Keith&Co.

I just had a lot of fun rereading JOB this week.

It does go on and on, but there is an important message in it.

Job gets bent over and bumped by the Devil for a bet with God. His friends come over and give him typical orthodox believer support. That is, they tell him that he can't be all that good of a follower of God, because God is a good guy who is good to His believers.
They even get Job to question his own worth as a true follower and keeper of the faith. He never questions God though. He wonders if maybe he did deserve what happened to him. He didn't, but can't know that for sure. He never seems to find out exactly what led to the deaths, loss, boils, but he remains convinced that God is up there.

He gets three cronies to shut up about saying he isn't a good member of the Faithful.

That's when the young guy speaks up. Elihu has been quiet for all this, because he says he respects the older guys. But he cannot keep quiet when they're being stupid.
He gets up and says listen to me, you'll know wisdom. He repeats this a time or two. He talks about God and god's plan and the way justice works and how the world works and if Job is getting shafted, he cannot, cannot be all that good of a believer. Elihu knows how God works. He's a student of their common religion and he knows the true teachings. He diligently explains how Job is wrong. Job must be a slacker, he must deserve what's happening.
Because that's just how it is.

God, who knows exactly how loyal a servant Job has been, has enough of Elihu at this point. He shows up, whacks the speaker on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, proves he doesn't know what he's talking about, and makes nice with Job.

I couldn't help but think of this forum as i read it. There are a number of people who tell us everything we need to know about scripture, about what God wants, what God offers and what God would think about something. They often claim that we don't know enough about the religion under discussion to make good conclusions about it, or that we don't understand something because we approach it with the wrong bias.

But Elihu shows us that you can be a good and faithful student of scripture, with the best intent and presumably the same holy spook helping your understand the meanings and still muck it all up in a given discussion.

vid

Now let's just wait until God shows up and smacks us with newspaper

d-ray

But since God is willing to let all a man's children die just to test his faith, I don't think it will be a newspaper he smacks us with. He'll use more firepower than that.

makerowner

lol some people actually think this book answers the problem of evil. Tools.

dr lazer blast

pretty good analogy, but the problem with Elihu was he was judging job with his 'apologetics'.

aChristian

Actually, Elihu never gets whacked and God never rebukes him nor requires Job to pray for him. It seems to be a pretty good endorsement of what he said unless it indicates that he was inconsequential. I believe the former is probably true, that he was making good sense and therefore God had no need to rebuke him.

Keith&Co.

Well, damn.
ON rereading, you're right. Ithought the first verse of 38 was God asking 'who is this idiot talking without no knowledge?' and referring to the speaker who just finished talking. I didn't notice that Elihu never got mentioned again, just the three senior pooty heads.

gregor

Ehrman in his new "God's Problem" (discussing theodicy) points out that Job is an amalgam of two originally separate stories. The first frames the book and discusses God's allowance of evil. The second is the discussion of several views of theodicy.

Ehrman does a good job explaining different OT views of theodicy expressed through the two different stories.

Casper

not to sidetrack this but that is something I have never gathered; it always seemed to me about how evil and dispicable the god of the jews was. God did the whole thing, and then "buys" Job's love back. His family have all been killed, his best hunting dog, everything gone. And then in an insulting twist he is given "replacements" for his loved ones.

I guess as a child I never could divorce myself from contemporary values enough to see how Job was ever "rewarded" in the end. I've always chalked it up to a cultural thing but now I'm not so sure, maybe there is a hidden story in there that people are ignoring? Like maybe the Devil is craftier than God because God allows him to be? Like an ancient Brer Rabbit story, with Satan as the rabbit?

Malachi151

First of all, "the Devil" has noting to do with Job, "the Devil" doesn't even exist in the "Old Testament". Satan plays a role in Job, but the Satan of the OT is not "the Devil".

Secondly, the events of Job simply reflect the reality of the world.

Really, the God of the Old Testament is a reflection of the forces of the natural world. He is the one who sends the famines, the floods, and plagues, the earth quakes, the storms and the raiding armies.

The world was and is a harsh place. If you believe that God is a being that directs the world, then you must believe that God does a lot of very nasty things to people because the reality is that a lot of very nasty things do happen to people.

If you look at the ancient Jewish beliefs about God they make perfect sense if we consider that the world is really a godless place.

For example the ancient Jews believed in collective punishment and that God punished whole nations and whole groups of people for the actions of a few.

Today we consider that to be immoral, we consider it to be unjust to punish someone for something that they didn't do. The United Nations specifically states that collective punishment is against the international laws of human rights.

Yet, the ancient Jewish scritpures state that God punishes collectively. Does this mean that "God is immoral" and "a horrible guy"?

Well, of course not, because there is no god.

The reason that the Jews thought that God engaged in collective punishment is because plagues hit whole populations, floods hit whole populations, invading armies destroyed whole towns. The Jewish concept of God was based on their real world experiences, and in their real world experiences of course nature doesn't discriminate, life is not fair, there is no real system of universal justice - Nature Is Unjust.

Thus, The God Of The Jews Was Unjust, because of course the God of the Jews was just Nature.

What the Jews did was they rationalized the injustice of the natural world.

This is what Job is about.

Job is about the fact that bad things happen to good people. That was simply a fact of life. In fact, the lesson of Job is in some ways a very good one, because the lesson of Job for the larger audience was that just because bad things happen to someone doesn't mean that they are a bad person.

The real world is an f*ed up place, which is why the God of Abraham is an f*ed up God.