Reading: 10-2 The Book of Job for the 21st Century

Themelios 40.2 (2015): 243-52

Communicating the Book of Job in the
Twenty-First Century

- Daniel J. Estes -

Daniel Estes is distinguished professor of Old Testament at Cedarville
University in Cedarville, Ohio.

lthough Job is one of the longer books in the Bible, in most churches today it is rarely taught or
preached in a comprehensive way. To be sure, some familiar details of the experience of its pro-
tagonist have come over into common knowledge. For example, even people who have scant
comprehension of the content of the Bible are aware of Job's words that the Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away (Job 1:21). They may well recall the proverb of Eliphaz that humans are born for trouble
as sparks fly upward (Job 5:7). Handel's brilliant aria in Messiah drawn from Job 19:25 has prompted
the widespread presumption that Job's endurance was rooted in his anticipation of Christ as his re-
deemer. And the allusion in James 5: 11 to the patience of Job is often the monocular lens through which
the whole book is perceived, even though that approach fails to consider fully Job's agonized speeches
throughout the poetic section that dominates the text that bears his name.

Nevertheless, in thirty years of surveying college students I have discovered that very few of them
have ever heard in their churches a series of lessons or sermons on the book of Job. Their reported
experience, which likely represents the general case, could be attributed to a number of possible factors.
For the pastor committed to expository preaching, the challenge of working through such a long
text is indeed daunting, and this could also explain why series on other lengthy books such as Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deuteronomy are as rarely found. If the prevailing emphasis of the preacher is on
evangelism or discipleship or mission, these subjects do not emerge as easily from Job as they do from
other scriptural texts. If the homiletical text is drawn from the Revised Common Lectionary, only rarely
does Job make an appearance. I For sermons that endeavor to move facilely from a biblical text to three easy applications for the week ahead, Job's complexity stubbornly resists such simplification. For these
and other reasons, those who preach the Bible too often fail to communicate the book of Job with any
frequency or detail. 2

To complicate the problem, it may not be too much of a stretch to allege that only rarely do we
find a seminary graduate who has worked through the text of Job. Few programs at the master's level
require more than a few class days in Job, and even elective courses devoted to the book are infrequent.
More commonly, Job is grouped together with the other Old Testament wisdom or poetical books in
a semester-long survey course. Perhaps there is a correlation here between the Job that is infrequently
taught in the seminaries and the Job that is rarely preached in the churches. Could it be that we are
sending into ministry the blind to lead the blind?

Added to this, a search for scholarly publications relevant to the preaching and teaching of Job
yields an equal paucity of results. In my investigation of Old Testament Abstracts and ATLASerials, I
have been able to identify only a handful of articles- and one brief book' that address the issue, and even
these sources touch only obliquely upon the subject of how to communicate the book of Job effectively
in the contemporary context. It is encouraging, however, to see that three recent books on Job have
considered aspects of this topic.'

In this paper, I want to ask and answer one key question: How can communicators of the book of
Job more effectively speak to people in the twenty-first century? To do that, I will discuss first why Job
has always been a difficult book to communicate. Then, I will consider several factors that make Job
especially difficult to communicate in the twenty-first century. That will lead into an investigation of how
scholars, teachers, and preachers can respond to both the long-term and the contemporary challenges
of communicating the book of Job. In conclusion, I will address why Job needs to be communicated
effectively today; in particular, I will note what is lost if we do not and what is gained if we do.

1. Why Has Job Always Been a Difficult Book to Communicate?

For many reasons, Job is difficult to read, to teach, and to preach, so it is not surprising that it so
rarely is. Throughout the history of its interpretation, within both the Jewish and Christian worlds,
the book of Job has been construed in a variety of ways that have failed to account adequately for its
complex content. Clines observes that Job has most often been viewed according to the ideals of the
reader, so that succeeding generations of interpreters have found in the book the ideal patient human
who fatalistically accepts suffering as God's will, or the champion of reason over dogma, or the heroic
victim in the face of the cruelty and absurdity of the world.' He concludes that these interpretations of
Job are in fact misreadings that introduce into the text the values of the readers' hermeneutical horizons
rather than accurately exegeting the textual meaning of the book.

For good reasons, beginning students of Hebrew do not often find their way into the book of Job, or
at any rate not far beyond its prose framework. The Hebrew text of this book is among the most difficult
of any in the Old Testament. Even the premier scholars of Job wrestle mightily with its frequent rare
words, grammatical conundrums, debatable variants, and structural complexities. Working in this book
is not for the novice or the faint of heart!

To complicate the interpretive challenge, the book of Job embodies a complicated literary form
that defies easy definition of its genre. The frame ofthe book is narrative written in prose, but enclosed
within that frame are thirty-nine chapters of poetry that must be duly considered. Francisco warns:

One of the greatest errors one can make about the book of Job is to think that when
you have found out what happened to Job you have understood the book. You can
discover the story simply by reading the prose in chapters ],2, and 42. The great poem
comes between these prose accounts, which give the setting for it. One does not read
Hamlet intelligently if all he does is ask what happened to the principal character. This
is important, but more important is what Shakespeare himself is saying as he arranges
the scenes and develops the conversation.'

The poetry of the book of Job is intricate,' with the speakers sometimes responding to the others,
but more often indulging in rhetorical excesses that obscure rather than clarify their points.' The diverse
characters articulate a variety of positions, so the readers must be careful to discern what the book as a
whole is endorsing, or they may wrongly conclude that it teaches what it does not.

In addition, even an initial perusal of Job indicates that the book frequently alludes to other
biblical texts, but many of these intertextual links are startling. For example, Job 7: 17-18 transposes
the privileged status of humans in Psalm 8 into a minor key,and in Job 10:8-11 God's fashioning of the
human embryo is not at all the comfort it is to the psalmist in Psalm 139. Mettinger has demonstrated
that the imagery in Job 16 and 19 draws from conventional language in the lament psalms, only "the
poet depicts Job as standing in the place of the enemy whom God annihilates, that is, in the position
conventionally assigned to evildoers under divine judgment'>

Wisdom literature as a whole, and Job as a specific case, has often been omitted or diminished in
treatments of Old Testament Theology and Biblical Theology." Taken by itself, the narrative frame ofJob
could be read as congruent with the retribution theology that is prominent in Proverbs. However, the
poetic dialogues feature Job's vehement rejection of his friends' attempts to condemn him as they reason
from the effects of Job's calamity back to what they presumed was the theologically necessary cause, that
is, his personal sin. Yahweh's siding with Job against the claims of the friends in 42:7-8 evidences that
the book as a whole argues that retribution, though accurate in general terms, does not explain all that
occurs in the world under divine control. This qualification of retribution is extant already within the
book of Proverbs, which states several times that there is mystery in Yahweh's ordering of his world, but
this relatively minor motif in Proverbs becomes the prominent point in Job.

A final factor that has long made Job a difficult book is that it tends to leave many readers unconvinced
or morally outraged. For many, the ending seems too contrived, as though Job lived happily ever after,
even though observation would suggest that life after tragedy is not always or even often like that. In
fact, severe traumas typically leave lifelong wounds and scars. Even more troubling, the book raises
profound ethical questions: How could a loving and just God allow Job to be treated so badly? What
about Job's children and servants and animals---don't they count for something? Are humans just pawns
in a cynical cosmic debate between God and the adversary? As Katharine DeIl asks in her recent essay,
"Does God behave unethically in the book of Job?"12

In 1984 a sculpture formed from 83 sheets of aluminum was dedicated on the Charles River
Esplanade in Boston. From a distance the visage of Arthur Fiedler, the longtime conductor ofthe Boston
Pops Orchestra, is readily discernible, but the closer one approaches the sculpture the more complicated
his representation appears. Throughout the history of its interpretation the book of Job has been like

that. This book that may seem so simple upon casual reading becomes ever more challenging the longer
and the closer one scrutinizes it.

2. Why is Job Especially Difficult to Communicate in the Twenty-First Century?

The twenty-first century is a profoundly different context from that envisioned by the original author
of Job, and people today bring to the book the questions, assumptions, and values that characterize our
contemporary culture. Although commentaries most often do effective work in explaining the ancient
world of Job, they do not always do as well in communicating to the present time with its distinctive
concerns. In fact, the scholarly literature rarely addresses how the book of Job speaks to the world in
which we live today. Consequently, as hard as it has always been to interpret Job, in the twenty-first
century there are additional challenges that must be overcome when one teaches or preaches this book.

In their recent commentaries, Clines and Seow have compiled extensive bibliographies of the
reception history of Job, including its influence upon literature, art, music, dance, and film." The
prevalent artifacts within Jewish and Christian liturgy have tended to regard Job as a great hero of faith
as they have concentrated on his portrayal in the narrative frame. Increasingly in the late twentieth
century, however, the Job of the dialogues is featured, and as Balentine has noted, "the Job who lives
on in the fiction, poetry, and drama of everyday life speaks with far less restraint and models a quite
different sort of heroism'> In particular, the depictions of Job in the Pulitzer Prize winning play J B.
by Archibald MacLeish (1958) and in Harold Kushner's bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen to
Good People (1978) have influenced how the general populace is prone to conceive of Job, even without
having personally read the book." MacLeish portrays Job's three comforters as representing history,
science and religion, all of which Job rejects as inadequate. Instead, Job finds comfort in the love of his
wife, and the two ofthem resolve to build a new life together on that basis, apart from religious faith."
In the final lines of the play, J. B's wife says memorably:

Blow on the coal of the heart.

The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the candle of the heart
And we'll see by and by ....

Kushner builds from MacLeish's position to contend that all of the characters in the book of Job
want to believe three ideas: that God is all-powerful, God is good, and that Job is good, and they could
hold to all three so long as Job enjoyed prosperity. However, after Job's profound adversity only two of
these positions could be affirmed simultaneously, and the third must be denied. The friends chose to
deny that Job is good, and Job denied that God was fair, but Kushner maintains that the solution comes in recognizing that though God is great, he is not totally in control ofthe world. The readers of Job, then,
must forgive God for choosing not to create a perfect world, and they must resolve to make the right
things happen by their own intentional actions. In the generation since the publication of When Bad
Things Happen to Good People, its position has seeped into much popular thought, and in large part it
has become the default view in the twenty-first century.

Another challenge in the contemporary context is that with the advent of continuous news
coverage and the Internet people today are more aware than ever before of the adversities, calamities,
and injustices in life throughout the world. The combination of economic uncertainty, political tension,
international terrorism, criminal activity, and medical threats causes us to feel as though much of the
world is sitting at the ash heap with Job trying to make sense of it all. Tollerton has written insightfully
about reading Job for a post-Holocaust world," and since that time recurrent waves of atrocities in
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, cataclysmic destruction by Hurricane Katrina, nuclear disasters at
Chernobyl and Fukushima, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and at the Boston Marathon,
and the recent barbarism of Boko Haram and ISIS have brought suffering full force into the collective
consciousness. Every person to whom we teach or preach this book will know at least one Job, and many
of them are Job. For them, abstract theology and theoretical platitudes will not suffice, because they like
Job are asking the hard questions, desperate to find satisfying remedies for the aches in their hearts.
Their deep pain will not be relieved by the homiletical equivalent of taking two aspirins, with the empty
assurance that they will feel better in the morning.

In many ways, the contemporary Zeitgeist finds the book of Job perplexing and even offensive. For
those who accept the prevalent narcissism of the age, assuming that "it is all about me;' Job counters
instead that life is all about God and his order for the world. People today place great faith in science and
technology, confident that there must be answers to their questions if only humans would search hard
enough. Job, by contrast, challenges the reader to accept that the Lord has knowledge that surpasses
what humans can know, so that we must accept mystery and place our faith in the God who knows far
more than he has revealed. Thus, Job calls upon humans to relinquish their pride and to bow humbly
before the Lord, an act of surrender that most people today want to avoid at all costs.

3. How Can Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Respond to These Challenges?

Given the numerous difficulties that have longed plagued the interpretation of the book of Job, as
well as the additional contemporary factors that have arisen, how can scholars, teachers, and preachers
effectively communicate this biblical text in the twenty-first century? I would like to present six general
strategies as guides to follow.

First, it is vital to grasp the content of the whole book of Job, and not to reduce Job to a brief
synopsis. Gustafson rightly says, ''Any reduction of the issues to a two- or three-sentence conundrum
captioned 'the problem of theodicy' will bleed the vitality out of the poetic, dialogic, and dramatic
passions that pervade much of the book.> Too often a Cliff's Notes version of the book is presented,
which distorts both the character Job and the overall message of the biblical text. As Paul Harvey used

to say, we need to hear the rest of the story, so that our theology is informed by it all, even the messy
parts. In practical terms, this means that the communicator must work through the entire book before
starting to preach or teach it. This enables one to develop the necessary interpretive framework for
understanding the specific passages within the book.

Second, because the book of Job is so difficult, it is vital to make judicious use of exegetical
commentaries that examine its text in detail. The standard seminary requirement of a year or two of
Hebrew may be adequate for exegeting simple narrative passages, but it is not sufficient for the massive
interpretive challenges of Job's poetry. As one of my mentors told me as I completed my doctoral
program, the ideal way to come to terms with the full content of a book of the Bible is to write an
exegetical commentary, because that process compels one to work through the entire text, rather than
just parts of it. No doubt, that is an unrealistic expectation for the typical preacher or teacher, but there
are some excellent resources both in commentaries and in journal articles on the book of Job, and these
must be examined assiduously, lest the communicator perpetuate misreadings of the text by failing to
comprehend its complexities.

Third, because Job is primarily poetry, the communicator must do more than just talk about the
story line. The power of poetry comes in its ability to recreate an experience in the reader, rather than
merely reporting the experience, as does prose. As Schreiber observes, "The poet's business in writing
his poem is not to tell us that this 'moment of imaginative experience' has happened to him, but to
make it happen to us as well?" Therefore, the preacher and teacher must discover ways in which the
poetry of Job can penetrate the hearts and touch the emotions of the hearer. One way to do this is to
prepare for a series or unit on Job by inviting the congregation or class to read through the book in
advance and to state the questions that it raises in their minds. By this means, the communicator will
be able better to guide them in studying and reflecting on the book, thus prompting honest and candid
dialogue." Another idea is to employ a dramatic rendering of the book, either acted out or in the form
of reader's theater. In the nineteenth century, James Stevens wrote a dramatization of the book of Job
which is available online as a free download. His portrayal uses the KJV text, it has some questionable
interpretive assumptions, and it takes nearly two hours to stage, so it might be better to employ someone
with a literary or theatrical bent to compose a script more suitable for the occasion. If this were to cover
the entire book in a condensed form within an hour, those who observe it would be better able to step
imaginatively into Job's situation and feel what he experienced.

Fourth, it is vital to transport the audience back to the biblical text, explaining its setting, cultural
references, and place in Old Testament theology. However, it is equally important to book them
on a return flight to the twenty-first century to consider how the book of Job applies to life today.
In other words, in the enthusiasm for acquainting the audience with what Job meant there and then,
the communicator must also enable them to understand what Job means for the here and now. We
do not have the luxury of communicating Job as abstract, academic theology alone; there must also
be a pastoral dimension in our preaching and teaching. It would be regrettable if the homiletical or
pedagogical journey were to leave the hearers "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" and not enable
them get back home to where they live and work and play. The numerous literary and artistic artifacts
cited by Clines and Seow in their compilations can serve as points of connection between Job and the
contemporary scene. The effective communicator will endeavor to link the abstract theology of Job

with concrete analogues in the present time. Literature, art, and current events can be useful tools for
highlighting how the ancient book of Job speaks with relevance today.

Fifth, the thorny theological problems posed by Job must be addressed directly rather than being
swept under the rug as though they do not exist. MacLeish, Kushner, and others have indeed surfaced
important and difficult questions, and the widespread acceptance of their views indicates that they have
given words to what many people think and believe. To pretend that these questions are irrelevant, or
to suggest that to ask them is in itself sinful, is to yield the field without a fight. Rather, the preacher
or teacher must raise and then respond to the queries that trouble people today: Why do bad things
happen to good people in God's world? Is God really both good and great? How can God's people
endure pain and minister to others in pain? How do humans live faithfully within the limitations of
their knowledge? And, as many have asked since the horrors of the Holocaust, Where was God at
Auschwitz? These are the kinds of questions that recur frequently in the lament psalms and especially
in the imprecatory psalms, when God's people expressed with excruciating candor their raw emotions
and anguished accusations, so there is ample biblical precedent for God's people to ask and discuss what
most troubles them. Parsons notes well: "The temptation is ... to ignore the many hard questions Job
raised in facing the mystery of his innocent suffering. Yet the candid record that Job began to question
God strikes a chord familiar to humankind. To ignore Job's question 'why?' and his search for God's
answer is to ignore basic issues of life everyone must face?"

Finally, we must call people today to trust the Lord humbly and courageously even when they feel
that life sucks, and God is silent. The literary and theological climax of the book occurs when Job comes
to his realization in 42:5-6: What I now know is that I do not know, but that the Lord does know, and
that is sufficient for me. Job, then, is a cautionary tale warning against rigid dogmatism, such as that
articulated by the friends and even by Job himself, which refuses to accept mystery. Job and the friends
all in their individual ways attempted to double-down on retribution theology, but functioning as the
master teacher Yahweh in his series of rhetorical questions in chapters 38-41 brought Job into a deeper
appreciation of divine omniscience. Within the book, Job never figured out what had happened to him,
and there is no record that Yahweh ever disclosed it to him. Nevertheless, Job came to the place that
he was content to accept that God's ways are higher than human ways, and God's thoughts are higher
than human thoughts (Isa 55:9). Ultimately, the book ofJob leads to the kind of courageous faith that
continues to trust God "though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart
of the sea" (Ps 46:2[3]).

4. Why Job Needs to Be Communicated Effectively Today

This article has assessed the long-term and the additional contemporary challenges in preaching
and teaching the book of Job, and several homiletical and pedagogical strategies have been suggested
to address them. One further question remains to be asked: Why does Job need to be communicated
effectively in the twenty-first century? This will be answered both negatively and positively.

First must be considered what is lost if Job is not communicated clearly and well. In his book
entitled Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey reflects on a conversation with a friend: ''As I brooded
over our conversation, ... I kept returning to three large questions about God that seemed to lurk just
behind the thicket of his feelings. The longer I pondered them, the more I realized that these questions