Reading: 10-2 The Book of Job for the 21st Century
Themelios 40.2 (2015): 243-52
Communicating the
Book of Job in the
Twenty-First
Century
- Daniel J. Estes -
Daniel Estes is distinguished professor of Old Testament at Cedarville
University in Cedarville, Ohio.
A |
lthough Job is one of the longer books in the Bible, in most churches today it is rarely taught or
preached
in a comprehensive way. To be sure, some familiar details of the experience of its pro-
tagonist have come over into common knowledge. For example, even people who have scant
comprehension
of the content of the Bible are aware of Job's words that the Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away (Job 1:21).
They may
well
recall the proverb of Eliphaz that humans are born for trouble
as sparks fly upward
(Job 5:7). Handel's
brilliant aria in Messiah drawn from Job 19:25
has prompted
the widespread presumption that Job's endurance was rooted in his anticipation of
Christ as his re-
deemer. And the allusion in
James 5:
11 to
the patience of Job is often
the monocular
lens
through which
the whole book is
perceived,
even
though that approach fails to consider fully Job's agonized speeches
throughout the poetic section that dominates the text that bears his name.
Nevertheless, in thirty years of surveying college students
I have discovered that very few of them
have ever heard in their churches a series of lessons or sermons on the book of Job. Their reported
experience, which
likely represents the general case, could be attributed to a number of possible
factors.
For the
pastor committed to expository
preaching, the challenge of working
through such a long
text is indeed daunting, and this could also explain why series on other lengthy books such as Isaiah,
Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and Deuteronomy
are as rarely found. If the prevailing emphasis of the preacher is on
evangelism or
discipleship or mission, these subjects do not emerge as easily from Job as they do from
other scriptural
texts. If the homiletical text is drawn from the Revised Common Lectionary, only rarely
does Job make an appearance. I For sermons that
endeavor
to move facilely from a
biblical text to three easy applications for the week ahead, Job's complexity
stubbornly resists such simplification. For these
and other reasons, those who preach the Bible too often fail to communicate
the book of Job with any
frequency or detail. 2
To complicate the problem, it may not be too
much of a stretch to allege that only rarely do we
find a seminary graduate
who has worked through the text of Job. Few programs at the master's level
require more than a few class days in Job, and even elective courses devoted to the book are infrequent.
More commonly, Job is grouped together with the other Old Testament wisdom or
poetical books in
a semester-long survey course. Perhaps there is a correlation here between the
Job that is infrequently
taught in the seminaries and
the Job that is rarely preached in the churches. Could it be that we are
sending into ministry the blind to lead the blind?
Added to this, a search for scholarly
publications relevant
to the preaching and teaching of Job
yields an equal
paucity of results. In my investigation of Old Testament Abstracts and
ATLASerials,
I
have
been able to identify only a handful of articles- and one brief book' that address the issue,
and even
these sources touch only obliquely upon the subject of how to communicate the
book of Job effectively
in the
contemporary context. It is encouraging, however, to see that three recent books on Job have
considered aspects of this topic.'
In this paper, I want to ask and answer one
key question: How can communicators of the book of
Job more effectively speak to people in the twenty-first century? To do that, I
will discuss first why Job
has always been a difficult book to communicate. Then, I will consider several
factors that make Job
especially difficult to communicate in the twenty-first century. That will lead into
an investigation of how
scholars, teachers, and preachers can respond to both the long-term and the
contemporary challenges
of communicating the book of Job. In conclusion, I will address why Job needs
to be communicated
effectively today; in particular, I will note what is lost if we do not and
what is gained if we do.
1. Why Has Job Always Been a Difficult Book to Communicate?
For many reasons, Job is difficult to read,
to teach, and to preach, so it is not surprising that it so
rarely is. Throughout the history of its interpretation, within both the Jewish
and Christian worlds,
the book of Job has been construed in a variety of ways that have failed to
account adequately for its
complex content. Clines
observes that Job has most often been viewed according to the ideals of the
reader, so that succeeding generations of interpreters have found in the book
the ideal patient
human
who fatalistically accepts suffering as God's will, or the champion of reason
over dogma, or the heroic
victim in the face of the cruelty and absurdity of the world.' He concludes
that these interpretations of
Job are in fact misreadings that introduce into the text the values of the
readers' hermeneutical horizons
rather than accurately exegeting the textual meaning of the book.
For good reasons, beginning students of
Hebrew do not often find their way into the book of Job, or
at any rate not far beyond its prose framework. The Hebrew text of this book is
among the most difficult
of any in the Old Testament. Even the premier scholars of Job wrestle mightily with its
frequent rare
words, grammatical conundrums, debatable variants, and structural complexities. Working in this
book
is not for the novice or the faint of heart!
To complicate the interpretive challenge, the
book of Job embodies a complicated literary form
that defies easy definition of its genre. The frame ofthe book is narrative
written in prose, but
enclosed
within that frame are thirty-nine chapters of poetry that must be duly considered. Francisco warns:
One of the greatest errors one can make about the book of
Job is to think that when
you have found out what happened to Job you have understood the book. You can
discover the story simply by reading the prose in chapters ],2, and 42. The
great poem
comes between these prose accounts, which give the setting for it. One does not read
Hamlet intelligently if all he does is ask what happened to the principal
character. This
is important, but more important is what Shakespeare himself is saying as he
arranges
the scenes and develops the conversation.'
The poetry of the book of Job is intricate,' with the speakers
sometimes responding to the others,
but more often
indulging in rhetorical excesses that
obscure rather than clarify their points.' The diverse
characters
articulate a variety of positions, so the readers must be careful to discern what the
book as a
whole is endorsing, or they may wrongly conclude that it
teaches what it does
not.
In addition, even an initial perusal of Job indicates
that the book frequently alludes to other
biblical texts, but
many of these
intertextual links
are startling. For example, Job 7: 17-18 transposes
the privileged status of humans in Psalm 8 into a minor key,and in Job 10:8-11 God's fashioning of the
human embryo is not at all the comfort it is to the psalmist in Psalm 139. Mettinger has
demonstrated
that the imagery in Job 16 and 19 draws from conventional
language in the lament
psalms, only "the
poet depicts Job as standing in the place of the enemy whom God annihilates, that is, in the position
conventionally assigned to evildoers under divine
judgment'>
Wisdom literature as a whole, and Job as a
specific case, has
often been omitted
or diminished in
treatments of Old Testament Theology and Biblical Theology." Taken by itself, the narrative frame ofJob
could be read as congruent with the retribution theology that is prominent in Proverbs. However, the
poetic dialogues feature Job's vehement rejection of his friends' attempts to condemn
him as they reason
from the effects of Job's calamity back to what they presumed
was the theologically necessary
cause, that
is, his personal sin. Yahweh's siding with Job against the
claims of the friends in 42:7-8 evidences that
the book as a whole argues that retribution, though accurate in general terms, does
not explain all that
occurs in the world under divine
control. This qualification of
retribution is extant already within the
book of Proverbs, which states
several times that there is mystery in Yahweh's ordering of his world, but
this relatively minor motif in Proverbs becomes the prominent point in Job.
A final factor that has long made Job a difficult book
is that it tends to leave many readers
unconvinced
or morally outraged. For many, the ending seems too
contrived,
as though Job lived happily
ever after,
even though observation would
suggest that life after tragedy is not always or even often like that. In
fact, severe traumas
typically leave lifelong wounds and scars. Even more troubling, the book raises
profound ethical questions: How
could a loving and just God allow Job to be treated so badly? What
about Job's children and
servants and animals---don't they count for something? Are humans just pawns
in a cynical cosmic debate between God and the adversary? As
Katharine DeIl asks in her recent essay,
"Does
God behave unethically in the book of
Job?"12
In 1984 a sculpture formed from 83 sheets of aluminum was
dedicated on the Charles River
Esplanade in Boston. From a distance the visage of Arthur Fiedler, the longtime conductor ofthe Boston
Pops Orchestra, is
readily discernible, but the closer one approaches the sculpture the more complicated
his representation appears. Throughout the history of its interpretation the book of Job has been like
that. This book that may seem so simple upon casual reading becomes
ever more challenging the longer
and the closer one scrutinizes it.
2. Why is Job Especially Difficult to Communicate in the Twenty-First Century?
The twenty-first century is a profoundly
different context from that envisioned by the original author
of Job, and people today bring to the book the questions, assumptions, and
values that characterize our
contemporary culture. Although commentaries most often do effective work in
explaining the ancient
world of Job, they do not always
do as well
in
communicating to the present time
with its distinctive
concerns. In fact, the scholarly
literature rarely addresses how the book of Job speaks to the world in
which we live today. Consequently, as hard as it has always been to interpret Job,
in the twenty-first
century there are additional challenges that must be overcome when one teaches or
preaches this book.
In their recent commentaries, Clines and Seow
have compiled extensive bibliographies of the
reception history of Job, including its influence upon literature, art, music, dance, and
film." The
prevalent artifacts within Jewish and Christian liturgy have tended to regard Job as a great
hero of faith
as they have concentrated on his portrayal in the narrative frame. Increasingly
in the late twentieth
century, however, the Job of the
dialogues is featured, and as Balentine has noted, "the Job who lives
on in the fiction, poetry, and
drama of everyday life speaks with far less restraint and models a quite
different sort of heroism'> In particular, the depictions of Job in the
Pulitzer Prize winning play J B.
by
Archibald MacLeish (1958) and in Harold Kushner's bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen
to
Good People (1978) have influenced how the general populace is prone to
conceive of Job, even without
having personally read the book." MacLeish portrays Job's three comforters as
representing history,
science and religion,
all of which Job rejects as inadequate. Instead, Job finds comfort in the love
of his
wife, and the two ofthem
resolve to build
a new life together on that basis, apart from religious faith."
In the final lines of the play, J. B's wife says memorably:
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in
the sky.
Blow on the candle of the heart
And we'll see by and by ....
Kushner builds from MacLeish's position to contend
that all of the characters in the book of Job
want to believe three ideas: that God is all-powerful, God is good, and that
Job is good, and they could
hold to all three so long as Job enjoyed prosperity. However, after Job's profound
adversity only two of
these positions could be affirmed simultaneously, and the third must be denied.
The friends chose to
deny that Job is good, and Job denied that God was fair, but Kushner maintains
that the solution comes in recognizing that though God is great, he is not
totally in control ofthe world. The readers of Job, then,
must forgive God for choosing not to create a perfect world, and they must
resolve to make the right
things happen by their own intentional actions. In the generation since the
publication of When Bad
Things Happen to Good People, its position has seeped
into much popular thought, and in large part it
has become the default view in the twenty-first century.
Another challenge in the contemporary context
is that with the advent of continuous news
coverage and the Internet
people today are more aware than ever before of the adversities, calamities,
and injustices in life throughout the world. The combination of economic
uncertainty, political tension,
international terrorism, criminal activity, and medical threats causes us to
feel as though much of the
world is sitting at the ash heap with Job trying to
make sense of it all. Tollerton has written insightfully
about reading Job for a post-Holocaust world," and since
that time recurrent
waves of atrocities in
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, cataclysmic destruction by Hurricane Katrina, nuclear
disasters at
Chernobyl and Fukushima, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and at
the Boston Marathon,
and the recent barbarism of Boko Haram and ISIS have brought suffering full force into the collective
consciousness. Every person to whom we teach or preach this book will know at
least one Job, and many
of them are Job. For them, abstract theology and
theoretical platitudes will not suffice, because they like
Job are asking the hard questions, desperate to find satisfying
remedies for the aches in their
hearts.
Their deep pain will not be relieved by the homiletical equivalent of taking two aspirins, with the empty
assurance that they will
feel better in the morning.
In many ways, the contemporary Zeitgeist finds
the book of Job perplexing and even offensive. For
those who accept the prevalent narcissism of the age, assuming that "it is all about me;' Job
counters
instead that life is all about God and his order for the world. People today place great faith in science and
technology, confident that there must be answers to their
questions if only humans would
search hard
enough. Job, by contrast,
challenges the reader to accept that the Lord has knowledge that surpasses
what humans can know, so that we must accept mystery and place our faith in the God
who knows far
more than he has revealed.
Thus, Job calls upon humans to relinquish their pride and to bow humbly
before the Lord, an act of surrender that most people today want to avoid at all costs.
3. How Can Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Respond to These Challenges?
Given the numerous difficulties that have
longed plagued the interpretation of the book of Job, as
well as the additional contemporary factors that have arisen, how can scholars, teachers, and
preachers
effectively communicate this biblical text in the twenty-first century? I would like to present six
general
strategies as guides to follow.
First, it is vital to grasp the content of the whole book of Job, and not to reduce Job
to a brief
synopsis. Gustafson rightly says, ''Any reduction of the issues to a two- or three-sentence
conundrum
captioned 'the problem of theodicy' will bleed the
vitality out of the poetic, dialogic, and dramatic
passions that pervade much of the book.> Too often a
Cliff's Notes version
of the book is presented,
which distorts both the character Job and the overall message of the biblical text. As Paul Harvey
used
to say, we need to hear the rest of the story, so that our
theology is informed by it all, even the messy
parts. In practical terms, this means that the communicator must work through
the entire book before
starting to preach or teach it. This enables one to
develop the necessary interpretive framework for
understanding the specific passages within the book.
Second, because the book of Job is so
difficult, it is vital to make judicious use of exegetical
commentaries that examine its text in detail. The standard seminary requirement of a year or
two of
Hebrew may be adequate for exegeting simple narrative passages, but it is not sufficient for the massive
interpretive challenges of Job's poetry. As one of my mentors told me as I completed my doctoral
program, the ideal way to come to terms with the full content of a book of
the Bible is to write an
exegetical commentary, because that process compels one to work through the entire
text, rather than
just parts of it. No
doubt, that is an unrealistic expectation for the typical preacher or teacher,
but there
are some excellent resources both in commentaries and in journal articles on
the book of Job, and these
must be examined assiduously, lest the communicator perpetuate misreadings of
the text by failing to
comprehend its complexities.
Third, because Job is primarily poetry, the communicator must
do more than just talk about
the
story line. The power of poetry comes in its ability to recreate an experience
in the reader, rather than
merely reporting the experience, as does prose. As Schreiber observes,
"The poet's
business in writing
his poem is not to tell us that this 'moment of imaginative experience' has happened
to him, but to
make it happen to us as well?" Therefore, the preacher and teacher must
discover ways in which the
poetry of Job
can penetrate
the hearts and touch the emotions of the hearer. One way to do this is to
prepare for a series
or unit on Job by inviting the congregation or class to read through the book in
advance and to state the questions that it raises in their minds. By this
means, the communicator will
be able better to guide them in studying and reflecting on the book, thus
prompting honest and candid
dialogue."
Another
idea is to employ a dramatic rendering of the book, either acted out or in the form
of reader's theater. In the
nineteenth century, James Stevens wrote a dramatization of the book of Job
which is available online as a free download. His portrayal uses the KJV text, it has some questionable
interpretive assumptions, and it takes nearly two hours to stage, so it might be better to employ
someone
with a literary or theatrical bent to compose a script more suitable for the
occasion. If this were to cover
the entire book in a condensed form within an hour, those who observe it would
be better able to step
imaginatively into Job's situation and feel
what he experienced.
Fourth, it is vital to transport the audience
back to the biblical text, explaining its setting, cultural
references, and place in Old Testament theology. However, it is equally important to book them
on a return flight to the twenty-first century to consider how the book of Job applies
to life today.
In other words, in the enthusiasm for acquainting the audience with what Job
meant there and then,
the communicator must also enable them to understand what Job means for the
here and now.
We
do not have the luxury of communicating Job as abstract, academic theology
alone; there must also
be a pastoral dimension in our preaching and teaching. It would be regrettable
if the homiletical or
pedagogical journey were to leave the hearers "a long time ago in a galaxy
far, far away" and not
enable
them get back home
to where they live and work and play. The numerous literary and artistic artifacts
cited by Clines and Seow in their compilations can serve as points of
connection between Job and the
contemporary scene. The effective communicator will endeavor to link the
abstract theology of Job
with concrete analogues in the present time. Literature, art, and current
events can be useful tools for
highlighting how the ancient book of Job speaks with relevance today.
Fifth, the thorny theological problems posed
by Job must be addressed
directly
rather
than being
swept under the rug as though they do not exist. MacLeish, Kushner, and others have indeed
surfaced
important and difficult questions, and the widespread acceptance of their views
indicates that they have
given words to what many
people think and believe. To pretend that these questions are irrelevant, or
to suggest that to ask them is in itself sinful, is to yield the field without
a fight.
Rather,
the preacher
or teacher must raise and then respond to the queries that trouble people today: Why do bad things
happen to good people in God's world? Is God really both good and great? How can God's people
endure pain and minister to others in pain? How do humans live faithfully within the
limitations of
their knowledge? And, as many have asked since the horrors of the Holocaust, Where was God at
Auschwitz? These are the kinds of questions that recur frequently in the lament
psalms and especially
in the
imprecatory psalms, when God's people expressed with excruciating candor their raw emotions
and anguished accusations, so there is ample biblical precedent for God's people to ask and
discuss what
most troubles them. Parsons notes well: "The temptation is ... to ignore the many
hard questions Job
raised in facing the mystery of his innocent suffering. Yet the candid record
that Job began to question
God strikes a chord familiar to humankind. To ignore Job's question 'why?' and his search for
God's
answer is to ignore basic issues of life everyone must face?"
Finally, we must call people today to trust
the Lord humbly and courageously even when they feel
that life sucks, and God is silent. The literary and theological climax of the
book occurs when Job comes
to his realization in 42:5-6: What I now know is that I do not know, but that the Lord does know, and
that is sufficient for me. Job, then, is a cautionary tale warning against rigid dogmatism, such as that
articulated by the friends and even by Job himself, which refuses to accept mystery. Job and the
friends
all in their individual ways attempted to double-down on retribution theology, but functioning as the
master teacher Yahweh in his series of rhetorical questions in chapters 38-41 brought Job into a
deeper
appreciation of divine
omniscience.
Within
the book,
Job
never figured out what had happened to him,
and
there is no record that Yahweh ever disclosed it to him. Nevertheless, Job came to the place
that
he was
content to accept that God's ways are higher than human ways, and God's thoughts are higher
than human thoughts (Isa 55:9). Ultimately, the book ofJob leads to the kind of courageous faith that
continues to trust God "though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the
heart
of the sea"
(Ps 46:2[3]).
4. Why Job Needs to Be Communicated Effectively Today
This article has assessed the long-term and the
additional contemporary challenges in preaching
and teaching the book of Job, and several homiletical and pedagogical strategies have been
suggested
to address them. One further question remains to be asked: Why does Job need to be
communicated
effectively in the twenty-first century? This will be answered both negatively
and positively.
First must be considered what is lost if Job
is not communicated clearly and well. In his book
entitled Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey reflects on a conversation with
a friend:
''As I brooded
over our conversation, ... I kept returning to three large questions about God that
seemed to lurk just
behind the thicket of his feelings. The longer I pondered them, the more I realized
that these questions
are lodged somewhere inside all of us. Yet few people ask
them aloud, for they seem at best impolite, at
worst heretical'> Yancey goes on to say that the three questions no one asks
aloud are "Is God unfair?"
"Is God silent?" and "Is God hidden?" Educational theorist
Elliot Eisner speaks of the null curriculum,
those subjects that either intentionally or unintentionally are not taught. Eisner contends that
"what
schools do not teach may be as important as what they do teach ... because
ignorance is not simply a
neutral void; it has important effects on the kinds of options one is able to
consider, the alternatives one
can examine, and the perspectives from which one can view a situation or
problem'> Relegating the
book of Job to the null curriculum by neglecting to teach and preach it
systematically, the church in
effect is conceding that this biblical text is not relevant to life today. This
regrettably leaves men and
women in the twenty-first century without God's answers to their unspoken but
nagging questions, and
as a result they have inadequate theological resources to face the inexorable
contemporary challenges to
their faith. Furthermore, it misses the opportunity to help people to know God
more fully.
As Job 28, the literary integrative center for
the book,>
demonstrates,
humans by their ingenuity
and intelligence are not able to discover wisdom, but only the omniscient God
knows the way to the
wisdom that evades human discovery. When Yahweh spoke to Job in chapters 38--41, challenging him
to answer seventy unanswerable questions, Job came to the realization of his
own limitations before the
omniscient Lord. Because humans are limited in their knowledge and
understanding, they like Job must
learn to trust the Lord for what they do not and cannot comprehend. Brown notes
well, "By provoking
issues and questions as forcefully as it does, Job leads the reader to
self-discovery and, thereby, to
knowledge of God of a different sort'>
It is also vital to consider what is gained
when Job is communicated effectively. Our congregations
and classrooms are full of people in pain, and the book of Job resonates with
their emotions and gives
words to their feelings and fears. By preaching and teaching through this book
we identify with and
enter into the real struggles that people have. Job's anguished laments, his
bitter frustrations, and his
daring questions are all points at which contemporary men and women can say,
"Amen" Sad to say, these
modern-day Jobs too often have heard only the same kinds of platitudes,
accusations, and irrelevancies
that prompted Job to dismiss his friends as plasterers of lies and worthless
physicians. By contrast
Holbert exhorts, "When we preach, Job must be with us, his painful life
must speak to ours, for in him
speak the voices of millions of our brothers and sisters in this world. We must
become Joban preachers,
open to the painful truth of our own lives and the lives of others">
In the book of Job, theology crashed into
experience, and in that collision faith was forged. What
Job learned in the biblical text can also become true in the contemporary
context. The Jobs who hear
our sermons and lectures and who read our papers and books face a barrage that
threatens to obliterate
their beliefs. However, by guiding them along the course trod by Job, we as
scholars, preachers, and
teachers can direct them toward the enlarged and deepened faith in God that
became his. For they will
learn, as Job did before them, and as God's people throughout history have learned, that
the path from
untested belief about God to genuine commitment to God passes
through painful experience. This
IS the message of the book
of Job that we must communicate effectively in the twenty-first century.