The Book of Job and the idea of Theodicy

In February 1987, “Diamond Jim” McClelland wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that Senator Graham Richardson was a numbers man who took politics to the extent of ensuring power at any cost. After describing what was essentially a political career of expediency he finished his essay with the adage, “Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword”. In this he expressed contemporary folk wisdom that encapsulates the concept of cosmic cause and effect.

In the Solomon Islands, swimming in the reef is safe if you are pure of heart and mind. It is said that if a shark takes you, it is inevitably because you have transgressed a religious or moral code and have been living in a state of disgrace, secret or otherwise.

In December 2004, the tsunami in the Asia Pacific region destroyed many villages on the coastal ring of the Indian Ocean. Countless lives were lost and the aid and repairs across those countries continues. Those who died were young and old, of many religions and were inevitably both just and unjust, sinners and saints.

Our very existence as human beings in history means that we will respond to incidents of evil, disaster and suffering with a moral framework in which to make sense of what is happening. Carol Newsom draws from Bakhtin when she calls our moral frameworks “Moral Imaginations”. She describes these as “the fundamental aesthetic and cognitive means by which persons and cultures construct meaning, value and significance”.

The concept of theodicy describes a process where the meaning, value and significance of suffering, guilt, and experiences of evil are explored and constructed within theological discourse.

Crenshaw has described theodicy as “an articulate response to the anomie of existence, one that goes beyond silence, submission and rebellion to thoughtful justification of the deity in the face of apparently contradictory evidence.”

This of course is not a new concept, Moltmann traces the Christian question to Boethius, who asked, “If God is righteous, why evil?” This question is not only asked in the Christian context, Moltmann goes on to write, “The problem is not limited to the area of the Christian-Jewish tradition, but is as old as mankind’s (sic) faith in a supreme power which orders the world…In all theistic religions, before the attempt at a rational solution to the problem of theodicy we find questions, lamentations and reproaches to the deity for evils that are experienced.”

So it is in this tradition that we find the book of Job. This book “ponders the problem of evil in a form not abstract, but embodied in a story of a human being”. However the book of Job is more than an exploration of theodicy, and the themes and stories that emerge as readers have engaged with the text over time, give testament to the power of what Penchansky calls the “disparate text, an act of literature that is characteristically unstable, a place of conflict.”

Summarising the purpose or message of the book of Job is therefore a tenuous task; however Perdue and Gilpin try this when they write:

“(the book) does not hesitate to leave the reader with painful questions about suffering or calamity; it challenges simplistic appeals to moral order in history; it enmeshes human responsibility in fate or destiny, but without absolving the human of responsibility.”

A short exploration of the book of Job may assist in understanding how one book can be used to uphold responses to theodicy, but also to question the concept of theodicy itself.

Whether the character Job was historical or fictive character is one that has exercised debate over the centuries. Contemporary methodologies of engagement with the text however, leave this question aside and instead focus much more on the historical or literary approaches to the text. Historical analysis has surmised that the book belongs to a tradition of literature that explored the issue of “inexplicable suffering” that arose in the Hebraic community at the time. Job is formulated primarily as an extended poem, which takes the story of suffering centred through one man, and explores it in relation to the theological context of its time, which was predominantly the wisdom tradition.

Clifford parallels the book of Job with a similar Babylonian work, but points out that the Babylonian is distinguishable by virtue of the fact that the focus of the story is on the change in the sage rather than the sufferer.

Fyall draws parallels between Job and Canaanite mythology, arguing that the author’s use of Canaanite mythological features was to “interact with the worldview of Israel’s neighbours,” and to establish “the incomparability of Yahweh as against the gods of the nation.”

From this we can see that the book of Job was intended to be read in the context of a number of competing stories, which appeared to be written in order that communities might make sense of human existence and their relationship with a theistic god. Crenshaw, in analysing the prologue of Job suggests that three fundamental questions are created for exploration in the poem. They are:
• How should one speak about the deity?
• How should one respond to suffering? and
• Does disinterested righteousness exist?

The didactic narrative of Job is essential the story of a hero who encounters misfortune, deals with conflict and struggle within which his virtue or ability is displayed, and is then subject to judgement.

However, the book of Job is more than this. The structure and method used to tell the story allows for a full engagement between the characters as well as between reader and text to explore the issues raised in the story.

Penchansky suggests that it is the dissonance of the text as characterised by the disparity between the frame of the story and the centre which creates a depth to the text. In particular he points out that, “The centre uses poetry as its primary mode of communication. The frame employs prose. They have different vocabularies and use different terms for the deity.”

It is clear therefore that the composition of the text affects the way the text is to be read.
Dumbrell categorises the composition as follows:
• The prologue and epilogue, both in prose form, bookend the debates. These elements set up the scene of suffering, and close the book with the restoration of Job;
• Three cyclic address between Job and his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar allow the arguments of the traditional wisdom to be confronted by Job as an example of how traditional wisdom fails;
• Job’s integrity is maintained and he puts his case for vindication. It is in this section that the poem on wisdom occurs at Ch 28;
• Job places his case before God (Ch 31) and Elihu makes four speeches, anticipating the divine speeches to follow;
• God speaks to Job from a storm. Job makes only subdued responses to the revelations from God at this point;
• Job responds fully to the divine speeches.

Penchansky suggests “dramatically different theological sensitivities characterise the two parts. The centre contains much more rebellion and scepticism than does the frame. One text presents a pious patient and orthodox Job, the other a Job railing against God.”

This dissonant text therefore allows a number of different readings of the text. For example Good provides a commentary based on the understanding that the primary purpose of the book is to understand the issue of evil in the world, even if it does not provide any solutions to the question. Instead, he suggests the following points can be extracted from the text:
• The prologue sets up the problem of evil with the dialogue between God and Ha-satan;
• In the first cycle of speeches, Eliphaz identifies religion with moral innocence and contrasts them with sin. In this he collapses sin into evil and makes the claim that bad things do not happen to good people;
• In response Job calls for a trail so that his “guilt” can be examined objectively – noting however that Job then also claims that the judge/God will have a skewed view. The argument is that even divine power does not equal justice;
• In the second cycle of speeches, Job claims that a “witness in heaven” will protect him from arbitrary use of power in governance. In these speeches the legal language of the discourse is commented on, still suggesting a worldview of judgement;
• The summation speech of Job occurs from Chs 29-31, but even here Job still falls back on the understanding of reward and punishment;
• Yahweh responds in a way which contains no answers about goodness and badness, evil and suffering;
• Job responds with the words, “Therefore I despise and repent of dust and ashes (42:6)” which is a rejection of the entire religious structure of guilt and repentance.

Mettinger also asserts that the issue of God and his relation to evil and suffering is the basic concern of the author. However, he recognises the dissonance in the text as represented by three different understandings of God which compete with each other. These are:
• the God of the friends, God as the engineer of the mechanisms of retribution, sowing and reaping;
• the God of Job, God as a nihilistic credo, not just amoral but actually immoral; and
• the God of the whirlwind, who defends himself against Job and speaks as the protector and preserver of his creation, overcoming chaos.

Habel however, argues that the book is actually about God, with the emphasis of the book to be found in the speeches of God from the whirlwind, which contain a theological defence of God the sage. He argues that the characterisation of God was intended to contrast the idea of God as warrior king, and instead represent God as a sage who acquired wisdom in primordial time.

Brown wrote that the book was primarily about Job, and not about anything else including God or theodicy. Instead the book is about the development of character as we watch Job experience incredible suffering.

Newsom offers a way of reconciling all approaches when she suggests reading the text in a polyphonic way. She writes, “…a polyphonic reading attends with particular care to issues of genre and verbal texture, as well as to the multiple ideological claims of the text. In addition it offers a means of conceptualising the book as an unified composition without sacrificing the hermeneutical significance of the many genres that comprise the book…Reading the book as a polyphonic text provides a model of reading that allows for all of the voices to “mean directly” as so be taken seriously in the play of ideas.”

With this understanding we can see that the book of Job is a text which is useful in approaching the question of theodicy, but is a text that might in the end allow for a development of theodicy beyond traditional readings.

James Crenshaw in the book Defending God, explores the way that biblical text can be and has been used to explore and construct responses to Boethius’ question. He discerns eleven approaches to theodicy:
(i) There is no god;
(ii) There are alternative gods;
(iii) Satan exists;
(iv) Freedom of choice in humans creates evil;
(v) God must balance justice (and therefore bad things happen) and mercy;
(vi) Adversity develops character;
(vii) The sinful are punished;
(viii) The righteous suffer to redeem evil;
(ix) Righteous judgement occurs after death;
(x) God can never be fully known; and
(xi) Theodicy itself is so anthropocentric, that it is not a valid exercise.

We have seen that the book of Job is such a broad document that most of these responses can be fathomed from the text. And Job has been used for this purpose. For instance in 1710, Liebniz referred to Job as “one who improperly complains of unjustified evil because he fails to see the divine purposes.”

Calvin used the doctrine of afterlife to understand the Book of Job. Schriener writes, “According to Calvin, the friends spoke many true things in their defence of God’s justice, but were rebuked by God because of their insistence on restricting providence to history.” Calvin also took the approach that adversity develops character and according to Schriener “tenaciously defend(ed) the retributive and pedagogical theology of suffering espoused by Job’s friends…the reason for adversity is knowable because it functions pedagogically as correction and discipline.”

The use of the character of satan (the adversary) has inevitably been used as the justification for evil and suffering. However as Crenshaw points out that while “the author of Gen 22:1 does not hesitate to attribute the monstrous test of Abraham to God… the compilers of the didactic story in the Book of Job resist such a harsh description of Israel’s deity, preferring rather to blame a lesser heavenly being for the trial that turn’s Job’s life upside down…(however) the text itself has the deity concede his role as the actual source of calamity…in the end, the attempt to let the deity off the hook has failed.”

Perhaps a more radical approach is found in the approach of “disinterested righteousness”, or “questioning the problem”. Crenshaw suggests that this approach is analogous to post-modern and feminist rejections of authority. He writes that “the authors of the book of Job perceived the dilemma that resulted from the religious system itself and drew from it an astute inference about the utility of evil. In a word, evil fulfils a vital function for sorting out those individuals who fear God for nothing, gratuitously and in vain….The author of the book of Job saw through the hypocrisy of self serving piety, recognising that it was both a lie and a farce. A lie, because life is far too complex to follow the simple rules of reward and retribution. A farce, because no one really fools God into thinking that the service is for nothing.”

A contemporary approach to the theodicy is described by Moltmann as having arisen after the Lisbon earthquake, and the sufferings of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He suggests that three points have become important in Christian discussion of a theology after Auschwitz. (i) The question of the justification of God cannot be answered, but it can never be abandoned as there will always be an irresistible hunger for righteousness. (ii) A theology after Auschwitz must take up the theology in Auschwitz: the prayers of the victims. God was present in their prayers; as their companion in suffering he gave up hope when no more could be hoped for. (iii) The question of theodicy remains open until a new creation, in which God’s righteousness dwells, gives the answer.

Does Job support these contemporary reflections about theodicy? Spykerboer argued that the book of Job as not being about suffering or evil, but rather about the faith that rises above and overcomes suffering. He comments that the idea of the book is about how the relationship with God endures despite experiencing evil and suffering.

The contemporary approach is also supported by Habel who argues that “…the theology of the whirlwind is not about consolation, justification or validation. Nor does Yahweh’s speech seek to answer in simple terms the eternal question of why there is evil in the world, why the innocent suffer, or why God des not seem to implement justice. In the world of the wise there are no absolute solutions to the open ended questions of life.”

Thus from Job we can see that the text has been used to support a variety of responses to theodicy, in the end it also provides the leverage to move us out of the trap of using text to justify answers within only one “moral imagination”. Indeed this was the trap in which Job’s friends found themselves as they operated within their own tradition. Instead, as Penchansky and Newsom suggest the dissonant voices of the text and the lack of any resolution propels the reader to discern and create their own moral imagination about theodicy.

But the text can also be used to provide us with clues or signposts about ways of approaching theodicy. As examples, we can use the scenarios given at the beginning of this essay.

The maxim used by Jim McClelland fits squarely within a framework of guilt and repentance, punishment and reward. The personal example of Job himself dissects this concept. We might therefore always find examples of how the mighty (like Richardson to some extent!) have fallen, but equally validly we also find examples of the righteous suffering and the mighty prospering. The formula does not work across all scenarios. Crenshaw explains that the theology of the friends reveals the depth of the conviction that evil visits those who are to be punished for their sins, however, the dialogues reveal the weakness of these arguments and in the end they are essentially an inadequate response to theodicy.

Similarly the folkloric tradition in the Solomon Islands would seem to suggest that God would only visit catastrophe against the unjust. This approach of course is countered by the example of mass catastrophes of the world, including the 2004 tsunami. While the belief may hold up for individual cases, when confronted by victims of mass catastrophe, the idea has to take on a greater meaning, that all have died as a result of sin. Again the story of Job offers us the understanding that this argument has little merit.

Instead, Job offers another approach. Crenshaw writes “…the ambiguity of Job’s response (in 42:6) matches that of the divine speeches. The nature of the test has prevented the deity from giving Job a reason for his suffering, which would legitimate Job’s faithfulness and place him right back in the position of serving God for the benefit it brings to him. Likewise the human condition requires that we face life’s uncertainties with no simple answer to its inequities.”

Theodicy as a concept then appears to continue to have merit in the sense that by virtue of our existence, we will always seek to construct a “moral imagination’ which will allow us to make sense of evil, suffering and guilt. If we belong to a theistic faith, it is inevitable to God will feature somewhere in this framework. The assistance that Job brings to this enterprise is the clear exploration of several responses to theodicy, and the power of a dissonant text that offers us signposts and guides for our own journeys.

Bibliography
Brown, W, “Character in Crisis” in Wisdom Literature, Lecture Notes and Readings prepared by Doug Jones, 2006.

Clifford, R.J. The Wisdom Literature, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998.

Crenshaw, J. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox press: Louisville, 1998.

Crenshaw, J. Defending God: Biblical Responses to the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Good, E. “The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job”, in Perdue, L. and Gilpin, W.C. (eds) The Voice form the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, Abingdon Press; Nashville.

Dumbrell, W. “The Faith of Israel” in Wisdom Literature, Lecture Notes and Readings prepared by Doug Jones, 2006,

Fyall, R. Now My Eyes Have Seen You: Images of Creation and Evil in the Book of Job, Apollos (Inter Varsity Press): England, 2002.

Jones, D. Wisdom Literature: Lectures and Readings, Trinity Theological College: Brisbane, 2006.

Habel, N. “In Defence of God the Sage”, in Perdue, L. and Gilpin, W.C. (eds) The Voice form the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, Abingdon Press; Nashville

Mettinger, T. “The God of Job: Avenger, Tyrant of Victor” in Perdue, L. and Gilpin, W.C. (eds) The Voice form the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, Abingdon Press; Nashville.

Moltmann, J. “Theodicy” in Richardson, A. and Bowden, J. (eds) A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, SCM Press: London, 1983.

Newsom, C. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, Oxford University Press: New York, 2003.

Newsom, C. and Schreiner, S. “Job, Book of” in Hays, J. (ed) Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1999.

Penchansky, D. The Betrayal of God, Ideological conflict in Job, Westminster/John Knox Press: Louisville, 1990.

Perdue, L. and Gilpin, W.C. (eds) The Voice form the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, Abingdon Press; Nashville, 1992.

Richardson, A. “Evil, The Problem of” in Richardson, A. and Bowden, J. (eds) A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, SCM Press: London, 1983.