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The Book of Job, which relates the story of a devout and wealthy man from the land of Uz whose devotion to God is tested by profound suffering, is easily the most fascinating and enigmatic book of the Old Testament. As usual, I approached this text with some preliminary research, and then, once some of the complexities of the text had come to light, I asked my partner what they knew of it. They related to me exactly the narrative I expected, the very one that I had been told throughout my life: God points out to Satan the devotion of Job, and Satan retorts that Job is only devoted because of his great wealth and healthy body. God then takes away Job’s wealth and causes him great bodily suffering, to prove that Job will remain devoted. Job loses his land, his wealth, his family, and his health, but remains devoted to God, and in the end God rewards him for his faith.

While this is not entirely inaccurate, it covers only the first, second, and last chapters of a book that is 42 chapters long. What is conveyed in the other 39 chapters? In looking into it, I found that, once again, what is said of the text and what the text actually says are two very different things.

The Book of Job is believed to have been authored around the 6th century BCE, plus or minus a few centuries. According to Kugler and Hartin’s An Introduction to the Bible (2009), there are several reasons for this dating, one of which is the language used to denote Satan. The Hebrew here is ha-satan, literally “the accuser,” with satan being the general word for any accuser or adversary, and this language reflects the early understanding of Satan as being not an evil entity existing in diametric opposition to God but rather an agent of God, a kind of heavenly prosecutor known as the Accuser. While the word satan is used earlier in the Bible to denote actual adversaries, this is the first appearance in the Bible of Satan as being any sort of distinct entity (and remember that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is never identified as Satan). I’ll be quoting the source using “the Accuser” rather than “Satan” — which the notes to my copy of the Bible state is a perfectly viable gloss — to reflect this understanding and to curtail conflation with the modern understanding of Satan.

The Book of Job begins with a description of its titular character, “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1), living in great wealth in the land of Uz. This notion that God is one who is to be feared is a point central to the text, and I’ll return to that later. As a specific example of Job’s uprightness, the text states that his children often hold feasts and revel, and Job offers burnt offerings to God by way of atoning for whatever sins his children may have committed in their revelry.

Having established Job’s character and situation, the narrative moves to heaven, where…

…the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord and the Accuser also came among them. The Lord said to the Accuser, “Where have you come from?” The Accuser answered the Lord, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” The Lord said to the Accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” Then the Accuser answered the Lord, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” The Lord said to the Accuser, “Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!” So the Accuser went out from the presence of the Lord. 1:6-12, NRSV

Satan the Accuser has returned from taking stock of the whole world, and God asks him to consider what it is that God considers best in the world: one who is simply fearful and obedient (note that the text does not say that Job does good, only that he “turns away from evil” and offers the proper sacrifices in atonement for the sins of his family). Responding to this, the Accuser asks whether Job can be truly fearful if he has only ever experienced God’s blessing and never his wrath. This is a somewhat different matter than expecting that Job will simply remain faithful in the face of adversity; the Accuser doesn’t seem concerned with whether Job remains devoted to God so much as whether he truly fears God: the Accuser expects that, faced with such adversity, Job will curse God to Their face, which would of course indicate a manifest lack of fear on Job’s part.

But here we come to a very strange matter with regards to the translation from the original Hebrew. The verb that is translated as “to curse” is ברך, barak, which means “to bless”. Barak is translated elsewhere in the Old Testament as “bless” and even elsewhere in Job is rendered as “bless.” But in this instance, and later when Job’s wife admonishes him to “bless God” (as per the Hebrew), it is rendered as “curse.” Explanations I have found on the internet write this off as being euphemistic and clear from context, but I think that that is an unwarranted assumption, especially given, one, its consistent usage as “bless” elsewhere in the Old Testament, and two, my thesis that the meaning of this entire book has been misunderstood and misrepresented.

I have another translation of the Book of Job, by Stephen Mitchell (1987), which states: “In several places, it is obvious that some scribe has deliberately altered a word, out of a pious desire to suppress Job’s blasphemy.” Should Mitchell be referring here to the bless/curse problem (and I very much think that that is the case), what he’s saying does not make any sense. Even though God is cursed elsewhere in the Old Testament (Leviticus 24:11), multiple scribes (for there must have been multiple extant lineages of the book) changed a word to mean its exact opposite, out of piety? But I am not an expert in Biblical Hebrew and there may indeed be subtle indications that this usage is euphemistic (though I’ve been unable to find any specific support for that), but failing confirmation either way, I’ll proceed from here with both translations in mind.

In this particular case, what might the Accuser mean in saying that Job will, having been afflicted, bless God to Their face? Given the emphasis on the fear of God, it might mean to say that, once Job has seen the true might of God, he will acknowledge this directly and it will no longer be an assumption absent the context of actual adversity in which “fear of God” would be more meaningful and real. This would prove the Accuser’s point that Job did not truly fear God before.

What’s more, the word barak is based on the Hebrew root B-R-K (bet-resh-kaf), upon which are also built words for the knee and for kneeling. The Biblical Hebrew verbs for “to bless” and “to kneel” are spelled the same, their pronunciation differing only in the vowels, which, in the original Hebrew text, were left unwritten. Given that the vowel markings in the Bible were not added until at least 600 CE, over a thousand years after the likely authorship of the Book of Job, I wonder if the original meaning might have been intended as “kneel to God” rather than either “bless God” or “curse God.” In any case, Hebrew words that share the same root are semantically related, so should this be a possibility, much of what follows from a translation as “to bless” also follows from a translation as “to kneel to.”

Then God, rather than intervening in Job’s life directly, delegates that power to the Accuser, stipulating only that he not affect the physical person of Job. This fits with the notion of Satan the Accuser as an agent of God, who is here working not only to test God’s assumptions about his followers but to ultimately get God the recognition that They deserve.

The next day, Job’s servants come to him almost tripping over each other to deliver worse and worse news. All his livestock have been killed or taken away and all his servants (save for those bringing him the news) and his children are dead. Job’s response is properly meek:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” 1:21, NRSV

Putting aside the fact that Job expects to return to his mother’s womb, this is a rather nihilistic reaction to such colossal tragedy. If I myself were visited by so much loss at one time, I would have to wonder whether I had gotten on someone or something’s bad side. A religious person such as Job would surely expect that such a coincidence of tragedy was the intentional work of God, but he accepts this with passive resignation. Job does not seem at all fearful here, only resigned to the will of God.

Seemingly some time later, the heavenly gathering recurs, with the Accuser again present, and this gathering proceeds in much the same manner as the first. The Accuser says that he has returned from taking stock of the world; God asks whether he has considered Job, who remains “a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” “He still persists in his integrity,” God continues, “although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (2:3). (And note that God’s speech here almost seems to indicate that They feel that They were bullied into this by the Accuser and would not have taken such actions of Their own accord). The Accuser’s response is that Job remains faithful not because he fears God but because he still has his health and the comfort of a healthy body. Make his life physically unbearable, the Accuser says, and Job will curse (or bless, or kneel to) God to Their face. So God removes the earlier stipulation and allows the Accuser to affect Job as he will, requiring only that he not take Job’s life.

The Accuser afflicts Job with horrible boils, and now Job’s wife admonishes him for persisting in his devotion to God. She says “Curse God, and die” (2:9), but again, the word here is barak, so we might translate this “Bless God, and die” or “Kneel to God, and die.” And in this case the translation as “bless” seems the more meaningful one. Why would God allow Job a release from his suffering if he were to curse Them? Job’s wife seems to be saying, “Acknowledge God’s power so that he might let you die.” But Job rebukes her, saying “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” Again, the translation here does not seem to be representing the full picture. רע (ra’) is not only “bad” but also “evil.” This curious notion that the God of the Old Testament might act toward both good and evil is something I’ll be returning to later on. Rather than acknowledging God as acting directly to torment Job, Job seems to be saying that God is working for the overall good and that some evil must necessarily come along with that. But this is not the acknowledgement of power that God and the Accuser are seeking. Had it been, God surely would have relented at this point and restored Job to his former wealth. What is to gain from continuing to torment Job when he has already demonstrated that his resolve will not break?

I’ve uncovered so much in the Book of Job that I’ve had to split this essay into two parts, and I’ll leave off here at the end of the second chapter of the book. Already we’ve uncovered some things that point toward this being a very different book than the one that is often described to us. In part 2, I’ll cover the parts of the book that are not usually spoken of, and we’ll uncover a great deal more along those lines.

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