The Book of Job:

A multiperspectival approach to the problem of evil,
The suffering of the righteous, and the justice of God. A theodicy.

Rob Sheldon, MAReligion, Westminster Seminary © 1999

Juan Gris:Landscape with Houses at Ceret (1913)



Job: A Multiperspectival Approach

  1. Preface

    1. Methodology

    2. Introduction

  2. Perspectives on Job

    1. Job as Wisdom Literature

    2. Job as Poetry

    3. Job as God on Trial

    4. Job as Man on Trial

    5. Job as Sufferer

    6. Job as Existentialist

    7. Job as Natural Scientist

    8. Job as Theodicy

    9. Job as Messianic Apologetic

    10. A Feminist Critique of Job

  3. Commentary on Job

    1. The Court

    2. Round One

    3. Round Two

    4. Round Three

    5. Friend of the Court

    6. The Judge

    7. The Verdict


The Biblical Text in Translation (Dead Links)

NIV * KJV * RSV * NASB * Douay-Rheims * Darby's * Young's * About Translations

*
German (Luther) * Dutch (Luther) * German (Modern) * Latin (Vulgate) * Pig-Latin (KJV) * Spanish * Hungarian * Swedish * Danish * Finnish * Italian * French (Louis Segond)

What is a Dead Link?

It's a copy of the original page saved locally, so that the page won't vanish when the owner does. Try the "Live Link" if you want more information.

Mailbag

Other Views

Sermons and Sermonettes

Pope JohnPaul II's Salvici Dolores sermon on suffering (Live)
John Barnett's sermon (Live)
Dan Dozier's sermon on Job (Live)
John W Brown's 1996 sermons on Job (Live)
A RBC Ministries Devotional on Job 1 (Live)
Ligonier Ministries "TableTalk" series on Job (Live)
Bible Pathway Ministry's 1996 study (Live)
Ray C. Stedman's 1977 Sermon series (Live)
Gary Petty's Sermon on Suffering (Live)
David Sisler's article on Suffering (Live)
Some sermons of Charles Spurgeon (Live)
A sermon of John Wesley (Live)
Four sermons of Fred Anderson (Live)
John Reisinger on Affliction (Live)
Ivan Maddox 01 02 (Live)
George Kirkpatrick likes Elihu (Live)
Tom Brown's "Why Job Suffered" (Live)
David Reid's "Why Me, Lord?" (Live)
Hudson Taylor's "Blessed Adversity" (Live)

On Satan

Jeffrey Maehr against Satan (Live)
In defense of Satan (Live)
Satan a fallen angel (Live)
More against Satan (Live)
More against Satan (Live)
Purpose of Satan (Live)
Jack Barr's Description of Satan (Live)
Charlie Hale's Personal Testimony (Live)
The Battle against Satan (Live)
Pop Culture defence of Satan (Live)
Satan and Suffering (Live)

The Philosophy of Theodicy--the problem of evil

The "Free Will Defense" (Live)
RBC Tract: Does God Want Me Well? (Live)
RBC Tract: Reasons to Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering (Live)
RBC Tract: Why We Believe (Live)
Michael Connelly (Live)
DIALOGOS Issue Nov. 96 (Live)
Ken Cauthen's position (Live)
A Theodicy bibliography (Live)
Another Theodicy bibliography by B.-T. L. Whitney (Live)
Greg Koukl's 60 second theodicy (Live)
Forrest Baird's analysis of the theodicy audience (Live)
Doug Erlandson's new defense (Live)
Glenn Miller's Theodicy material (Live)
Tim Stall's Theodicy (Live)
Doug Muder's Personal Theodicy & Commentary on Kushner (Live)
Louis Goldberg: Apologetics-Ch.16: The Existence of Evil (Live)
Mark Copeland's Outline on Suffering (Live)

Related Stuff

Tim Bulkeley's Glossary of Biblical Terms
Tim Bulkeley's Hypertext Post-Modern Bible (Live)
Glenn Miller's thoughts on Feminism in the book of Job (Live)
Roger Eaton's links to other Job sites (Live)
Links to Information on Mesopotamia (Live)


Preface to Job

Psalm 127
Unless the LORD build the house, its builders labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.
In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat--
for he grants sleep to those he loves.



This commentary would not have been possible without a long list of friends and enemies. Topping the list is my wife, Sunmi, to whom I owe my not only my survival at
Westminster Seminary, but great credit in listening to the rough draft of this work many times yet showing unflagging enthusiasm for its completion. Two of my seminary professors will see much of their lecture material incorporated into this book, Dr. Vern Poythress and the late Dr. Ray Dillard. I only hope they are not distressed to see the use I have put their teaching to. Finally I thank the faculty of Boston University, who showed me the necessity of beginning this work earlier rather than later.

Te gloriam Deo


Preface

The book of Job has had a bad reputation, perhaps because the Hebrew it is written in is obscure, and some earlier translations gave confused readings. Perhaps because it is written in poetry, which is harder to understand than the historical writings. Or perhaps because the topic is too painful and the answers not comforting. For whatever reason, there have been too few studies of the book of Job, and fewer that I have found encouraging. Yet it is a book that holds a magnetic attraction for me, a book I keep coming back to year after year. When I feel discouraged, when I feel persecuted, when I feel abandoned by God, I stop and reread this book. The answer I find changes with each reading, the answer deepens and brings with it fresh wonder and awe. With each new disappointment in life I find a resonance in Job, and a new revelation in his reply. It is out of that appreciation for Job, for how he lived and how he spoke, that I am writing this short study. If I can convey a small fraction of the comfort I have received, then this effort will be well spent.

1.1 Methodology

The requisite section before beginning any book study is a semi-exhaustive list of the historical context, the sources, the authors, and the theology of the book. I have neither the knowledge nor the resources to write such an introduction, though some of these points will be made at other places in the study. Instead I want to describe the approach I take to this book. It is both objective and subjective, scholarly and personal, observer and participant, strategic and tactical. Without analyzing the objectives of the book we will get lost in the debates, but without participating in the dialogue we will completely miss the rebuttals. Therefore the early part of this study will be all strategic, laying out the battleground, the weapons, the known tactics of the belligerents. The later part of this study will be the thrust and parry, the heat and the dust of the battle. The stakes are high: Job's very life and perhaps his salvation hangs by a thread. The tactics are brutal: accusations, innuendoes, words that cut like knives. The outcome: well, unexpected.


We are neither observers nor shamans of the book of Job, but participants in this rivetting drama. As we absorb with Job the next body blow to our psyche, our emotions well up fresh each time. Yes, they are colored by our previous reading, but also deepened. We can begin to feel beyond the raw anger to the disappointment, the pity, and yes, the hope that Job speaks in his reply. Then when life deals me the short stick, the cutting comment, the unexpected disaster, I can hear Job's voice guiding me, "no don't put your trust there, here is your real hope." and his words are like steel girders to my soul.


1.2 A Brief Introduction

Space and Time

Just about any book can be better appreciated by locating it in spacetime. I always check the copyright date after reading the jacket cover and before starting the preface. Job is an exception. We are given a Hebrew manuscript, in a nondescript location in "the land of Uz", (which always reminds me of a famous fairy tale) that has no historical precedents. Then we are given no temporal help at all, no kings, no kingdoms, no other historical references. The dialogue is reminiscent of the stories of God talking to Abram, definitely pre-Mosaic covenant, so many scholars put it in the patriarchal period. Linguistic studies of word usage suggest some influence from Edom, and place it in the south, somewhere in that millennium. It could have been written much later, say, during the monarchy, but placed in a patriarchal setting. Clues are so scarce, one might even believe that it was intentionally vague. It is as if the writer were telling us, "Forget the Mosaic Law, forget the covenant of circumcision, this could have happened to anyone, anywhere, at any time, this could have been you."

Ancient Librarians

The position of the Book of Job in the Bible reflects the difficulty that ancient scholars had when they attempted to group together similar books. Is Job a historical book, a poetic book, a prophetic book, or a wisdom book (e.g., Proverbs)? In the English Bible it is sandwiched between history and poetry using St. Jerome's order, but in previous editions it surfaced between poetry and prophets (Septuagint), or between songs and wisdom (Alexandria), or between law and history (Peshitta).

Why is it so difficult to classify?
Harrison writes, "The book derived its title from the Hebrew name of its principle character, and by any standard of comparison it ranks among the most significant pieces of world literature. Certainly it is unmatched in the writings of the Old Testament for its artistic character, its grandeur of language, depth of feeling, and the sensitivity with which the meaning of human suffering is explored...Pfeiffer held the book to be one of the most original works in the entire corpus of human poetry, and of such a kind as to defy classification in terms of lyric, epic, poetic, reflective, or didactic categories." But couldn't the book be all of the above and still be easily classified? This is an important clue, and perhaps one worth delving into.

What is literary classification? Plato would have said that it is recognizing that this piece of human literature reflects some aspect of the divine literature, a poor reflection of God's library. Aristotle would have said that God's library is all in our heads, that we unconsciously group together items so as to make more efficient use of our brain cells. But perhaps the two fellows are not that far apart. Computer scientists have spent decades trying to get million dollar computers to recognize, say, a horse. According to Scientific American, they succeed only 30% of the time, they cannot duplicate what an average 2 year old is capable of. Perhaps it is Plato's divine gift to maximize Aristotle's brain cells. In any case, we develop categories based on experience and common use.

Whether I knew it or not at the time, my first stumbling attempt at writing rhyming verse to a lady joined centuries of previous efforts in the category of "bad love poetry." It was new to me, but a well-known classification. Is it possible then, to do something unique, say, to write rhyming verse to a pig and start the category "porcine poetry"? Certainly it's possible. If you succeed in starting a trend you get elected professor; if you don't, you must rejoin the work force and your effort gets classified with "miscellaneous bad poetry" anyway. If then Job is impossible to classify, I draw three conclusions: that he must have started a trend that was impossible to duplicate; that everyone applied a different category to which no two can agree; and that he did too good a job to be thrown into the miscellaneous bin with all the other riffraff. Let me rephrase this. If no one will relegate the book to the miscellaneous bin, then I think it is fair to call this book "objectively excellent". If, on the other hand, no one can agree as to a category, I would call it "subjectively understood". And if it has never been duplicated, thereby starting a trend, I would call it "divinely inspired".

Modern Librarians

Has this ever been done before? Let me admit my bias and say that I believe St. John the Divine's gospel bears the same relationship to the other gospels as Job's book bears to wisdom literature. He took an existing format and modified it to his own, very subjective purpose with a genius that can only be divinely inspired. If I can be permitted to coin a phrase, this "transformational" genre is more common in world literature than perhaps is appreciated. I just finished reading a novel to my children and noted that the jacket cover had the quote "Few books could be easier to enjoy or harder to describe than C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces." which then goes on to make the three points above. What makes this genre so difficult to replicate is the very subjectivity of the treatment. No, I'm not saying that using the first person is unique, but that the book is written to elicit a subjective response, a reaction that inserts the reader into the story to become a participant. This is a "meta-genre" based not so much on the objective content of the book, but on the subjective response of the reader.

Now if the response desired is transparently obvious, we would call this type of literature "propaganda" or "educational", depending on our bent. Wisdom literature falls into this infinitely repeated, obvious category. The writer of Job then, bases his book on the well-known characteristics of wisdom literature in order to spring his trap on us; he uses our tendency to ask "where's the moral?" to draw us into this amoral morass where God speaks riddles and men speak the truth. Transformational literature, unlike wisdom literature, does not reveal to us something we already know, but changes what we already know into something else. Since wisdom literature was the writer's starting point, let us then examine some of the characteristics of this genre.

1 R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament


2.0 Perspectives on Job

In the methodology preface, I spoke on "multiperspectivalism", the attempt to view a piece of literature (or life) from many different perspectives. This list of perspectives I have assembled here is by no means complete, indeed, as long as God continues to reveal Himself in the world, it can never be complete. Rather I have listed the perspectives that I found interesting and fruitful. I have even listed the "feminism" perspective, not because anyone could mistake me for a feminist, but rather to demonstrate that one need not hold/believe/defend a particular perspective in order to learn from it. Perhaps someone will oblige me and write a Marxist perspective on Job, it would be equally interesting though, as I said elsewhere, not every perspective is as equally illuminating of the text, some are more revealing of the proponent.

In addition to taking these different perspectives, I have done my best to allow one perspective to illuminate another. These inter-relationships of perspectives produce what I call "the web of meaning". Webs are not absolute truth, nor do they exist independent of people, for a a Marxist or a Materialist would certainly have a different web than mine. But webs are complex enough to be unique to individuals and convey a "personality", or a "world-view". Therefore I am not using "multiperspectivalism" to create a smoke-screen of viewpoints behind which hides a cowardly fundamentalist, rather I am encouraging you, the reader, to take your theology to a higher (meta)plane; to weave your own web; to find a web that might accomodate both religion and science, reason and experience, laws and life. This is my effort. This is theology.


2.1 Job as Wisdom Literature

When I was a younger man, I had the privilege of being the best man at the marriage of a friend and classmate. To my horror I discovered that the best man must begin the feast by toasting the newlyweds. I had been raised a teetotaller, and while I thought I could handle a wineglass almost like a pro by gripping it tightly at the stem between my thumb and forefinger, the only toast I knew was "cheers". My panic must have shown, because the MC, another classmate, came over and suggested that I recite an ancient Jewish blessing. I was so grateful I would have recited it in Hebrew, but here is the English text. "May you have the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job and the children of Israel."

"The patience of Job". A short phrase that I have never fully understood, since Job appeared to be anything but patient. Or perhaps in my family patience meant something different, something closer to comatose--"Just be patient and you will get your turn too!". Nevertheless, it is a phrase more widely known than the character it was intended to describe. This is an example of wisdom literature: a short, pithy saying that attempts to capture a lifestyle, an attitude, or a worldview. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was another favorite in my family. The book of Job is replete with such examples. Perhaps this accounted for its continued popularity during the dark ages of the KJV when the obscure Hebrew made for opaque English. Even when the plot line was too tangled to follow and the rebuttal had lost its logical thread, one could still extract gems such as "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." If you will allow me to gloss over the intervening millennia, surely something similar kept scribes busy copying this book from age to age, and before them, maintained the oral tradition. If this then is the enduring legacy of the book of Job, it would behoove us to examine it for those qualities common to wisdom literature.


Why is Solomon wise, but Job only patient? Was Job's complaint a wise thing to say? Or is wisdom only worthwhile if we are first "healthy, wealthy and wise"? What is wisdom, something cultural or something transcendent? Is wisdom about people or about God; is it by people or by God? Does Job say anything that wasn't culture bound? How can we tell? Is Job's wisdom even relevant for today?

We find ourselves unable to answer these questions until we understand what wisdom is, and what it is not. This is, of course, the purpose of wisdom literature. And now we can see we have just purchased a ticket for the oldest merry-go-round in the universe, for we cannot understand the question until we have understood the answer. But before you exit in haste, consider perhaps if it is not the world that is travelling in circles, finding questions for answers that no one believes, and this merry-go-round of wisdom is the one stationary point on a planet spinning out of control.


2.2 Job as Hebrew Poetry

In seventh grade my younger brother was exposed to higher culture and western literature. His English teacher decided that memorizing a poem would be a profitable way of teaching him about the civilizing aspects of modern culture, perhaps giving him some romantic appeal as he approached the liberating age of adolescence. She asked the class to memorize Wordsworth's poem "Daffodils". My brother, who was perhaps too far gone for such rescuing efforts, saw through the ploy immediately. "I'm not going to memorize a sissy poem!" he confided in me. We held a strategy session, and decided that if he found a longer poem more to his liking, she could have no objection on purely academic grounds. Sure enough, the strategy worked, and he set out at once to memorize "Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling. To this day I can rattle off the prologue to Gunga Din, doing my best to sound like a British soldier, "Oh you can talk of gin and beer, when you're quartered safe out here, and you go to penny fights in Aldershottit; but when it comes to slaughter you'll do your work on water, and you'll kiss the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it". I think its fair to say that he escaped the civilizing aspects of modern culture virtually unscathed.


2.3 Job as God on Trial

One risks being burned at the stake for even suggesting that God could be brought to trial, as if the created creatures had any right to judge their creator. Let me state clearly that we humans are neither the judge nor the prosecution in this heavenly trial, but the witnesses of an archetypal struggle. This is not our trial, this is God's, to which we play a not insignificant, but secondary role. We are presented with a heavenly scene which has a baffling encounter of a being named Satan with God. It is only as we examine the language and dialogue that we begin to realize that the spotlights on Satan and God are also faintly illuminating a huge chamber with myriads of angels and humans, all observing this primeval debate, this cosmic conflict. The very language of God's speeches late in the book, Rahab, Leviathon and Behemoth, are reminiscent of the ancient middle eastern myths of creation, of the heavenly struggle between the forces of good and evil. This is the cosmic backdrop to the very human story of Job and his friends, but a very important backdrop, because it supplies the context for the entire book. Therefore we need to examine carefully the strokes used to paint it.


2.4 Job as Man on Trial

Once when I was driving to a meeting, animatedly waving my hands while discussing passionately some fine point of theory, and totally oblivious to the sudden braking of heavy traffic for no apparent reason, I found myself caught in a speed trap at the bottom of a hill. The bill arrived in the mail a few weeks later, and came to about $150, 3 months of my disposable income. Closer scrutiny showed that I was being accused of a misdemeanor for driving far in excess of the speed limit, which was patently untrue. (One can always make fine distinctions about speed limits.) I resolved to appeal the ticket and appear in court with my wife and children. After waking the family up at 3 am and driving for 6 hours through a tropical rainstorm, I arrived in court only to be mistaken for a lawyer by all the adolescent miscreants who actually were driving far in excess of the speed limit. The district attorney called us in one by one to determine how we would be pleading our case. She warned us sternly that this judge was known as a hanging judge, so we should not think that our mere presence in court would grant us leniency. I knew enough lawyers to know that if my particular policeman were not present to vouch for the radar report, I would be off scott-free. Furthermore I was incensed that my infraction had been inflated to the level of a misdemeanor to benefit the coffers of the state. I was determined to plead "not guilty." My wife, however, felt this was immoral because, in point of fact, I had been exceeding the maximum 55 miles per hour allowed in this state. I was in a quandary. Should I plead not guilty to my false accusation or plead guilty to a separate charge? Do I face the wrath of man or the wrath of God?

This was the situation Job found himself in. He was on trial, not particularly because he deserved it, but because he was caught in a speed trap of Satan's making. Job found himself caught in a struggle between superpowers: between Satan, the premier Behaviorist, who claims that Men are predictable machines optimizing their probability of survival; and God, who seems to believe that his creation is capable of loving its creator. Both superpowers have played their hand, and now hold their breath awaiting Job's choice. The trial that began in heaven continued on earth; and it was on earth that it would be resolved. His friends play the part of the District Attorney, advising him how to plead his case. Did Job fear God or fear Man? For in some sense, Job represents more than himself, he represents all mankind. The story of Job is the story of Man on trial.


2.5 Job as Sacrifice of Suffering

The World Wide Web has lived up to its inventor's dream of providing a brand new form of communication that complements the more traditional forms of print and conversation. But even before hypertext was the quiet revolution of e-mail. This unassuming stepchild of the Web has already created whole new genres of literature including "group humor". You know the antecedent, the xeroxed cartoon that circulated via copying machines and was invariably pasted above the coffee pot or the fax. In the same way group humor circulated via e-mail, accreting modifications and additions in the process. One of this genre passed through my e-mailbox recently, which I repeat briefly:

If one takes happiness as the opposite of suffering, one could replace "toy" in the above humor with "happiness", and most of the sentences would still make sense. Although I do not endorse any of the views expressed above, it strikes a resonant chord that we should associate denial (and suffering) with Catholicism. Pope John Paul II's Salvici Dolores, listed in the appendices, records all the benefits that suffering brings. In contrast, the appendix on theodicy lists all the arguments defending God from the crime of causing unjust suffering. Is suffering and denial a good thing or a bad thing? Was God doing Job a favor or an insult to afflict him so heavily? How can I even ask such an obvious question? In our modern Western culture we have perhaps lost any sense of the value of righteous suffering, a concept that was well understood by the ascetics and martyrs of past centuries. Perhaps it would be beneficial to examine this story from such a perspective.


2.6 Job as Existentialist

A story that I heard second-hand from a meeting of phenomenologists has two philosophers driving together to a conference. They must have rented a car at the airport, because the passenger is reading the informational material stuffed in the glove compartment.
"Hey," he says, "Do you know that there's a fine for burnt out lights in this state?"
"No," replies the driver, "I didn't, and I didn't check them either. I'd better pull over and make sure they're in good shape. Why don't you go around the car and check the bulbs?"
"Okay" says the passenger, as he opens his door and walks around to the front of the vehicle.
"I'm checking the turn signals," shouts the driver, "are they working?"
"Yes!", came the reply,"Wait, No! Yes! No! Yes!..."

Like those philosophers, the truth we extract from Job depends crucially on our expectations of truth. This chapter is designed to disappoint everyone's expectations. Those of you who thought I was going to follow in the footsteps of great theologians and philosophers of the past, the "ground of being" and all that will be disappointed as will those who find in Job an irrational God who steps outside all of our understanding. For it seems to me absurdly futile to construct rational arguments proving the essential irrationality of the Universe. Yet both intensely conservative and thoroughly intellectual people have done just that, arguing that the message of Job is intentionally illogical and irrational. What could have enticed them into such dire straits? Who incited them to abandon, even scuttle, the ship of reason in such perilous waters? Finding the answer to these questions reveals more about the captain and his choice of the Charybdis of despair than about the Scylla of suffering. For the writer of Job, by putting truisms in the mouths of the enemy, and enigmas in the mouth of God, cleverly forces the reader to make choices about what constitutes truth. Thus this chapter will not be about Job so much as it is about modern man and his encounter with Truth.

Summary

In this most scientific of all Biblical books, we have followed in the footsteps of Job through epistemology, ethics and metaphysics, through meteorology, astronomy, economics and biology. The medium changed, but the message remained constant: in Man's humiliation lies his essential holiness, for Man's inadequacy demands the wholly other, and Man's folly requires divine wisdom. Intention, execution, comprehension: we cannot escape the Trinity.


Meteorology Notes

Job on Weather & God

Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air. Destruction and Death say, 'Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.' God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm, then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it. And he said to man, 'The fear of the Lord--that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.' (28:20-28 NIV)

Elihu on God & Weather

How great is God--beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out.He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind. Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion? See how he scatters his lightning about him, bathing the depths of the sea. This is the way he governs the nations and provides food in abundance. He fills his hands with lightning and commands it to strike its mark. His thunder announces the coming storm; even the cattle make known its approach. At this my heart pounds and leaps from its place. Listen! Listen to the roar of his voice, to the rumbling that comes from his mouth. He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven and sends it to the ends of the earth. After that comes the sound of his roar; he thunders with his majestic voice. When his voice resounds, he holds nothing back. God's voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding. He says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.' So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor...Do you know how God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash? Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge? You who swelter in your clothes when the land lies hushed under the south wind, can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze? (36:26-37:6,15-18 NIV)

Astronomy Notes


Economics Notes

Stats Speaking as a physicist and not an economist, one can treat wealth by counting how many people fall into "net-worth" bins (normalizing for cost-of-living etc.). Then one can fit the distribution with a single-peaked Gaussian and determine "skewness" and "kurtosis" of the distribution. This assumes, for example, that the distribution of wealth is monotonically decreasing from the average. A more robust statistic is to look at the median and the mean and calculate the deviation. If the distribution appears to be double-peaked, one can calculate whether a twin-peak function gives a better fit than a single peak. This last result alone may indicate how "stable" a society is. My uninformed guess is that societies have two stable positions, either a "gaussian" single-peak or a "skewed" two-peak distribution. Bourgois and stone-age societies may be in the first category, whereas feudal or fascist societies might fall into the second category.


Biology Notes


2.8 Job as the Problem of Evil

What is the Problem of Evil? Its hard to say, for there are as many definitions of "The Problem of Evil" as there are polemics on the subject, each of which comes with its own implied audience, a long history of debate, and a peculiar jargon. For example, the word "theodicy" comes from the greek for "God" + "justice", implying that the existence of evil is somehow related to the justice of God. Some would argue that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God, or at least, the existence of a good and just God. Some would argue that evil has nothing to do with God, but is entirely due to human corruption, while some have argued that evil has no more existence than a shadow or a vacuum.

These debates, then, are like syllogisms, where the cleverly debated proof is all contained in the suppositions, in the definitions of the words, in the jargon. The right jargon with the wrong audience, however, is as doomed to failure as Paul on Mars hill. So it is as important to recognize the different audiences as it is to identify the different presuppositions.
Forrest Baird identifies four groups that are traditionally the audience for a theodicy: the sufferer, the observer, the moral atheist, and the traditional atheist. Taking liberties with his titles, we will call them "the sufferer", "the observer", "the theologian", and "the philosopher".

For example, the highly popular theodicy,
"When Bad Things Happen to Good People", was written by Harold Kushner, the father of a terminally ill child and a Reformed rabbi. His theodicy, while containing some philosophy and theology, has had little discernable impact on either discipline. But when I mentioned the title in a nursing home, I had the immediate attention of the entire nursing staff. His theodicy had spoken most strongly to those who observe suffering constantly, to nurses and pastors and rabbis. These are the people who understood his jargon, who are his audience. If one argues that an author's circumstances dictate his approach, then it may not be so surprising to find caregivers as his primary audience.

In the sequence of audiences given above, we move from the concrete to the abstract, from the sufferer to the philosopher three times removed. The details of abstract metaphysical philosophy are as unlikely to provide solace for the concrete pains of the sufferer as pain-killers to provide satisfaction for the philosopher. So it may be helpful to describe the problem of evil for each audience, identifying the general concerns and presuppositions.

Yes, the book of Job does have an answer for evil, for pain, for suffering. The answer is as complex as the book itself, for the answer is not a formula, a pill, or a prescription, no, the answer is a person, the answer is Him.


2.9 Job as Messianic Apologetic

Perhaps you've seen the humor "proving" that Jesus was of a certain ethnic background.

Three Proofs that Jesus was ...
  1. JEWISH:
    1. He went into his father's business
    2. He lived at home until the age of 33
    3. He was sure his mother was a virgin, and his mother was sure he was God
  2. IRISH:
    1. He never got married.
    2. He never held a steady job
    3. His last request was for a drink
  3. ITALIAN:
    1. He talked with his hands
    2. He had wine with every meal
    3. He worked in the building trades
  4. BLACK:
    1. He called everybody brother
    2. He had no permanent address
    3. Nobody would hire him
  5. CALIFORNIAN:
    1. He never cut his hair
    2. He walked around barefoot
    3. He invented a new religion
  6. REDNECK:
    1. His friends were all fishing buddies
    2. He ate laying on the couch
    3. He showed up four days late to his best friend's funeral
As the humor suggests, one can find all sorts of reasons to claim the Messiah. When people suggest that Job was a "type" of Christ, they usually mean that one can find similarities between the two. I find most of these proofs as convincing as the humor above. Let us suppose that we know nothing of the New Testament. If we do not have the benefit of hindsight, what can we say about the shadowy protagonist, the advocate, in this book? What, if any, is the connection to the Messiah, this Anointed One, the Second Elijah, this Moses returned? Is there any connection between this figure from the heavenly court and the human nature of Job's Personal Truth?

So we see three appearances, three visitations that answer Job's cry of desertion: the revelation of the divine advocate standing in heaven, the return of the spirit of faith, and the reply from the whirlwind. Three answers, yet the answer is one. We see the miracle, yet we do not fathom its meaning. Job is vindicated, his fortunes restored, yet we do not know the answer to his questions, nor the significance of God's appearing. Surely, if Job was vindicated in material wealth, must he not also be vindicated in spoken truth? Where was his advocate, if it was not God? and Man? and Spirit? Could one be sufficient without the other two? Job saw God, and it was enough. We have only heard of Him from Job's lips, and we do not understand. In the fullness of time, in the ripening of world, at the turn of era, our eyes too will flash with the mystery revealed, of the questions answered, in the vindication of truth.

2.10 Job as Feminist Critique