The Scrapheap Job -- #6

‘After this, . . .’ (3:1)

After what? And how long after? Is this fast-paced narrative moving to closure? That is the way the story of Job seems so often to have been told and retold --

Messengers appear before ‘God’ to report in turn on the marvels of the creation. ‘God’ notices and challenges the Accuser among them – ‘Have you looked closely at my servant Job?’ ‘God’ points confidently to Job’s values, his behavior, his religion. The Accuser questions Job’s motivation and the insight of ‘God’ when he points to the thick hedge of blessing around Job and his family -- ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ (1:9). Unknown to Job, a wager is set. The stakes are high. The Accuser, with the approval of ‘God’, cuts down Job’s hedge in swift strokes. Job grieves deeply and visibly, but ‘did not charge God with wrongdoing’ (1:22). ‘God’ mistakenly expects the Accuser to fold in defeat -- ‘ . . . (Job) still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason’ (2:3). Instead, the Accuser argues that Job’s integrity remains in doubt as long as he has his health – ‘Strike his flesh and bones’ and see the truth. The Accuser, again with the approval of ‘God’, covers Job with painful sores. Sleepless, in agony, smelling foul -- Job withers away. His wife breaks – ‘Curse God and die!’ (2:9). Still Job does not ‘sin’ in what he says. Three close friends rush to him, only to hesitate from a distance when they can barely recognize him. Grief overtakes them. They sit in the silence with him for seven days and nights.

What could be ‘after this’? Job has weathered two tests of character. The Accuser’s suspicion -- that Job’s ultimate intent is prosperity -- is surely false. The link between uprightness and blessing -- i.e., a matter of gift rather than payment -- has been clarified. All that remains is for Job to be restored. Job’s story is comforting, even edifying, to many when the story they hear closes with ‘After this, . . . the Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before’ (42:10). This way of telling Job’s story seems in line with the narratives about Noah and Daniel (Ezekiel 14). It seems to fit the reason James pointed his readers to ‘Job’s perseverance and . . . what the Lord finally brought about’ (5:11).

‘After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth’ (3:1).

In a single sentence, the narrator tears apart a neatly packaged story on the verge of a happily-ever-after ending. In a single sentence, he shakes the reader’s confidence. Is the Accuser right after all? Is Job charging ‘God’ with wrongdoing? Has ‘God’ utterly ruined him? In a single sentence, Job becomes at the same time much more familiar and yet deeply disturbing.

Do not be surprised if you hesitate to cross this jarring transition. A remarkable number in religious circles have never read closely what follows ‘after this, . . .’ (3:1). Is the narrator merely pointing to a much longer and complicated route to the story’s eventual ending? Or is the narrator -- by disclosing the raw truth about Job’s struggle -- boldly challenging accepted ways of associating ‘God’ with human experience? We face a choice. Will we treat the abbreviated story -- from prologue to wager to tragedies to epilogue -- as complete, leaving the extended interlude (chs. 3:1-42:9) either to be forced into theological conformity or to be ignored? Or will we regard what comes ‘after this, . . .’ (3:1) as the story’s core, even if the views advanced in the abbreviated version of Job’s story collapse – for us as well as for the ‘scrapheap Job’ -- as a house of cards?