/lit/ - Literature

>>19065095

You don't see it.

Why would Satan, a being who's sole purpose is to tempt and corrupt mankind away from God and righteousness, want to make a bet with God; that God's most righteous mortal servant is actually a phony who will fold like paper the moment any pressure is applied? God takes the bet. Satan tries his hardest to turn Job away from God through suffering, yet, despite Job`s complaints, despair, and confusion; Job does not curse God. He keeps his faith.

God took the bet because he already knew what was going to happen. He knew Job was strong enough to endure the worst suffering possible, but Job himself didn't know. Job and his friends errenously believed that we get rewarded or punished on Earth for our behavior, God shows them the truth.

On a higher analysis, we see that the wager is symbolic. Evil and suffering vs righteousness and faithfulness. Through Jobs example, we know that a human being can endure any amount of suffering if they keep God in their heart and stay faithful to him. We learn that God only permits us to suffer as much as we can endure, even if we don't know it ourselves. We learn that God uses suffering to burn away our delusions and teach us wisdom, if we only show humility and faithfulness in the face of it.
We learn that for the faithful believer, suffering is only ever temporary.
These and many more lessons contain in Job, taken together glorify God. The worst worldly suffering and evil is only temporary, for God's truth; that God is the absolute, the Alpha and Omega, that good always triumphs evil, and that God loves us; keeping these truths in our hearts allows mortal man to transcend his limitations and this material world.

>>17633288
>>17633054

Anon, in your few short posts I think I gleam the background of what you are saying am why, and I have a gut feeling you are closer to the truth than the other anons here. Now, I THINK you are making the same arguments as Seraphim Rose in his Nihilism essay, to which I recently stumbled upon. I am not nearly well read enough to grasp the deeper arguments and subtle meanings behind your arguments, but I want to learn. Do I unironically start with the Greeks? What other reading would you recommend?

The overall structure of the book is fairly clear, but it is somewhat obscured by certain disjunctures between the frame-story and the poem, and by two major interpolations and some gaps in the received text. There is a palpable discrepancy between the simple folktale world of the frame-story and the poetic heart of the book. God’s quick acquiescence in the Adversary’s perverse proposal is hard to justify in terms of any serious monotheistic theology, and when the LORD speaks from the whirlwind at the end, He makes no reference whatever either to the wager with the Adversary or to any celestial meeting of “the sons of God,” a notion of a council of the gods that ultimately goes back to Canaanite mythology. The old folktale, then, about the suffering of the righteous Job is merely a pretext, a narrative excuse, and a pre-text, a way of introducing the text proper, and what happens in it provides little help for thinking through the problem of theodicy. The two major interpolations are the Hymn to Wisdom (chapter 28), a fine poem in its own right but one that expresses a pious view of wisdom as fear of the LORD that could scarcely be that of the Job poet, and the Elihu speeches (chapters 32–37), which could not have been part of the original book both because Elihu is never mentioned in the frame-story, either at the beginning or at the end, and because the bombastic, repetitious, and highly stereotypical poetry he speaks is vastly inferior to anything written by the Job poet.

After the opening two chapters of the frame-story, the core of the book is introduced by Job’s harrowing death-wish poem (chapter 3), to which God will offer a direct rejoinder at the beginning of the speech from the whirlwind (see the commentary on chapter 38). There are then three rounds of debate between Job and his three reprovers, each of the three speaking in turn and he replying to each. The third round of the debate was somehow damaged in scribal transmission. Bildad is given only a truncated speech, and the third contribution of Zophar to the debate seems to have disappeared entirely. In any case, after these three rounds, Job concludes the discussion with a lengthy profession of innocence in which he also recalls his glory days before he was overwhelmed by catastrophe (chapters 27 and 29–31, with his speech interrupted by the Hymn to Wisdom of chapter 28). At this point, in the original text, the LORD would have spoken out from the whirlwind, but a lapse in judgment by an ancient editor postponed that brilliant consummation for six chapters in which the tedious Elihu is allowed to hold forth.