📖 Job

אִיּוֹב Iyyov — 'Job' — the name's meaning is uncertain and may be deliberately apt: it can be read from a root meaning 'to be hostile' (so 'the assailed one,' or 'enemy'), or as an old Semitic name meaning 'where is my father?' The name is attested outside the Bible in Egyptian and Amarna-period texts as an ordinary personal name, centuries before the book.
Ἰώβ (Iob) — ⚠ The Greek Septuagint of Job is about ONE-SIXTH SHORTER than the Hebrew — some four hundred lines missing, mostly from the speeches — and it softens Job considerably. It also appends a note identifying him with a king of Edom and naming his friends' kingdoms. Whether the Greek translator abbreviated a difficult text or worked from a shorter Hebrew one is a live question.

The book that refuses to comfort you — a blameless man is ruined on a wager he never learns about, argues with God for thirty-nine chapters, and is answered out of a whirlwind with a speech that never mentions his suffering.

Chapters

1 of 42 chapters translated · 2.4%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

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Chapter by chapter

Job 1A blameless man in a country nobody can find loses everything in a single afternoon — and the reader, unlike Job, is shown exactly why. In a heavenly council the Accuser (the Hebrew says ‘THE satan’, with the article: an office, not a name) asks the question the whole book exists to answer — ‘is it for NOTHING that Job fears God?’ Is anyone good unpaid? Four messengers arrive, each while the last is still speaking, each ending on the same sentence. Then Job tears his robe, falls to the ground, and blesses — using the very verb the Hebrew has been using all chapter to mean CURSE.

About the book

Where it sits

Among the WRITINGS (Ketuvim) in the Hebrew Bible; in the Christian Old Testament it heads the poetic books, before Psalms and Proverbs. Its canonicity was never seriously in doubt, though what to make of it has been argued from the beginning — the Talmud preserves the striking opinion that 'Job never existed and was a parable' (Bava Batra 15a) beside rabbis who dated him anywhere from Abraham to the return from exile.

Genre

WISDOM literature, and the Bible's most ambitious piece of writing. The shape is deliberate: a PROSE folktale frame (chs 1-2 and 42:7-17) wrapped around a vast POEM (3:1-42:6) — three cycles of speeches between Job and three friends, a fourth speaker who arrives unannounced, and God's answer from the whirlwind. The Hebrew of the poem is the hardest in the Bible, with more words occurring only once here than in any other book.

Author

Unknown, and unusually so — the book names no prophet, no king, no setting in Israel's history to attach itself to. Talmudic tradition credits Moses (Bava Batra 14b), which no one now defends; the sophistication of the poetry, the Aramaic colouring, and the international wisdom setting have suggested authors from Solomon's court to the post-exilic period. The prose frame and the poem differ in language and in the portrait of Job, which has long raised the question of whether an older folktale was taken up by a later poet — arguable either way, and the book as it stands is a single deliberate design.

Date written

Genuinely open, with proposals spanning nearly a thousand years. The SETTING is patriarchal (wealth in livestock, the father sacrificing without priest or temple, a lifespan of 140 further years, the archaic qesitah coin of 42:11, no mention of Israel, the law, the covenant, or Jerusalem). The COMPOSITION is another matter: the Aramaic-tinged vocabulary, the developed figure of the Accuser, and the theological question itself have most scholars placing the book somewhere between the 7th and 4th centuries BC, often after the exile — when the collapse of a nation had made 'why do the innocent suffer?' unavoidable. Setting and writing are two questions, and this book keeps them apart.

Place

The land of Uz — unlocated, and outside Israel. Job is not an Israelite; neither are his friends. This is the one book of the Hebrew Bible whose hero stands wholly outside the covenant, which is precisely what lets it ask its question without the covenant supplying the answer.

Audience

Anyone who has been told that suffering is deserved. The book's targets are not atheists but the pious: the friends say what most of the Old Testament seems to say — that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked — and they say it fluently, at length, and with real conviction, and at the end God tells them they have not spoken rightly of him, and Job has.

How it's laid out

1-2PROSE. Job's uprightness and wealth; two scenes in the divine council; the loss of his children, property and health; his wife; and three friends who come and sit with him seven days in silence.

3Job breaks the silence by cursing the day he was born.

4-27Three cycles of speeches — Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar in turn, each answered by Job. The friends' case hardens from gentle piety into accusation; Job's moves from grief into a demand for a hearing.

28The poem on wisdom: 'But where shall wisdom be found?' — a meditation that stands apart from the argument.

29-31Job's final defence — his former life, his present humiliation, and an oath of innocence, clause by clause, daring God to answer.

32-37ELIHU, a young man who has been listening and is not introduced beforehand, speaks four uninterrupted chapters that nobody replies to.

38-41JEHOVAH ANSWERS OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND — a tour of creation, wild goats and ostriches and the war-horse, then Behemoth and Leviathan. He asks Job seventy-odd questions and answers none.

42:1-6Job's reply: 'I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.'

42:7-17PROSE. God rebukes the friends — 'you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has' — and Job's fortunes are restored double; the children are replaced, not doubled.

What it's about

IS DISINTERESTED PIETY POSSIBLE? — the Accuser's question at 1:9, 'is it for NOTHING (chinnam) that Job fears God?', is the wager the whole book runs. Strip away every reward and see what is left.
THE FAILURE OF THE RETRIBUTION PRINCIPLE — the friends hold that suffering proves sin. It is a decent theology, it is what most people believe, it is much of what Proverbs says — and the book demolishes it, from the inside, using a case the reader knows is innocent.
THE ABSENCE OF AN EXPLANATION — the reader is told why in chapter 1; Job never is. God's answer from the whirlwind does not mention the wager, the Accuser, or Job's suffering at all. The book is at least as interested in what it refuses to say as in what it says.
SPEAKING TO GOD RATHER THAN ABOUT HIM — Job accuses God to his face; the friends defend God behind his back; God vindicates Job. Honest protest is treated as a form of faith, and correct piety as a form of lying.
CREATION AS THE ANSWER THAT IS NOT AN ANSWER — the whirlwind speeches answer a moral question with a zoological one: the rain that falls where no one lives, the ostrich that forgets her eggs, the crocodile no one can tame. The world is not organized around human deserving, and it is not thereby meaningless.
A REDEEMER, AND A HEARING — from the depths Job keeps demanding a witness, an umpire, a go'el who will stand on the earth (9:33, 16:19, 19:25) — the longing that Handel put to music and that Christians have read forward.

Key words & people

Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:

chinnamsatan / ha-satantamimgo'el

People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:

Job the land of Uz Edom (Seir)

The source text

Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠️ Job's Hebrew is the most difficult in the Bible: the poem is dense, archaic and deliberately strange, with a very high proportion of words that occur nowhere else (so their meanings are reconstructed from Arabic, Aramaic and context), and several passages — the third speech cycle, where Bildad's turn is short and Zophar's is missing, and the description of Behemoth and Leviathan — are textually or structurally disputed. The Greek Septuagint is roughly a sixth shorter. A translator's honesty here consists largely in flagging how much is uncertain; the notes do that where it falls, and this chapter, being prose, is the easy part.

Looking forward

Job's cry for an arbiter is the thread Christian reading has always followed: 'there is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand on us both' (9:33), 'my witness is in heaven' (16:19), and above all 'I know that my REDEEMER lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth' (19:25) — go'el, the kinsman-redeemer word of Ruth and Boaz. What Job asks for is someone who can stand on both sides at once. Beyond that, the book supplies the New Testament with its sharpest refusal of the idea that misfortune measures sin — the assumption Jesus rejects flatly about the man born blind (John 9:2-3) and the tower of Siloam (Luke 13:4) — and, in the innocent sufferer who is vindicated and whose prayer is then accepted on behalf of those who wronged him (42:8-10), a shape Christians have not been able to read without recognition.

Where the debates are

Nearly everything. Whether Job is a historical figure or a parable (the Talmud records both views). Whether the prose frame and the poem are one composition or a poet's use of an older tale. The DATE, spanning nearly a millennium of proposals. Whether the ELIHU speeches (chs 32-37) are original or a later insertion — he is not introduced in the prologue, not mentioned in the epilogue, and nobody answers him. What Behemoth and Leviathan are (hippopotamus and crocodile, or the chaos-monsters of ancient myth, or both at once). The famous crux at 13:15 — 'though he slay me, yet will I trust him' or 'I have no hope' — where the written and read forms of the Hebrew differ by one word. And above all what God's answer means: whether the whirlwind humbles Job, overwhelms him, or finally treats him as an equal worth speaking to. Laid out with pedigrees; the library does not cast a vote.