“Ha, ha!” That is the spirit of God’s answer to Job. I am power itself, he says. How dare you question me?

Job immediately apologizes for challenging his maker: “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Now God addresses the three friends, who told Job that God is just. He punishes them for presuming to say that they understand his ways. Then he turns to Job and tells him that he alone has spoken the truth—apparently, that God is not understandable. For this, God rewards him.

The story is bewildering, from beginning to end. How could God, being God, allow Satan to seduce him into destroying a good man? More important is the moral: that we have no right to question him for doing such things. (God, for all that he says from the whirlwind, never answers Job’s questions.) Furthermore, the Book of Job seems to claim that all wrongs can be righted by property. If everything was taken away from Job, the problem is settled by God’s giving it all back, mostly twofold—fourteen thousand sheep for his seven thousand, etc. As for the ten dead children, in this case Job gets only ten back, but the new daughters are more beautiful than any other women in the land.

For people who take the Bible seriously as an explanation of life and as a guide to right conduct, all this is mysterious. It is certainly not the first instance in which God inflicts appalling misery on his people. In Genesis, he killed everyone on Earth except those on Noah’s ark. But Job is highly individualized—a person like us. He is probably the character in the Old Testament we sympathize with most closely. (David is his only competition.) Therefore, his struggle to go on believing in God is something that theologians and moralists have had to think about. Their conclusions are the subject of Mark Larrimore’s book.

Discouragingly, it begins by listing all the things that we don’t know about Job. In our lifetime, Job has been regarded as a sort of Jewish saint, a symbol of suffering Jewry, but we don’t know whether he was Jewish. (No lineage is provided, and neither Job nor his friends have Jewish names.) Nor is there any certainty about whether the Book was written by Jews. We know nothing about the setting of the tale (where was Uz?), or about how it came to be written. Scholars think that it, or parts of it, was handed down over centuries as an oral tale, and finally recorded sometime after the seventh century B.C.

The text we have is clearly corrupt in many places. The central section—where Job speaks to his friends, and God speaks to them all—is in verse, and its language is impassioned: pleading, sweeping, vaulting. The outer sections are written in prose, and in a blunt, matter-of-fact manner. This stylistic contrast, together with the subject matter, underlies the main puzzle of the Book: the profound nature of Job’s complaint and of God’s answer versus the cynicism of the outer sections, where God bargains with Job’s life and then, at the end, pays him off. Many modern scholars believe that the outer sections may have been written independently of the central section—perhaps slapped on to make it a story, with a beginning and an ending. More daringly, some writers have suggested that God’s speeches are interpolations. God rarely makes such a grand appearance in the Old Testament. Why here, in his most dazzling entry, is he not given any sort of introduction? (All we get is “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.”) And why is this proud, thundering deity so different from the cold executive of the opening and closing sections? Also, his pronouncements from the whirlwind are often inconsistent with what he says elsewhere in the Bible. As Larrimore puts it, “The pious asseverations of Job’s friends, condemned by God, are the passages of the book that best square with other texts accepted as scriptural.”

That is by no means the end of the textual problems. Sometimes you can’t figure out what’s happening. Job will make a statement to his friends that doesn’t seem to be addressed to them. Passages have apparently been moved or omitted or inserted. Immediately before God’s arrival, we suddenly hear, at length, from a man named Elihu, who adds little to the discussion and is never mentioned again. But Job’s text was not questioned until the Renaissance, and the investigation didn’t really get going until the nineteenth century, at German universities. For many centuries before that, philosophers and theologians took the Book as canonical and analyzed it as such. Not surprisingly, their main question was the one debated by Job and his friends: Why does God allow evil in the world?

The first single commentator to whom Larrimore gives serious attention is Pope Gregory I, or Gregory the Great (540-604), who wrote a six-volume study of Job. His book, as Larrimore explains it, is our introduction to many centuries of allegorical interpretation of the Book of Job—indeed, of the entire Old Testament—as parallel to the New Testament; in particular, Job’s torment was thought to presage the sufferings of Jesus. Some modern readers find this sort of thinking far-fetched, but it certainly wasn’t confined to the Middle Ages, or to Roman Catholics. Luther’s Bible, one of the earlier vernacular testaments, had illustrations that combine, in the same frame, events in Job that occurred many verses apart. This was not to save money on woodcuts. It was an expression of the view of time that had been held for many centuries, by both Jewish and Christian commentators. To them, the Old Testament was divinely inspired, and, if it seemed to contain contradictions or errors, that was not its fault but ours. We needed to dig for deeper, subtler meaning.

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According to Larrimore, this was also, essentially, the opinion of the great Jewish scholar Maimonides, in the twelfth century, and of the formidable St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth. Aquinas, emboldened by the dispute between Job and his friends, treated the Book as a quaestio, or debate, the primary mode of learning at the University of Paris, where he was a celebrated professor. (Job won the debate, of course.) As Larrimore points out, such a method has the problem of omitting the matter of the hero’s extreme suffering. Maimonides, in his “Guide for the Perplexed,” from 1190, is more modest and quizzical, but he, too, obedient to the tradition, says that we must yield to the text’s divine authority. In Job, he believes, we can understand God’s message only in glimpses. In 1536, John Calvin wrote his “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” with meditations on Job. Calvin’s view was the most radical, in terms of theodicy—that is, the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with a benevolent and omnipotent God. Calvin said that God had a higher justice, veiled to human eyes. Other thinkers did not buy that. (After all, the Old Testament shows God issuing codes of justice for us—the Ten Commandments, for example.) The problem was stated most succinctly two centuries later, by David Hume: “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”