Confronting Job’s Demons

2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-535
Author(s):  
Steven Shnider
Keyword(s):  
Human Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job

Abstract The theme of demons connects three difficult passages in the Book of Job: Job’s curse on the day of his birth in 3:3–10, Eliphaz’s mocking censure of Job for that curse in 5:6–7, and 38:12–21, God’s challenge to Job for his appeal to demons. A crucial insight is provided by a Talmudic discussion of demons and human suffering, which connects Job 5:6–7 to Psalm 91:5–8.

Divine Justice and Sublime Suffering

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-70
Author(s):  
Damien B. Schlarb
Keyword(s):  
Vantage Point ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
Textual History ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
The Moment

This chapter shows how Melville draws on the book of Job to discuss issues of divine justice and human suffering. It argues that Melville uses the language and themes of Job to evaluate divine jurisprudence from the vantage point of the human plaintiff, celebrating human perseverance and indicting the arbitrariness of divinely mandated suffering. After sketching out the book of Job’s textual history, the chapter discusses in turn Mardi, Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and The Encantadas on these grounds, detailing how Melville uses typology and intertextual reference to examine the Bible and to apply his findings to comment on natural, social, and cultural phenomena. It concludes that Melville sees the book of Job as a story not of defiance and repentance but of the learning and growth that occur in precisely the moment when one’s preconceptions and expectations of reality are shattered.

scholarly journals Animal Suffering, God and Lessons from the Book of Job

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1047
Author(s):  
Georg Gasser
Keyword(s):  
Main Part ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Suffering God

Nature shows itself to us in ambivalent ways. Breathtaking beauty and cruelty lie close together. A Darwinian image of nature seems to imply that nature is a mere place of violence, cruelty and mercilessness. In this article, I first explore the question of whether such an interpretation of nature is not one-sided by being phrased in overly moral terms. Then, I outline how the problem of animal suffering relates to a specific understanding of God as moral agent. Finally, in the main part of the argumentation, I pursue the question to what extent the problem of animal (and human) suffering does not arise for a concept of God couched in less personalistic terms. If God’s perspective towards creation is rather de-anthropocentric, then moral concerns might be of less importance as we generally assume. Such an understanding of the divine is by no means alien to the biblical-theistic tradition. I argue that it finds strong echoes in the divine speeches in the Book of Job: They aim at teaching us to accept both the beauty and the tragic of existence in a creation that seen in its entirety is rather a-moral. Finally, I address the question what such a concept of God could mean for our existence.

“Give Sorrow Words”: Lament—Contemporary Need for Job's Old Time Religion

2002 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Huff Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Human Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
The Many

The author explores the many meanings and interpretations often assigned to the Book of Job and finds in the notion of lament a particularly helpful understanding, especially for pastoral caregivers often called upon to work with persons experiencing sorrow, loss, and human suffering.

scholarly journals In the Circle of the Tragic: The Book of Job. A Fragment of a Greater Fragment

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (1 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 151-187
Author(s):  
Andrzej Tyszczyk
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Book Of Isaiah ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Polish Version ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
The Image Of God

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 57 (2009), issue 1. Job’s drama that is equally a drama of existence and a drama of faith reveals the dimension that is in fact rarely seen in Greek tragedy, namely the transcendental tragic dimension. The identity tensions between the image of God whom Job accuses of cruelty and the image of the “defender in high” (go’el) mentioned by Job, one who would take the side of his suffering, at the same time testifying to the fact that Job was not guilty, opens the possibility of transformations blending the different images into a figure of transcendental tragic quality—based on a figure similar to the Greek figure of a tragic transfer—in which God, as the ultimate source of everything, including unjust misery, not only takes the side of human suffering but also experiences the suffering himself, revealing the analogy and then the interpretative identity of levels of human and divine experience of the tragic. The Book of Job is only the necessary starting point for the possible transformation of the image of God introducing a split of the image of God (the motif of go’el) in the book protagonist's complaint and deconstructing the category of “just retaliation.” The conditions that make transformation possible can be found in The Book of Isaiah, especially in the image of “The Lord’s Servant” and in Messianic interpretations of this picture closely connected with the phrase: “It was the Lord’s will to crush him with pain” (Is 53:10).

Job's Wife as Hero: A Feminist-forensic Reading of the Book of Job

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Rachel Magdalene
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Job Offers ◽  
Feminist Hermeneutics

AbstractThis article offers a new reading of the role of Job's wife in the trial of Job, based on feminist hermeneutics, legal hermeneutics, and comparative legal historical analysis. The article proposes that the book of Job explores the problem of the violence and oppression of God's law as manifested through human suffering. Mrs. Job offers Job the best means available for resisting a violent, oppressive legal system, that is, martyrdom. Although Job does not use that strategy directly, he does employ it in an indirect fashion to exercise another form of legal resistance against God's violence in order that the case might be resolved. Consequently, God settles the matter with Job. The article demonstrates that Mrs. Job is a more important and more powerful figure in the book than prior readings have allowed. She is both heroic and wise.

scholarly journals The Sufferings of the Biblical Job as an Icon of Postmodernity: The ‘loneliness’ of God and the human being in a consumerist paradise

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Józef Stala ◽  
Elżbieta Osewska ◽  
Krzysztof Bochenek
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Causal Consequence ◽  
Meaning System

AbstractThis article explores ways in which the attitudes of the biblical Job may enrich postmodernist philosophy by addressing some of its inherent problems. The discussion focuses in particular on the biblical Book of Job that can serve as an example of confronting suffering as a dramatic implication of human life that denies the sense of happiness. In an attempt to suppress this fear, the postmodern human contests, in various ways, the truth of their ontic frailty and the fragility of their constructed “happiness”. The questions that the biblical Job posed to God with a distinct air of resentment and regret seem at first sight to be meaningless as they are thrown into the void of a terrifying Universe. The critique offered here comes out of a Christian philosophical and theological base which posits that belief in the sacrum, transcendence, God and the hope of eternal life are key elements in a meaning system that fosters mental health and human happiness. In the postmodern system of meaning, individuals may no longer question the existence of God for the sake of human freedom, nor seek evidence of God’s non-existence, but simply live as if God does not exist. From a Christian perspective, it appears that non-belief in a transcendent spiritual dimension can inline people in postmodern society to feel that they live in an atmosphere of existential anxiety. Similarly, a Christian critique would consider that it is the postmodernist view of fluidity in all aspects of human life that leads to uncertainty and suffering, a causal consequence that people may not advert to. In this way, confronted with many postmodern phenomena, they may unknowingly live in a world of illusion. The Christian critique would also see it is as necessary and important to address constructively the challenges raised by cultural postmodernity. For this reason, the article will reflect on the realism of human suffering, the forgetting and rejection of God, as well as transcendence.

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