Canter Bridge

The book of Job lurches to an unexpected conclusion, one that troubles the logic of scholars and challenges the shape of the piety we know.

YHWH’s rhetorical tour de force persuades Job that he truly knows nothing. Job responds to this conviction by ritual humiliation. So far, somewhat conventional.

But then, a startling turn ensues. It turns out that Job has spoken ‘what is right about YHWH’ and the friends have not. Crucially, the reader is given to understand that Job’s right standing before YHWH depends not on the visceral enthusiasm of his confession, but rather on his aggrieved confrontation of a God who seemed both absent and condemning. Job had maintained his integrity in good times and in those that had famously become very, very bad. He does not fear to say so to God himself.

In the end, it is the professional theodicists—Job’s friends so convinced of YHWH’s invincible justice and the fallacy of Job’s wearisome self-justification—who find themselves desperately in need of forgiveness. Indeed their restoration—if such is still possible—will be effected through the very prayers of Job.

The book of Job endures as compelling literature—to say nothing of its condition as one component of an anthology considered sacred and even God-revealed by Jews and Christians—because of this complex denouement.

Things are decidedly not as they appear. This paradox the reader is encouraged to embrace, even when it runs at crosscurrents to conventional and well-worn certainties about God, his world, and those who serve him in it.

This book becomes an irritating, unsettling, and occasionally liberating volume in the biblical library. Its presence alongside the biblical Proverbs renders those conventional aphorisms more beautiful and realistic—in the deepest sense of the word—by seeding the soil around them with the most profound epistemological warrant: things are not as they seem.