The book of Job goes like this. A prologue introduces the book’s readers to Job and describes decisions made in a parallel universe, that of a celestial court in which YHWH holds ultimate power (chs. 1-2). The heart of the book consists of a series of dialogue cycles between Job and three friends in which Job appeals to YHWH for vindication (chs. 3-31), followed by YHWH’s responses to Job’s appeals and a brief response by Job (chs. 38-41; 42:1-6). Speeches by a young interloper, Elihu, serve as a kind of intermezzo before YHWH’s responses to Job (chs. 32-37). An epilogue ties up all the loose ends of the book (42:7-17).

The book describes a titanic struggle of “one against all.” It is not until the book’s conclusion that Job experiences God as an advocate rather than as an enemy. Job’s response to the experience of undeserved suffering is the focus of the book. The book’s resolution of the problem of Job’s suffering, the role assigned to God in bringing about Job’s suffering, and God’s reply to Job’s charges against God, have challenged and baffled generations of interpreters. Interpreters who believe in the God of the book of Job and those who do not have praised the book as a literary and theological masterpiece. “Read him,” said Kierkegaard, “read him over and over again.” The influence of the book of Job on art, literature, drama, and philosophy, wherever Judaism and Christianity have been potent cultural forces, has been far reaching, and shows no signs of abating.

In the prologue of the book of Job, we the readers are made privy to the fact that Job, a man of exemplary behavior, is meted out suffering through no fault of his own. One of God’s angels (“the Satan” or “the accuser” in the original Hebrew) has cast aspersions on Job. God takes up Job’s defense. The matter is put to the test. If Job suffers every manner of affliction but does not thereby hold God in contempt, Job will be vindicated. God allows the Satan to empty Job’s life of whatever gives it meaning, but the Satan must also act as Job’s guardian angel and save Job’s life from a premature conclusion: “He is in your power, but his life you must protect” (Job 2:6).

No one in the Job story - neither Job, nor Job’s wife, nor Job’s friends, nor Elihu - knows about God’s wager with the accusing angel. We the readers know, but despite this knowledge, an explanation for Job’s suffering is not thereby given to us.

Strange as it may seem, Job fails the test. He cracks under the pressure of his suffering. He begins by speaking of God approvingly, even after he loses his children and all that he possesses (1:13-22). “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” But when the suffering literally gets under his skin, Job maligns God again and again, directly and indirectly. “Let there be darkness,” exclaims Job (3:4). Job colors the world and God’s relationship to it with the same dark hues that have invaded his personal existence (7:17-20; 9:21-24; 10:8-19; 16:9-14). He now considers God to be his worst enemy, and the enemy of all humankind. Job’s accusations in 21:7-33 and 24:1-24 are particularly harsh.

When Job puts God in the dock, Job’s friends defend God from Job’s charges by maligning Job. Job must have done something to deserve his fate.

Job is incensed by his friends’ accusations. So malicious are their words that Job ends up contradicting the God-accusing thrust of his early speeches (through ch. 24). Given his friends’ accusations, he needs God to be a righteous Judge; otherwise, his friends will not be condemned and he will not be justified. Job refers his case to God (chs. 26-31).

In Job 28, Job sorts out what he knows and doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he suffers – he never will, according to the plot of the book. The wisdom that rules the world is unsearchable, for Job as for every other human being. But Job does know and holds fast to the wisdom that it supposed to rule his ethical behavior: he is to fear God, the principle of justice and truth, and shun evil.

After a comic intermezzo provided by Elihu’s speeches – who nevertheless anticipates more than one theme in the ensuing divine speeches - God replies to Job out of a whirlwind.

God is furious. How dare Job darken God’s counsel! Does Job even know what darkness is? Only God, of all living beings, has walked in the recesses of the deep (38:1, 16).

God confirms Job’s worst fears. God’s counsel, or design, really does include unimaginable terror. The world God has created is not anthropocentric at all. Man is not the measure of all things. The world is full of awesome creatures, useless or inimical to human beings, creatures in whom God takes immense delight (chs. 39-41). The subtext: man lives in a world that is not at man's beck and call. God the Creator commands the sea and the waves. He himself is commanded by no one. A lesson, one might add, the modern world has yet to learn.

Indirectly, God rebuts Job’s most awful insinuations. In distress Job claimed, “He mocks as the innocent fail” (9:23). Not so, implies God, who “hunts prey for the lion, and satisfies the appetite of the king of beasts,” who “provides food for the raven, when his young cry out to God (38:39, 41).

God’s knowledge and power, not God’s justice, are the foci of God’s reply to Job. We sense the bewilderment of Job, who has suffered without cause under God’s hand. “I am of contemptible worth; what can I answer you? I clap my hand to my mouth” (40:4). “I recant and I change my mind amidst dirt and ashes” (42:6).

Now the plot thickens. God acquits Job and vindicates Job before his friends. Job was right to defend himself before God. Job was guilty of putting God in the wrong in order to put himself in the right, the point of God’s reproof of Job before acquitting him (40:8). But Job’s forthrightness before God is ultimately held to his credit (42:7).

God instructs Job to pray for his friends, because they, not he, risk God’s displeasure. Job, though he is furious with his friends, accedes to God’s request. Job thereby signals his recommitment to exemplary words and deeds, and God responds by giving Job twice what he had before. He goes on to live a life of legendary proportions and delight in his children’s children (42:8-18). God's justice is a matter of both word and deed.

A theodicy is an attempt to justify the ways of God to men. The book of Job is an anti-theodicy. According to the book of Job, unjustifiable suffering takes place in the world. Those who claim otherwise “do not speak the truth about [God]” (42:8). Defense of man before God (anthropodicy), not defense of God (theodicy), is appropriate when suffering occurs. Job’s friends should have defended Job against God rather than God against Job. Theodicy, as Dostoevsky also knew, is a misguided enterprise.

The apologetics of Job’s friends do not do justice to the status of the sufferer in God’s sight. If the book of Job is taken as a model, the right response to undeserved suffering is to vindicate the sufferer even if that means calling God’s actions, or inaction, into question. The God of the book of Job vindicates Job. Before doing so, that same God puts an end to Job’s revolt against him.

As Michael V. Fox points out, the book of Job is not skeptical literature (“Job the Pious,” ZAW 117 (2005) 351-366; 363). It is not about approaching the world with questions and no expectation of answers. But does the book of Job demand “unqualified faith in God’s goodness” (“Job the Pious,” 364)? A bolder claim is hard to imagine.

In my view, the opposite is true. The book of Job justifies the sufferer’s lack of faith in God when darkness colors all. Faith is a characteristic attitude of a virtuous person. It is also something a virtuous person may expect to lose in a time of despair.

Faith in God’s goodness, or more precisely, acquiescence to God’s sovereignty, is not demanded of Job so much as given to him in and through the fact that God replies to him out of the whirlwind. Job accepts God’s reply even if God does not answer all of his questions. His acquiescence is a kind of faith, more precisely, a form of obedience, without which Job could not have gone on living.

Leo Purdue among other interpreters finds Job’s acquiescence implausible. Purdue imagines a Job who is defiant to the end, and a book of Job in which God is weighed in the balances and found wanting. Properly qualified, the latter statement seems correct, but the purchase price of a Job who remains defiant to the end is an improbable construal of Job 40:4 and 42:6.

The book of Job does not resolve the problem of evil so much as rehearse it within the context of a broader set of reflections on the dvine-human interface. Other works of ancient literature in and beyond the limits of the Jewish Bible do likewise. Examples include the “Babylonian Theodicy” and “I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom” from Mesopotamian literature, Psalms 37, 49, and 73, Proverbs 30, Qohelet (“Ecclesiastes”), and 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch from Jewish literature of the Roman period. I would argue that the book of Job served the same needs in ancient Israel as Ludlul did in ancient Mesopotamia.

A condensed version of the above appeared in the Encyclopedia of World History (ed. Mark Whitters et al., New York: Facts on File, 2007).