Theopedia

Book of Job

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

— Job 1:21

Overview

The Book of Job is a Hebrew wisdom poem set within a prose prologue and epilogue, taking up the question of why a righteous man suffers.1 Alongside Psalms and Proverbs, the Hebrews reckoned it one of the three poetical books, marked off from the rest of the Old Testament by a stricter clausal rhythm and its own system of accentuation.2 Its subject is not suffering in general but God’s providential government of a particular individual: whether that government is simply retributive, so that outward calamity always measures inward guilt, and what a righteous man owes God when it is not.34

Timeline

  • Job’s wealth and the accuser’s challenge: Job is rich, godly, and blameless, and God calls him a model of righteousness. Satan claims Job is only loyal because God has blessed him (Job 1-2).
  • Job loses everything: Raiders and storms wipe out Job’s flocks, servants, and all ten children in one day. Job is then covered head to foot in painful sores (Job 1-2).
  • Job curses the day he was born: After seven silent days with his three friends, Job finally speaks, and curses his own birth (Job 3).
  • Three rounds of debate with his friends: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar each argue that Job’s suffering proves hidden sin. Job denies it and keeps demanding that God answer him (Job 4-27).
  • Job’s closing speeches: Job asks where true wisdom can be found. He compares his ruined life to his old prosperity, then swears an oath that he is innocent (Job 28-31).
  • Elihu speaks: A younger man named Elihu says suffering can teach and correct, not just punish. He tells Job to humble himself before God (Job 32-37).
  • God speaks from the storm: God does not explain Job’s suffering. Instead he shows his own power and wisdom in creation and questions Job in return (Job 38-41).
  • Job repents and is restored: Job submits to God, who clears him before his three friends and accepts his prayer for them. God then gives Job twice what he had before (Job 42).

Author and Date

The book names no author, and its authorship and date have long been debated among conservative interpreters. Elijah Porter Barrows surveyed the evidence and concluded:

“Job plainly belonged to the patriarchal period. This appears from his longevity. He lived after his trial a hundred and forty years (42:16), and must have been then considerably advanced in life. This points to a period as early as that of Abraham… But we need not from this infer that the book was written in the patriarchal age, for the author may have received from the past the facts which he records… Some have supposed Moses to be the author, but this is very uncertain. The prevailing opinion of the present day is that it was written not far from the age of Solomon.”5

Scripture elsewhere treats Job as a real historical figure rather than a literary device: Ezekiel names him with Noah and Daniel as a man whose righteousness was known (Ezek. 14:14, 20), and James points to the outcome of his trials as an example of the Lord’s compassion and mercy (James 5:11).

Historical and Literary Context

The narrative is set in the land of Uz, outside the boundaries of Israel, among a people who lived by patriarchal custom rather than Mosaic law.5 Job offers sacrifices for his own household without a priest (Job 1:5), his wealth is counted in flocks and servants, and no idolatry appears in the book beyond the worship of the sun and moon, a mark of the same early period.5 The prose prologue opens the scene in the heavenly court, where an accuser challenges the sincerity of Job’s piety before God (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7), and the poetic dialogue that follows works out, in the mouths of Job, his three friends, a younger man named Elihu, and finally the Lord himself, what that challenge means for how God governs a righteous sufferer.

Structure

Barrows outlined the book’s movement as a single, deliberate plan rather than a loose collection of speeches:6

  • Prologue (1-2): Job’s uprightness and prosperity, the accuser’s challenge, and the double stripping of his possessions, children, and health.
  • Job’s opening lament (3): Job curses the day of his birth after seven days of silence with his friends.
  • Three cycles of dialogue (4-27): Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar argue in turn that Job’s suffering proves hidden sin; Job answers each cycle, insisting on his integrity and pressing God for an explanation.
  • Job’s closing discourses (28-31): a meditation on the hiddenness of true wisdom (28), a contrast between his former prosperity and present misery (29-30), and a formal oath of innocence (31).
  • Elihu’s speeches (32-37): a younger observer argues that suffering can be corrective discipline rather than only punishment, and presses Job toward humility before God’s greatness.
  • The Lord’s speeches from the whirlwind (38-41): God answers Job not with an explanation of his suffering but with a display of his own power and wisdom in creation.
  • Epilogue (42): Job submits, God vindicates him against his three friends and accepts his intercession for them, and Job’s fortunes are restored twofold.

Major Themes

Suffering and God’s sovereignty

The book roots Job’s suffering in God’s own sovereign permission rather than blind misfortune. When Chaldean raiders strip him of his possessions, Job’s response, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), traces the loss directly to God rather than to the raiders themselves. Calvin took this as the pattern of how providence trains a believer to patience: had Job “turned to the Chaldees, by whom he was plundered, he should instantly have been fired with revenge, but recognising the work of the Lord, he solaces himself with this most beautiful sentiment.”7 Loraine Boettner made the same point from the standpoint of the book as a whole: what looks from the human side like mere misfortune is, from the divine side, God “exercising complete control, giving the Devil permission to afflict so far but no farther, designing the events for the development of Job’s patience and character.”8

The inadequacy of retribution theology

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar argue from a single shared assumption: that God’s government is strictly retributive, so that the measure of a man’s suffering is the measure of his sin.4 Barrows summarized their position and the book’s verdict on it together:

“[The three friends] enter into an earnest controversy with him assuming the false ground that the administration of God’s government over this world is strictly retributive, so that special calamity comes only as a punishment for special wickedness, and is therefore itself a proof of such wickedness… The three friends were right in maintaining God’s justice; but with respect to the manner of its manifestation their error was fundamental.”9

Job, conscious of his own integrity, refutes their charges by appeal to the visible facts: the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer alike, so that outward affliction cannot by itself be read as a verdict on inward guilt.9

God’s speeches from the whirlwind

God’s answer to Job does not address the fairness of his suffering directly. Instead, “he addresses Job out of the whirlwind, rebuking him for his presumptuous language, and setting before him His infinite perfections, manifested in the creation and government of the world, as a sufficient proof that to arraign His justice at the bar of human reason is folly and presumption.”10 John Gill pointed to these chapters as evidence of the book’s own divine authority, its language exceeding “such strong and lofty expressions as are not to be found in human writings, especially the speeches Jehovah himself delivered out of the whirlwind.”11

Job’s vindication

God’s verdict falls against the three friends, not against Job: “he has spoken of Him the thing which is right” (Job 42:8), a judgment concerning the ground Job had taken in the dispute rather than the intemperate spirit in which he had pressed it.10 Job’s own response to seeing God is not self-justification but repentance: “Wherefore I abhor myself in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Stephen Charnock read this as the pattern every soul follows on a true sight of God’s holiness, since “every flash of the Divine purity has struck [the most holy saints in Scripture] into a deep sense of their own impurity and shame for it.”12 God then restores Job’s fortunes twofold, after Job intercedes for the friends he had disputed with (Job 42:10-17).

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 21, “The Poetical Books,” 279. ↩

  2. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 265. ↩

  3. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 269. ↩

  4. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 280. ↩ ↩2

  5. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 283-284. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 280-283. ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 17, sec. 8, 191. ↩

  8. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 156. ↩

  9. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 281. ↩ ↩2

  10. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 21, 282. ↩ ↩2

  11. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 2. ↩

  12. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 185-186. ↩