Western Culture’s Most Famous Sick, Miserable Wretch

The Book of Job in Medieval Spirituality

Dr. Robert Alter, a man still living who spent twenty-four years translating, with paper and pencil, the entire Old Testament, says it is “in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible.” Yet all this mystery, even obscurity, has not excluded it from the list of Western Civilization’s most influential texts. Of the protagonist’s location and lineage we can say little more than what the Scripture says: “There was a man in the land of Uz called Job.” And it’s easy to summarize what we know about its composition, because we know almost nothing. The date? Maybe the fifth century BC, maybe the sixth, maybe the fourth, and the time period that its poetic narrative evokes—the age of the patriarchs—was far earlier. The original language? Probably Hebrew, but scholars have suggested that it’s a translation from Aramaic or Arabic. The essential theology to be conveyed or lessons to be imparted? Many centuries of exegesis seem to offer more questions than answers. The author? Completely unknown, and we do well to reflect on the words, more relevant now than ever, of a nineteenth-century biblical scholar named Andrew Bruce Davidson:

[The author of the Book of Job] has been supposed to be Job himself, Elihu, Moses, Solomon, Heman the Ezrahite, author of Psalms 88, Isaiah, Hezekiah, author of the hymn Isaiah 38, Baruch the friend of Jeremiah, and who not? There are some minds that cannot put up with uncertainty…. There are others to whom it is a comfort to think that in this omniscient age a few things still remain mysterious.

The first verse of the book tells us that Job was the Old Testament equivalent of a saint: “perfect” (having no major defect), “upright” (pleasing to God and just in his dealings with others), God-fearing, and careful to turn aside from evil ways. By the eighth verse of the next chapter, Job’s children are dead, his wealth is ruined, his body is covered from head to foot in ulcerous boils, and he is sitting on a dunghill using a shard of pottery to scrape corrupt matter from his decaying flesh. It is at this moment that Job’s wife offers her famous, or infamous, advice: “Curse God and die!”