#it's also a fertile ground for people to project their own theodicy onto

[tanadrin]

the book of job is so interesting to me because it's the closest an ancient book of religious scripture seems to come to admitting that any attempt to seek theodicy is in vain--i.e., that a plan of divine justice can't be found because it doesn't exist. like, god not only rebukes job at the end, but he completely ignores job's (extremely reasonable) demands for an explanation, and the only thing that rescues god for the reader, gives some hint that this whole "god" thing isn't a post-hoc attempt to salvage a just world out of a universe that is in fact quite uncaring about humans in particular, is the fact that job's life ends happier than it began.

and yet somehow this story became a landmark of both jewish and christian literature! i think perhaps it's because god's whole "who are you to question me" attitude to job is very useful in service of defending religious authority, and the speeches by job's friends that intimate if you're suffering you must have done something to deserve it, even if you don't know what, also can be used to defend orthodoxy when shorn of context. but as a complete literary object, the book feels to me at best a divine version of the Melian Dialogue, and maybe even as a repudiation of, rather than an attempt to defend, a notion of divine justice. like, the whole point of the story is that job is upright and blameless, that god lets satan fuck him over for no reason. we are told this explicitly. and no amount of "you are just a mortal being, you cannot possibly understand" at the end can make up for the fact that we are told explicitly in the beginning, "the moral of this story is that this god fellow is a real son of a bitch."

#it's also a fertile ground for people to project their own theodicy onto #cf. all the literature and theology that references it in the millennia since