¹ Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.

² The satan. In the Hebrew text, the word ‘satan’ is not a proper name, and is always preceded by the definite article. It probably functions as a title – as the name of an office, perhaps something along the lines of ‘Chief Spy and Prosecutor’. This means that when the satan accuses Job, he is only doing his job. In any case, the text makes it quite clear that when the satan brings misfortune on Job, he does so with his Master's express approval. (See 1: 12 and 2: 6.) It is also worth noting that by the time we reach the Epilogue, the satan's role in the affair has been completely forgotten. (See 42: 11.)

³ It should be noted that the friends represent themselves as the inheritors of traditional wisdom. [8: 8–10, 15: 10]. Large parts of their speeches are virtually indistinguishable in both style and substance from some of the Psalms. (See esp. Psalms 1, 37, 49, and 73.) They are also reminiscent of passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. (See Isaiah 58: 6–14; Jeremiah 17: 5–8; Ezekiel 18.) Since the friends get the worst of the argument (God himself declares that they have not spoken the truth [42: 8]), I think it is fair to conclude that the poet means to reject the prevailing Hebrew view of the meaning of suffering.

⁴ Many scholars believe that the Elihu speeches, which appear at this point in the text (chapters 32–37)) are an interpolation by a later poet. However that may be, they certainly interrupt the dramatic flow of the poem, and add amazingly little to what Job's soon to be discredited friends have already said. I will not discuss them.

⁵ Job had always recognized that God is supremely powerful. That is precisely what sometimes makes his case seem so hopeless to him. See especially 9: 4–15.

⁶ Some readers see this as the primary emphasis of the Theophany. According to them, the main point of God's Answer to Job is to assert that God is automatically in the right just because he is supremely powerful. For an entertaining example of this approach, see chapter thirty one of Hobbes's Leviathan.

⁷ I am thinking especially of those Christian philosophers who write on the problem of evil.

⁸ ‘Epistemic Probability and Evil’ (in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. by Daniel Howard-Snyder, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 75).Google Scholar I am using Plantinga's statement as a touchstone for my discussion of the Standard Interpretation partly because it offers such a succinct and clear defence of that way of reading the text, and partly because it is so typical of the use that Christian philosophers have made of Job in their treatments of the problem of evil.

⁹ Job is not Plantinga's principal target in this essay. He is primarily concerned to defend theism against an ‘evidential’ argument from evil of the sort that is championed by William Rowe. However, Plantinga does (mistakenly, in my opinion) see Job has having argued in a way that is parallel to Rowe.

¹⁰ Plantinga, op. cit., p. 75.

¹¹ In Robert Frost's satirical postscript to the book of Job, God says:

I'm going to tell Job why I tortured him

And trust it won't be adding to the torture.

I was just showing off to the Devil, Job,

As is set forth in chapters One and Two.

And Job replies:

'Twas human of You. I expected more

Than I could understand and what I get

Is almost less than I can understand.

Masque of Reason (Henry Holt: New York, 1945), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

¹² Many Job scholars are convinced that the divine speeches and the Prologue were written by different people. However that may be, the God who answers Job is a very different, and much more God-like, God than the one who holds court in the Prologue. It is a mistake to explain the meaning of the former in terms of the intentions of the latter.

¹³ This is consistent with most of what Plantinga says in the essay quoted above (though not with the unfortunate reference to the Prologue).

¹⁴ The Book of God and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 133.Google Scholar My emphasis.

¹⁵ Stump, Eleanore, ‘The Mirror of Evil’. In God and the Philosophers (ed. Morris, Thomas V.). (New York: Oxford, 1994), pp. 242 and 246Google Scholar (fn. 10). See also: Eleanore, Stump, ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’. In Reasoned Faith (ed. Eleanore, Stump). (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1993), p. 353.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 242.

¹⁷ In fairness to Stump, it should be said that Job is not the main focus of the essay from which the above quotations are taken. However, the more extended treatment she offers in ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’ suffers from the same deficiency.

¹⁸ The Book of Job (New International Commentary on the Old Testament) (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1988), p. 516.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 489–490. My emphasis.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 516.

²¹ Apparently the poet didn't know that the ostrich runs away in order to draw predators away from its young.

²² yet, And, Otto says, ‘this very negation of purpose becomes a thing of baffling significance’. The Idea of the Holy, tr. Harvey, John W., second ed. (New York: Oxford, 1950)Google Scholar, ch. VIII.

²³ See specially 42: 11, where Job's relatives and friends comfort him ‘for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him’.

²⁴ This means that the first of our four incompatible propositions is not true in precisely the way that Job and his friends had thought. They believed that God had singled Job out for special treatment. But on the view suggested by the animal passages in the Theophany, that is not true.

²⁵ On this reading, the Theophany rejects the whole idea of special providence, and not merely a particular view about the way it operates. (Once again, it is important to distinguish between the point of view of the poem and that of the Prologue.)

²⁶ Stephen, Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco North Point Press, 1987), p. xxiv.Google Scholar See also Wilcox, John T., The Bitterness of Job (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Wilcox also offers an interpretation that places God ‘beyond good and evil’.

²⁷ Ibid., p. xx.

²⁸ Ibid., p. xxi.

²⁹ Ibid., p. xxi.

³⁰ Ibid., p. xxviii.

³¹ Guide to the Perplexed, Part III, chapter XXIII. Maimonides reads 42: 6 as saying that Job repents of ‘dust and ashes’.

³² Two other small textual points are worth making in this connection. (i) The Hebrew verb, translated in the New Revised Standard Version as ‘despise’, is transitive but lacks an object. This must be supplied by the translator. Most authorities now agree that when Job says ‘I despise…’, what he despises is not himself, but his former words. (ii) ‘Dust and ashes’ is a symbol of finitude, of the gap between the Creator and a creature made out of ‘dust’. It does not refer to place where Job is sitting, nor is it a sign of penitence. (Compare Genesis 18: 27 where Abraham, pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, addresses Yahweh in similar terms – ‘I who am but dust and ashes.’)

³³ Mitchell, op. cit., p. xxiii. My emphasis.

³⁴ With this distinction in mind, we can be a bit more precise about the implications of Mitchell's interpretation for the four incompatible propositions that make up the Problem of Job. If we are thinking in terms of human justice, God is not just, and Proposition 3 is false. If we are thinking in terms of divine justice, then it is not true that a just God always makes sure that people get what they deserve, and Proposition 2 is false.

³⁵ For a full development of this idea of justice, see Lenn Evan Goodman, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1991). Goodman, whose interpretation of Job in some respects parallels Mitchell's, speaks of the ‘claims’ and ‘deserts’ of natural elements and forces (the ‘whirlwind and the worm’) as something that God rightly takes into consideration. See especially pp. 124–125 and pp. 150–151.

³⁶ ‘I will call no being good’, he wrote, ‘who is not [at least] what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures.’ See Mill, John Stuart, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, ch. 7, ‘The Philosophy of the Conditioned as Applied by Mr Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought’. (London: Longmans, Green & Company, Ltd., 1865).Google Scholar

³⁷ I do not mean to suggest that the prophet thinks that God is ‘subject’ to some ‘external’ moral law – a notion that is quite alien to the Hebrew tradition, in which God is the supreme Law Giver. I do mean to suggest that, at least for this prophet, the deepest moral requirements are a reflection of God's nature.

³⁸ See Armstrong, Karen, The History of God (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1993), p. 169.Google Scholar

³⁹ If, as many Job scholars believe, the hands of several generations of authors are at work in the book of Job, then it may be a mistake to look for a single coherent message. Instead, we should look for ‘point and counterpoint’ – for signs of one author trying to undo the work of another! For an excellent exposition and defence of this view of the matter, see Zuckerman, Bruce, Job the Silent (New York: Oxford, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ See Pope, Marvin, Job: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Doubleday: New York, 1973), p.lxxxii.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Cited in Robert Gordis, op. cit., p. 131.