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Cursing God Like Job Can Still Make You A ‘True’ Believer
‘He is truly valiant that can wisely suffer’
The Book of Job, one of five books of Hebrew poetry and a part of the wisdom literature in the Bible, was written between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE. As one of the first philosophical musings on the nature and reason behind human suffering, it also doubles as a masterpiece of world literature. It was written by an unknown, polyglot author with a highly poetic grasp of literary Hebrew, who was also well versed in disciplines ranging from astronomy and biology to anatomy, law and mathematics. The Book of Job ‘dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled vocabulary and a penchant for linguistic innovation — in words, forms, and combinations’ (Greenstein, 2020).
To me, the greatest stories deal with a few key questions:
‘What is love?’
‘How can we live a good life?’
And: ‘Where is God?’
It is the latter issue that the Book of Job contends with the most.
The name Job-‘ijjob’-in Akkadian means ‘Where is the Father?’ A question I have asked myself over many dark nights and even darker days, from the time we discussed ‘the loving father’ as an image of God in religion class to the moment I heard friends decry their own father’s…
