The Rationality of the World: A Philosophical Reading of the Book of Job

I am a philosopher who believes that Western philosophy begins not with Plato, but elsewhere, and earlier, with the Book of Job. That is because I believe that the problem of evil is the central point where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop. The experience of inexplicable suffering and basest injustice forces us to ask whether our lives have meaning, or whether human existence may be deeply incomprehensible. And if that is the case, then the urge to philosophy can seem to be a simple mistake.

Put more optimistically: if the task of philosophy is to show how the world is, or can be made rational, then it must address the presence of evil in the world.

Consider the classic statement of the problem of evil. It consists of three sentences which are impossible to maintain together:

God exists, and is omnipotent;

God exists, and is benevolent;

Evil exists.

Classically, the majority of thinkers dealt with the problem by denying the third claim. Evil doesn't exist, or anyway not really: you can't have light without having shadows; you wouldn't want to eat sugar all the time and nothing salty (these are Leibniz's examples.) Everything we take to be evil actually happens for the best, and if we knew all that God knows we would understand that too.

Though one still does hear versions of this view from surprising corners, it is the route we are least likely to take these days, largely since the mid-eighteenth century, certainly since the twentieth century. For it denies what we witness nearly every day: children are murdered in Syria or Florida, and the world keeps on turning, and not even the punishment of those responsible ― if it happens at all ― can make a dent in the cosmic flaw that is revealed when that kind of evil shows itself among us.

Before the eighteenth century, however, nearly every major thinker preferred to deny the evidence of his senses than deny the central theses of monotheism ― that God exists, and is omnipotent and benevolent. Perhaps it would have seemed a denial of hope. The Book of Job is matchless because it is unwilling to make the problem easier by dropping any of these claims, and makes us feel the force of all of them.

Note that the example I just used is an example of moral evil, which is different to what, up to the mid-eighteenth century, was called natural evil ― namely, the suffering that is caused through things like earthquakes, plagues and floods. One revolutionary turn of the Enlightenment was to make a radical distinction between these: there is a fundamental difference between what happens when a child is killed by a vigilante thug and when he is killed by an earthquake in Italy.

I am simply here pointing out that the distinction between natural and moral evils is not a distinction that is important for most traditional believers, and hence not for Job. The book notes no difference in the misery he feels when the suffering was caused by lightning or by marauding neighbours ― after all, both the lightning and the neighbours are all ultimately in the hands of God. So this book ignores a quintessentially modern distinction, but before you conclude that this makes the book less timeless, you should know that Sigmund Freud ― that profound atheist and demystifier ― held the distinction to be of little importance. From the perspective of the one who suffers, the source of the suffering ― earthquakes or vigilantes ― makes very little difference at all.

I want to begin by touching on an unresolved textual question about the Book of Job that I find most interesting: whether the text we know as the Book of Job is the product of more than one author. There is good reason, at first glance, to believe this. Even the best translations cannot obscure the incredible differences in language: the poetry of the main body of the text ― Job's outrage, and God's answer ― seems worlds away from the language of the prologue and epilogue, which is not only prosaic, but so wooden as to come closest to soap opera or slapstick.

Just consider the way in which Job's suffering is introduced: the first messenger appears with the announcement, "The oxen were ploughing and the donkeys grazing and the Sabeans attacked and took them and killed the servants and only I escaped to tell you." Before he had finished speaking another one came and said, "Lightning fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and servants and only I escaped to tell you." Before he had finished speaking, another one came and said, "Your sons and daughters were feasting and a great wind came out of the desert and they're dead and only I escaped to tell you." If you saw this on a stage, you might laugh, or sneer. You can do neither in the main body of the text.

Moreover, the weakness of the language of the prologue and epilogue seems to reflect the weakness of their content. The opening premise is clearly outrageous: God makes a bet with the devil? God allows someone He Himself describes as a man of perfect integrity to be tortured as a means of proving a boast about His own power? And speaking of power, in the second round of torments, the Almighty behaves like a sulky child, complaining to Satan that "You made me torture him for no reason". This is the God who speaks out of the whirlwind with a force and majesty unequalled in the Bible?

If the prologue can seem outrageous (one writer calls it the most brutal scene in all of Western literature) the epilogue can seem ridiculous. It looks like a tacked-on happy ending, straight out of Disney, which simply ignores all the questions that the rest of the book poses. Is there incomprehensible suffering in the world? Of course not, or not for long: at the end of the book Job has 14,000 sheep instead of 7,000, 6,000 camels instead of 3,000; the Lord doubles Job's possessions, and gives him just the same number of children he had before.

Moreover ― and this is perhaps the most crucial point ― the Job of the prologue and the epilogue seem to be a wholly different man from the one we see in the poem. There his rage and rebellion know no bounds; in the prologue and epilogue we only see the Job whose humble piety became proverbial, the man whose only response to the complete destruction of life as he knew it ― and all ten of his children ― was to utter the sentence: "The Lord gave, and the Lord took; blessed be the name of the Lord."

The sense that there are two Jobs in this book, as well as two Gods, has led many to conclude that there must have been two authors. In particular ― since this was one of the books of the Bible whose canonisation was hotly debated, for reasons I think obvious ― scholars have speculated that the epilogue was tacked on at the end in order to support conventional notions of religion and morality that are threatened by the body of the text. (How to do this with the prologue is rather harder to see.) So in order to make the book bearable the second author stuck on a little fairy tale: See folks? God is always just and comprehensible; be good and pious and eventually you'll be rewarded. If you happen to suffer along the way, just hang on and your reward will eventually double.

I am in no position to answer such textual questions, or evaluate the attempts made to argue for the unity of the text. I raise them just to say that scholars are still debating them, and if your initial reaction in reading Job was a sense of severe dissonance between parts of the book, you are not alone.

What we can say, however, that the text has been transmitted to us as a unity. Interpretations of Job have been given to us, usually, as interpretations of the book as a whole ― coherent or not.

Perhaps the most striking fact about traditional, pre-twentieth century literature on Job is just this: Job has preoccupied people for centuries, but what interests us about Job is not what interested them ― anyway, not explicitly. We are moved by this book because we accept, or begin by accepting, its basic premises. We take the text at face value because something about it seems true. Here is a good man who suffers the most horrible series of catastrophes, for no reason at all. Though he tries to bear them with humility and fortitude, he breaks down in a rage that we share: where is justice, and meaning in the world, when this sort of thing is possible?

A brief survey of the immense literature on Job reveals that Job's world is much closer to ours than the world of the intervening centuries; for every earlier interpretation sought to deny some piece of that picture we find undeniable. Some medieval Christian interpretations did this in the most straightforward of ways: they simply censored those pieces of the text in which Job expresses rage. If you leave those out, you get the figure of the patient Job, who remains humble and pious throughout every twist of fate; you get some bits of traditional theodicy about the mysteriousness of God's purposes for the feeble human mind; and Job's piety is rewarded in the end, serving nicely as an example for schoolchildren.

This is precisely what John Calvin did ― admittedly, I haven't read all 159 sermons that he wrote on Job, but in the sample I have taken he goes on to add that Job was actually fortunate to have his riches taken away, given how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, before rushing to add that the story also tells us that riches per se should not be despised. Hello, Max Weber! In sum, the lesson Calvin draws is that Job shows we should be patient until God discloses His reasons, for God can dispose of His creatures at His pleasure. Calvin doesn't mention the children.

Other Christian readings viewed the problems in the Book of Job to be problems within Judaism, which Christianity had resolved. Job was seen as a parallel or precursor to Jesus; one theologian wrote that Job is the question, and Jesus the answer. Moreover, some Christian theologians continued, the difficulties in Job stem from the failure of traditional Judaism to develop an adequate theory of the afterlife. On some views, that theory just is an answer to the problem of evil: the Jobs of the world land in heaven, where the infinite duration of their reward makes any problems they had in the world below seem fleeting and trivial.

Other writers, both Christian and Jewish, suggest that this begs the question: the Book of Job concerns the problem of evil in this world, not in the world to come. But traditional Jewish interpretations can deny the immensity of the problem just as surely as do Christian ones. Here we find no straightforward censorship; once a text has been canonised, it cannot be cut. As a text, it is sacred. If passages in it seem problematic, it is precisely the business of scholarship to explain them, by argument and analogy, by imagining details that were left out of the original text and make it explicable.

In short: Jews don't cut texts, we write more of them. One Midrash (a collection of sacred tales meant to explain problematic passages of Scripture) tells us that Job was punished for the sin of neutrality. Three non-Jews were asked what should be the fate of the children of Israel in Egypt. The father-in-law of Moses, Jethro, said they should be liberated, and he was rewarded appropriately. Pharaoh said they should be annihilated, and we know what happened to him. Job remained silent, undecided, neutral on a question of good and evil; hence the very peculiar nature of his torment.

Another Midrash tells us the following: as the children of Israel were trying to cross the Red Sea, Satan came along to try to stop them. In order to divert Satan long enough for the people to cross, God threw him Job, just as a shepherd may temporarily leave the strongest of his rams to battle the wolf while herding the lambs to safety.

Let's reflect the philosophical structure of these tales. In the first, what is claimed is that Job was guilty of something after all; therefore his punishment was deserved. (Indeed, a host of traditional interpretations accuse Job of a variety of sins, from self-righteousness to rebellion itself. Since God, knowing everything, knew that Job harboured rebellious thoughts, Job can justly be punished for having them even before he expresses them.) The neutrality story is interesting for its political implications, but however complex the sin it describes may be, its solution to the problems Job poses is very simple: Job was guilty, and God punished him.

In the second Midrash, what is being argued is that Job's suffering served a higher purpose, diverting Satan so that the children of Israel can escape to freedom. This turns Job into a kind of Hegelian resistance hero who, albeit unwittingly, is strong enough and righteous enough to plunge into the slaughterbank of history for the sake of other's lives or freedom.

Now consider at what is common to both of these readings, which can serve as typical ones. Both attempt to find meaning, or reason, in Job's suffering. For Job's friend Eliphaz is right to accuse Job of undermining religion, and crippling faith in God. If what Job says is true, our faith must be devastated. So traditional interpretations have sought to deny Job's claims by finding meaning, one way or another, in his suffering.

Without fully realising it, all these readings confirm the assumption that is the source of Job's outrage. That assumption is just this: there must be reason in the world, or Creation itself is unbearable. In particular, if misery occurs, it has to be explicable ― either as the consequence of some unknown transgression, or in the service of some greater good. Traditional interpretations fully accept these premises, and go on to try to discover the explanation implied in them.

This is a peculiar, back-handed vindication of Job himself, but it is about as helpful as the answers of Job's friends. Indeed, you may look at traditional readings of Job as variations on one or another of the friends' replies. And they do not address what contemporary readers find compelling in the book: the apparent and absolute meaninglessness of Job's suffering. Unlike earlier readers, we share Job's rage.

Just consider Job's tirade, in Stephen Mitchell's translation:

God damn the day I was born

And the night that forced me from the womb

On that day ― let there be darkness

Let it never have been created

Let it sink back into the void

Let chaos overpower it

Let black clouds overwhelm it

Let the sun be plucked from the sky.

As the curse goes on it is easy to see this passage as an anti-Genesis, a demand to undo all that which has been created, almost in the order which is set out at the very beginning of the Bible. Though Job remains modest enough to confine his fantasy to obliterating only the day he was born, the terms in which he speaks mirror the Creation story. This is indeed blasphemy, but in view of Job's claims we can take it seriously, as a comprehensible demand: let Creation be undone if it makes no sense.

We see how hard it would be to answer Job's charges. The Prologue begins by telling us that Job "was a man of perfect integrity, who feared God and avoided evil." It doesn't give us much to go on in grounding that claim, but the texts of the speeches show us what Job's integrity really was. Comparing his speeches with those of his friends, and even that of God Himself, it is not hard to feel that Job's unbending wisdom ― I don't mean sheer intelligence, which he has too, in spades ― is a match for every answer he is given. To Zophar he cries, "I am not an idiot! Who does not know such things?" This is before acknowledging, as he does several times, that God's wonders are beyond our grasp, that the human mind is simple, that only God is truly wise. Job does not demand that everything be explicable, nor deny that only God really fathoms the universe He has created.

Nor is his complaint a self-centred one, reducible to the question, "Why me?" It is true that he begins with his own case, which is natural enough ― it is his pain and his suffering, after a lifetime of decency, which cause him to doubt. But here it should be pointed out that it is not only the physical and emotional pain which drive him; Job's suffering is compounded by the fact that he is a man of integrity, with a strong sense of justice, and that sense has been violated. Perhaps a lesser man would have suffered less precisely because his pain was self-centred: however awful it may be to confront the loss of your wealth, and health, and even your children, it is not as awful as losing all of that and your belief in the justice and sense of the world as a whole.

As his rage and pain continue, Job generalises his own case, in terms that seem undeniable. In the starkest of terms he outlines the reasons for his impatience and horror: the wicked prosper, secure in their houses; not even their cows miscarry, and their grandchildren play like lambs. All this while the poor people shiver, picking up scraps for their children, and breaking their backs for the rich. This is, we will say, the way the world is; and only Job's friends, who cling to their dogmatic theorising, are able to ignore it. So their answers, Job says, are empty lies. It is just this weaving between his own case and others, between the particular and the universal, which gives his speech such power.

Nor will many of us be tempted to understand this text ― as some writers have done ― by seeking passages which show Job to be guilty, not quite of some secret sin, but of something we might call moral simplicity, even obtuseness. There is indeed one passage in which he sounds arrogant; another talks about settling of accounts like a businessman, which could seem to justify William Blake's idea that Job's initial piety and righteousness were superficial.

Yet the beautiful and genuine defence Job gives of his own decency, in his last speech, shows that this is a man who knows what goodness is about. Indeed, it must be the very fact of this speech that finally moves God to answer:

If I ever neglected the poor, or made the innocent suffer

If I ate my meals alone, and did not share with the hungry

If I did not clothe the naked, or care for the ragged beggar

If his body did not bless me for the warmth of my sheep's wool

If I ever abused the helpless, knowing that I could not be punished

Let my arm fall from my shoulder, and my elbow be ripped from its socket!

If I ever trusted in silver, or pledged allegiance to gold

If I laughed when my enemy fell, or rejoiced when suffering found him

If I ever covered my crimes, or buried my sins in my heart

Afraid of what people thought, shivering behind my doors ...

If my land cries out against me, its furrows weep together

May nettles grow there instead of wheat; instead of barley, stinkweed!

The text is at an end, the author unable, or unwilling, to say anything further. He has shown that Job knows what righteousness is, if anyone does; he has shown that Job can see the world more clearly than any of his friends; that his mind is keen enough to answer any theoretical attempt they offer to justify God's ways. And just to make certain that we do not dismiss Job's charges, the author calls up God Himself as a witness to their truth. Twice, in the epilogue, God chastises Job's friends: you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.

Before returning to this statement, the most compelling defence of Job, I want to address a modern indictment of Job which, some will argue, should lead us to reject Job's questions entirely. On this view Job is seen as lacking, not righteousness or humility, but maturity: Job's questions, and outrage, are based on naive, misguided assumptions about reward and punishment. For why should we think that the universe is just? Modern psychology explains how we come to share such assumptions: our parents raised us with sticks and carrots, so we project this pattern onto the universe at large.

Now there is no denying that some version of these claims is true. Some of us were raised in traditionally authoritarian homes where the connections between good behaviour and rewards, or bad behaviour and punishments, were made brutally clear. But most of us have, on becoming parents, concluded that some such connections are unavoidable, even if they are as simple as a sentence like: "If you pour the juice on the floor again, I'm taking away the cup." There are interesting and controversial studies on the psychology of moral development, showing how children get from the phase where good behaviour can only be connected with the desire for a reward, to the phase where they learn to act rightly for the sake of a principle.

Here there are many questions, and much work remains to be done. Still, the fact is that all of us were raised this way from our earliest, preconscious moments: so our deepest assumptions are connected with the expectation that if we only please mama and papa sufficiently, we'll get the story or the cookie or the hug. (Or, if you were particularly unlucky, the expectation that if you didn't please mama and papa sufficiently, you'd get a slap or a lash.) And all of the images of God as father that permeate most religions develop with, and through, these assumptions.

But to say that all this is true is not to bring us to the conclusion some have suggested: that Job's questions are meaningless, little more than a naive projection of a set of expectations onto a universe which we, as grownups, have learned cannot fulfil them. The conclusion that once you have described the origins of something you have accounted for it, or explained it, is what philosophers call the genetic fallacy. What is important is that understanding how we learn to have certain expectations of justice does not, by itself, invalidate them.

To see this, consider two things. First, few if any thinking theists ― and Job surely belongs to these ― have operated with naïve notions of God as the rewarding father. Job knows that things are at best murky, and that much is beyond his understanding; to expect that God provides instant or clear connections between behaviour and reward would be simply blind. Sometimes the friends talk this way, but we know they are the fall guys of the story, and even they admit that God's ways of meting out justice are mysterious. So no good theist uses as simple a notion of reward and punishment as the psychological objection supposes.

Second, you do not have to be a theist to expect justice from the world. Here is a quote from Max Horkheimer: "Reason rebels against the thought that the present state of reality is final, and that undeserved misfortunes and wrongdoing ― and not the self-sacrificing deeds of human beings ― are to have the last word." Immanuel Kant tells us that reason has a need to find, or create, a connection between happiness and virtue. The fact that we may have good psychological explanations of how this need develops ― of why reason rebels ― does not mean it isn't true. I believe that all our deepest, most immediate moral reactions presuppose just this need. Our despair when innocent people suffer, our indignation when wicked people flourish, presuppose reason's need to find a connection between virtue and happiness.

Up to this point, I have been defending Job's charges, just as he stated them. Pre-modern readers sought to reject them as impious or impatient; postmodern readers seek to dismiss them as childish. I have tried, very briefly, to sketch answers to them which show that Job's indictment is just as compelling as it ever was: the world, as created, is intolerably unjust.

But once we find Job's statement of the problem to be defensible, what do we say about the answer? It is hard to avoid feeling that if Job's charges are coherent, the answers given in the text are not. And because both the charges and the answers come close to exhausting the ones that can possibly be given, it is hard to avoid concluding that either there is no problem of evil, or there is no answer.

Let us take the friends' answers first. We know they are wrong, and not just because God says so. It is striking to watch how thoroughly they sink. In the beginning they are all that friends can be: they come immediately (there is a Midrash that tries to explain how they knew what had happened to him instantly, in an age without text messaging); they sit with him for seven days and nights and "said no word, for they saw that his grief was great." Unfortunately, they begin to talk. They begin with dogmatic and pious assertions. God's justice and omnipotence are undeniable, therefore Job must have sinned. And as they go on their answers get worse. No longer attempting to argue, they simply state:

It is true: the sinner is snuffed out

His candle flickers and dies.

Or they descend to the cruellest kind of ranting: "Your crimes must be inconceivable!" It is interesting to see that as the friends get weaker, Job rises to new heights. Where he may have begun with a curse and a cry of pain ― which does look simply like a particularly poetic version of the question Why me? ― what he ends with is a universal indictment.

But however horrible the friends may seem by the end, the beginning of their arguments deserves some attention. In particular, they make two claims that look very close to those made by the Voice from the Whirlwind. Eliphaz says:

[God's] workings are vast and fathomless

His wonders beyond our grasp.

Then further on:

When disaster strikes he will rescue you ...

You will see your family multiply

Your children flourish like grass

You will die at the height of your powers

And be gathered like ripe grain.

Is this not precisely what happens in the epilogue? Claims like this get repeated throughout the friends' early speeches; so what's wrong with them? How are they different from God's answer?

One suggestion is made by Job himself: "Your answers are dusty answers." One way of understanding this was offered by Kant, who said that Job's friends were like the dogmatic metaphysicians Kant was out to attack ― roughly, the Dr Pangloss whom Voltaire ridicules in Candide. What could this mean? The friends are content to theorise, they seek no personal encounter ― either with Job or with God. If you take this far enough you can even call them blasphemous, taking God's name in vain. What God wants is not mumbled piety, but deep and direct engagement.

Another reading of the phrase "dusty answers" could be: they are merely prose. A good translation makes them good prose, but the difference between the language used in their answers and that used by the "Voice from the Whirlwind" is vast. One thing this could mean is that answers to the problem of evil, if there are any, can only be given in poetry. Something about prose is too superficial, inadequate, even, again, blasphemous, because it is disrespectful ― insufficiently awed by the task.

I find something right in these suggestions, especially if you think about connections between poetry and music, and Job's connections to that. But they are not entirely convincing. I am still left feeling that there is not enough difference between the friends' answers and God's. And while we expect to be disappointed by the friends, I suspect that even atheists expect more from the voice of the Lord.

So let's now turn to the "Voice from the Whirlwind." At first glance, God's seems to be completely beside the point. "Where were you when I planned the earth?" is no answer to the question Job asked, for God's power was never at issue. Job questions His justice, not his omnipotence; and God's response seems to be merely a detailed description of His power. Even worse than begging the question, God's speech seems to be not only an assertion of power, but an assertion so brutal it amounts to absolute tyranny.

This is how Thomas Hobbes read the book ― a book Hobbes loved so well that he named his two major books after the creatures with which God's speech ends: Leviathan and Behemoth. Hobbes read the speech from the Whirlwind to make the sort of point for which he became famous: a kind of might-makes-right view in which the created world is so chaotic that submission to an absolute sovereign is the only wise course of action. And there is no doubt that this is the easiest way to read the speech, which then becomes less of an argument than an assertion of power.

Stephen Mitchell sums up most of our reactions well in saying that God's answer seems nothing but an angry "How dare you question the Creator of the world? Shut up now, and submit!" while Job's final response looks like a meekly uttered, "Yes, boss, anything you say." The brutality of that reaction is saved perhaps only by the very Jewish device of showing that God, provoked by Job's questions, replies with nothing less than a series of questions of His own.

There are, of course, other ways to read God's speech, and I want to sketch the most promising. When God begins by asking, "Where were you when I created the earth?" and then goes on to describe the wonders of Creation, He is not simply asserting His power. The point of going through all the details about the wild ass and the antelope is not to assert that, because God knows and does all kinds of things Job cannot do, He therefore has a right to absolute, unquestioned sovereignty. Nor is it the case, as some commentators have it, that God lists all these things in order to point out the weirdness of the world; to show that Creation is fraught with mysteries which humans cannot understand, so that Job, in particular, should stop troubling his head about this particular mystery.

Rather, one could take God's answer as precisely an assertion that there is order in the world, in exquisite detail. So if Job's question can be phrased thus: If grave justice occurs, is there no order/meaning/reason in the world? Then God's answer can be read as saying not Shut up, you weakling, but: You want order? I'll show you order.

There is support for this reading in a passage of Talmud, which suggests that Job said to God, "Perhaps a tempest passed before you, and caused you to confuse Iyob (Job) and Oyeb (enemy)." In other words, Job says: "Hey God! It's me, Job, your friend, not your enemy!" A partial quotation of the answer the Talmud gives to God is this:

"Many thunderclaps have I created in the clouds, and for each clap a separate path, so that two claps should not travel by the same path, since if two claps travelled by the same path they would devastate the world. I do not confuse one thunderclap with another, and shall I confuse Iyob and Oyeb? The wild goat is heartless with her young. When she crouches for delivery, she goes up to the top of a mountain so that the young shall fall down and be killed, and I prepare an eagle to catch it in his wings and set it before her, and if he were one second too soon or too late it would be killed. I do not confuse one moment with another, and shall I confuse Iyob and Oyeb?"

One thing this passage proclaims is the extraordinary system God has created, and continues to keep in motion. If Job's fear is that his own case shows that God makes mistakes, and hence that we may live in a world threatened by overwhelming chaos, God's answer is to reassure him of the incredible order which permeates the universe, and all its pieces.

A problem with this way of reading is that it may work for the first part of God's answer, but not the ending. Why does He end with the descriptions of the monsters? If the first part of His speech can be read as a glorious description of the wonderful order in the world, the second set of images is so horrible that it does look as if God is bludgeoning Job into submission, and in truly heartless ways.

But there are answers to this problem, too. One is that the Creation must include the horrible and the grotesque. God is not, as Leibniz would have it, a master watchmaker, nor is the world a place of simple order ― but it is order nonetheless, vast and awesome enough to include horror as well.

A possible counterpart to this comes from that part of Jewish tradition that denies God's omnipotence. God, on this view, created the world from primordial chaos. Elements of that chaos are still there and God is constantly working to keep them at bay, to maintain order against the threat of monstrous chaos. While this does something to explain the appearance of the monsters at the end of the monologue, it does so at the cost of turning God into a bit of a Jewish mother, whose answer to Job is: "You're coming to me about justice when I'm working day and night just to keep this total chaos from overwhelming us?" But better a Jewish mother, perhaps, than a more incomprehensible kind of tyrant ...

The biggest problem with this kind of reading is another one entirely. Job is not simply asking for evidence of order in the world; he is asking for evidence of moral order. And it is just that evidence which God refuses to give. Thus His answer becomes an old one: there is order, and reason, in Creation as a whole, but it is stupid or blasphemous to try to define that order in human categories, particularly human moral categories. This brings me to what I take to be, philosophically, Job's strongest and most provocative claim. He says:

Man who is born of woman -

How few and harsh are his days ...

And must You take notice of him?

Must You call him to account?

Since all his days are determined

and the sum of his years is set

Look away; leave him alone

Grant him peace, for one moment.

I take Job to be saying here that God cannot have it both ways. If the message we are to learn from all this is not to see things in merely human terms; to recognise that God has a plan for the whole universe ― of which we are only a tiny part ― then Job's answer is: fair enough, but if that is the case, why not just leave us alone? If You are going to notice us at all, then make things comprehensible, but do not try to have it both ways.

If we are merely insignificant pieces of a much larger picture that we are foolish to try to understand on our own terms, then God should leave us alone ― leave us alone meaning, without moral categories. Let us be part of nature and be torn apart like the vulture's prey which feeds its children, but do not tear us apart with the peculiarly human pain of guilt, and moral outrage, and all they imply. On the other hand, if You are going to give us those categories, and demand that we maintain them, then You have to be fair by reflecting them, somehow, in the structure of the universe. This could be called a covenant.

It is perhaps for this reason that God tells us, twice in the epilogue, that Job has spoken the truth about Him. In the speech from the Whirlwind, God's claim is put more paradoxically: "Am I wrong because you are right?" Thus three times in this book, the truth of Job's claims is asserted by none other than the One who should know. It is curious that this fact is not noted as often as it should be in many traditional interpretations. Or perhaps it is not so curious, for God's own testimony in favour of Job seems to undercut most interpretations, which in one way or another try to defend God's answer by showing Job's questions to be wrong. So we are left with the question: what could God mean by asserting that Job has spoken the truth ― or more provocatively, "Am I wrong because you are right?"

Let me conclude by sketching an answer inspired by Kant, who wrote a little essay on the subject entitled, "On the Impossibility of All Future Attempts at Theodicy."

I begin by accepting Kant's own claim that Job's friends represent the voice of pure reason, untainted by experience. The claims they assert are reasonable ones: the universe is ordered, its Creator is just. The problem with these claims is not their content but the fact that they are uttered without a bit of concern for experience: they are repeated blindly, dogmatically, refusing to look at the world as it is. Indeed, Kant goes so far as to accuse the friends of dishonesty: they are not speaking the truth, but speaking the words they believe God wants to hear ― just in case He might be eavesdropping.

The look at reality is provided by the Voice from the Whirlwind, whose speech is simply description ― glorious description, to be sure, but description all the same, of the way the world really is. The lack of moral categories, of a defence of just that universal justice which seemed to be called for, is what can make that speech seem inadequate.

If the Voice from the Whirlwind is meant to stand for the sheer assertion of reality, and the friends represent the claims of reason, what is the voice of Job? He is, in this picture, nothing other than the claim that the two ought to be brought together. Knowledge may depend on the recognition that the world does not exhibit the moral categories we demand, but justice depends on the recognition that it should. Here we would have to assume that God is not omnipotent, for His Creation as it stands is not final. Righteous people, like Job, are needed to make it whole. Abandoning traditional claims of divine omnipotence will be problematic for many, but that may be what facing reality requires.

As Kant would later put it, two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we look upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. They are both awesome and wonderful, but entirely separate ― the one stands for a cosmos described by the Voice from the Whirlwind, a cosmos so vast and impersonal that it strikes down our self-conceit and makes us feel, as Job put it, that we are but dust. Yet the moral law within me, which Job so beautifully upholds in his darkest hours ― he may wish he had never been born, but he never once wishes he had behaved anything less than righteously ― that moral law reveals our power to step in and change a piece of the world if it seems to be gone wrong.

Thus, while the book as a whole is a warning against arrogance, it is also a reminder of the need for moral action. Of course, this is explicitly denied by traditional readings, which suggest that passive acceptance of Creation, not an active attempt to change it, is the only wise attitude for human beings to hold. But then, as I mentioned at the beginning, traditional readings usually censored, or tried to read away crucial pieces of text. On the reading that I have been sketching, God Himself asserts the need for human moral vigilance, and action: "Am I wrong because you are right?"

Viewing Job's claim as the claim that reality should become reasonable is one way of seeing how both God and Job could speak the truth: the one a truth about the way the world is; the other, a truth about the way it should be. It is this that we call moral clarity, when we have the good sense or good fortune to achieve it.

The rationality of the world: A philosophical reading of the Book of Job.  By Susan Neiman.  ABC Religion & Ethics , April 29, 2019. 

Illustrations to the Book of Job by William Blake