doing something wrong. Indeed, the friends are the voices of conventional wisdom in other times and places as well: if your life’s not going right, it’s your fault; if your life’s not going right, fix it.
They also demonstrate the peril of quoting all parts of the Bible as if they reflect God’s point of view. According to the book of Job, what Job’s friends say at considerable length reflects a point of view that not only the character of Job and the author reject, but that God also rejects.51 Conventional wisdom, whether biblical or secular, offers an inadequate explanation of suffering; it fails to account for the way the world is ordered.
Job’s Dialogue and Encounter with God Throughout the long central section, Job not only rejects the wisdom of his friends, but expresses a strong desire to meet God face-to-face that he might confront God with the unfairness of his suffering.
Job’s desire is granted, but the meeting turns out different than he had imagined it. The last five chapters contain God’s answer to Job, expressed in the most remarkable nature poetry in the Hebrew Bible. God answers Job “out of the whirlwind.” In a series of rhetorical questions, God displays the wonders of creation to Job: the foundations of the earth, the sea, the dwelling place of light, the storehouses of snow and hail, the constellations, clouds and rain and lightning, lions, mountain goats, deer, the wild ass and wild ox, the ostrich, the war horse, the hawk and the eagle, and ultimately the mythological sea monsters of Behemoth and Leviathan.52
The language is marvelous, the display magnificent. The effect of the latter is twofold. On the one hand, the display speaks of the absolute difference (though not distance) between the creator and the created. On the other hand, it speaks of the world of undomesticated nature—the nonhuman world of creation beyond culture—as an epiphany or disclosure of God.
The display stuns Job into smallness and silence:
I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
I lay my hand on my mouth; I have spoken once,
and I will not answer;
twice, but will proceed no further.53
Then Job does speak to God one more time. His words are the climax of the book:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you.54
Seeing God is classical language for a mystical experience: an intense, immediate experience of the sacred. In many traditions, the “vision of God” is the peak experience of the religious quest. Here, in the climax of the book, the author of Job presents the character of Job as having a firsthand experience of the sacred. I am persuaded that the author knew this kind of experience in his own life. I have difficulty imagining how he could have written the climax as he does if he had not.
The contrast between hearing and seeing is the key to the book’s climax. What Job had heard was the conventional understanding of God as conveyed by tradition. No doubt he had accepted it until his time of calamity began.55 Then it no longer made sense to him, despite the fervent repetition of it by his well-intentioned friends. It did not fit his experience, and he was resolute enough not to agree with those who put it forward. But his rejection of conventional wisdom called everything he had once believed into question. Now, at the end of the book, he sees God—he experiences the sacred. In the words of an older translation, “But now my eye beholds you.”
Job’s experience of God gave him no new answers or explanations for the problem of suffering. But his experience convinced him that God was real in spite of the human inability t
o see fairness in the world.
His experience of God changed him: “Therefore I melt into nothingness, and repent in dust and ashes,” he said. As his old construction of the world (and himself) melted away, he “repented”—that is, he changed.56
A century ago, William James made a distinction that perfectly illuminates the climax of the book of Job. The most brilliant and influential American psychologist and philosopher of his day (and brother of the novelist Henry James), James distinguished between secondhand and firsthand religion. Secondhand religion is religion as learned from others. It is religion as a set of teachings and practices to be believed and followed—in other words, religious conventional wisdom. Firsthand religion is the religion that flows from the firsthand experience of God. At the end of the book of Job, the main character moves from secondhand religion—from what he had learned—to firsthand religion: “I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye beholds you.”
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