Job
The righteous sufferer who will not curse God—and will not pretend the world is just.
Hebrew Scripture · Wisdom poem · c. 6th–4th c. BCE
The Book of Job
The Job Poet
A blameless man is stripped of everything but speech. His friends offer theology; he offers protest. The whirlwind answers with a creation that will not be reduced to a moral.
Theodicy
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Characters
The friends
Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar: piety as a closed system.
The Voice from the whirlwind
Not an explanation. A tour of leviathan.
Themes
Innocent suffering
The oldest unsolved problem, staged rather than solved.
Speech and silence
Job talks until God talks; then Job puts his hand over his mouth.
Motifs
Answer as weather, as excess of world.
The sitting-place of the argument.
The body as the evidence the friends refuse to see.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.