Job: The Adversary and the Artistry

After six months of deciding what to study and how to study, I finally dove into Job. It took six weeks to get through the first chapter and two more to get to through the second. I was not in a hurry. I wanted to get into the poetry in the other chapters, but I wanted to know all I could about the background before I did so.

It seems that everyone knows the basics of Job: he was a good guy who lost everything and then because he refused to curse God, he got it all back, and then some. Everyone uses it to discuss persevering through hardship deserved or not. Of course, that it just the prologue and epilogue, but it is important stuff.

One of the many things readers like to know about books is who wrote them and when. As with many old books, we have no idea who wrote Job or when. People have studied who could have written it and when it could have been written and after all that study, we still have no idea.

In running through all I found in the time I allowed, the funnest idea was that it was Aaron writing for an academic performance class when he was taking classes in Pharaoh’s house with Moses. There is nothing in the text to support any of these pieces, but as I had seen a movie about Egyptian schools and religion sometime during this period, I dreamed it up. We know that Pharaoh would have had access to the best possible education for his kids, their kids (even adopted ones), and whoever he wanted to educate. We know Aaron and Moses were brothers and had some kind of relationship before God called them to speak to Pharaoh. We know Aaron was a talented speaker from what God told Moses. So there is at least the potential that Aaron got to attend classes with Moses when they were school age.

One of the key aspects of Job that is the author was immensely talented in prose and poetry. Another is that the author was intimately familiar with Hebrew. We also know that very little of Job has anything to do with the aspects of Jewish life that came after the exodus from Egypt. I find it very hard to believe that the shepherd lives of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob would have led to such art, and I find it hard to believe the life of slaves from then until the exodus would have either.

Without a doubt the skill is from a single individual, and while theologically given by God, it shows the beauty that we associate with educated genius.

There have been innumerable arguments over how pieces are left out and missing or reorganized or simply too hard to understand, but the short cuts we take in school sometimes produce work that is judged similarly.

Alternatively, the author was so confident in his talent, that he felt he could make the piece the way he wanted it for his own purpose without following every rule he learned about writing from his “English” teacher.

I really think it was a piece written to performed in front of a live audience then knew everything a Hebrew of that day would have known, and that all the characters had aspects and characteristics obvious to the audience that are not detailed in the book itself. I would love to see it performed live someday exactly as written. Maybe I would have to learn Hebrew to really enjoy it, but still, one can dream.

One of the issues that gave me heartburn during the process was when a translation used the name Satan in Job. When Job was written, we did not have all the later material that identifies the character by name. He is simply referred to in Job by his title the Adversary or the Accuser.

Think of it as a role like the district attorney. His job is to report on the bad things that people do. He comes before God to give his reports and spends his time on earth watching people. The title in Hebrew is something akin to “hasatan” which is broken down something like ha=the and satan=adversary and eventually the ha is dropped, and the character comes to be known as Satan by name.There are other names for the same character that have equally questionable legitimacy, but in the end, we start to learn of an adversarial character in Job.

My point for this piece is that Job is about more than one man’s reward for his vigilant faith, it is about the beauty and wonder in God’s Word, and the introduction of spiritual conflicts outside the prevailing hope that if we are good enough, we will be rewarded. We now know we are only rewarded for faith, not tipping the scales a little.