[July 2006 journal entry]
The frightening calamities (1:13-19) -- from the Sabeans’ violence to destructive lightning to the Chaldeans’ deadly aggression to the terrible storm -- are all attributed to ‘God’ in the story/play. The same explanation occurs re Job’s humiliating afflictions in the second cycle of calamities (2:1-10). Job, in his first lines in the prologue, accounts for the calamities with “the Lord gave” and “the Lord has taken away” (1:20-21). The narrator makes the point that the prologue Job “did not charge God with wrong” (1:22), apparently meaning Job does not accuse ‘God’ of injustice or malevolence when he attributes the calamities to ‘God’. In response to his humiliating afflictions, the prologue Job speaks of receiving good and evil from ‘God’ (revealing that he considers the wave of calamities as well as his personal afflictions to be ‘evil’). Yet the narrator repeats that Job “did not sin with his lips” (2:10). Are Job’s two responses in the prologue acceptable to/within the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm?
