Immerse: Poets Full Volume - Flipbook - Page 279
IMMERSED IN JOB
T H E S T O R Y O F J O B B E G I N S by telling us “he was blameless—a man of
complete integrity. He feared God and stayed away from evil.” Job is
exactly the kind of person the book of Proverbs envisions when it urges
its readers to embrace wisdom. According to Israel’s wisdom tradition,
such godly character should lead to success and prosperity in life. And
when we first meet Job, he is indeed prosperous and wealthy, surrounded by a large family and respected for his wisdom. But a sudden
series of catastrophes takes everything away, and he’s left in poverty,
disfigured by disease and disgraced in the eyes of the community.
The book then presents an extended dialogue between Job and
three of his friends who come to “comfort and console him.” But as it
turns out, they have come mostly to confront him with his guilt, which
they believe caused his troubles. In their unbending moral universe,
goodness is always rewarded and wrongdoing is invariably punished.
So if Job has gone from prosperity to suffering, there must certainly be
some great sin or failure in his life.
For his part, Job relentlessly protests that he is innocent, that the
Almighty has made some mistake in allowing these tragedies into Job’s
life. In the strength of his moral certainty, Job demands to meet with
God and present his case directly.
The reader learns at the start of the book that there’s more to this
story than any of the players on earth know. But the drama of Job’s
arguments with his friends and his extended complaint to God has to
play itself out, since the secret remains unknown to them.
The book of Job is a daring exploration of the deepest questions
regarding our faith in God and his role in the world. According to the
Bible, wisdom gives us the ability to understand the order God gave to
the world. But what happens when that ability is stretched to its limits?
What are we to do when our explanations fail? What if the order in the
world itself seems to be fractured?
The book of Job is made up of a series of long poetic dialogues that
are bookended by brief explanatory narratives. The poetic dialogues
are marked by powerful imagery and elegant, serious tones. There are
three rounds of these speeches between Job and his three friends, and
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