Books of the Bible

The Book of Job

Old Testament · Wisdom and Poetry · Genre: Wisdom · Author: The author is unknown · Chapters: 42

Job wrestles with the hardest question of all, why the righteous suffer. When a blameless man loses everything, he and his friends argue over the meaning of his pain, until God himself answers, not with tidy explanations, but with his own overwhelming presence and majesty.

Start reading: Job chapter 1

A key verse

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:Job 19:25 (KJV)

The setting and background of Job

Job is the first of the books of wisdom and poetry, a group that also includes Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. The author of Job is unknown, and the setting appears very ancient, with Job living like a patriarch outside the story of Israel, which has led many to regard it as one of the oldest stories in Scripture. Its date of composition is uncertain and much debated.

The book is mostly poetry set within a prose frame. It opens with a prose prologue in heaven and on earth, giving way to long cycles of poetic speeches in which Job and his three friends debate the meaning of his suffering, followed by the speeches of Elihu and finally the voice of God from the whirlwind, before a prose epilogue restores Job. This structure lets the book explore its question from every human angle before God answers.

Job was written to wrestle with the deepest problem of faith, why the righteous suffer, and to correct the easy assumption that suffering is always punishment. It refuses every simple formula and rests instead in the trustworthiness of God. In the sweep of Scripture, Job's longing for a living Redeemer and a mediator points forward to Christ, the innocent sufferer in whom God does not merely explain suffering but enters it.

The story and structure of Job

Job is introduced as a blameless and upright man, wealthy, godly, and the father of a large family. The book pulls back the curtain to a heavenly scene in which Job's integrity is questioned: does he serve God only because God has blessed him? To test whether anyone loves God for God's own sake, Job is permitted to lose everything.

In a series of disasters Job loses his flocks, his servants, his ten children, and finally his health, until he sits in ashes covered with sores, having lost all but his life and his wife. Yet in his first grief he does not curse God, but says that the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

Three friends come to comfort him and sit with him in silence for seven days, but when they speak they become accusers, insisting that such suffering must be punishment for hidden sin, since in their theology the righteous prosper and only the wicked suffer. Job protests his innocence and refuses their easy answers, even as his anguish drives him to question God directly.

Through long cycles of speeches Job clings to a desperate hope that he has a Redeemer, and that even after his body fails he will see God. A younger man, Elihu, adds his voice, and then, at last, God himself answers Job out of a whirlwind. God does not explain Job's suffering but overwhelms him with question after question about the wonders of creation and the wisdom that upholds it.

Confronted with the majesty of God, Job is silenced, not crushed but comforted, confessing that he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear but now his eye sees him. God rebukes the friends for not speaking rightly, and restores Job, who has learned to trust the God he now knows more deeply than before his losses.

The great themes of Job

Key passages in Job

Job in the sweep of Scripture

Job stands with the wisdom books as Scripture's deepest wrestling with suffering, and it corrects the easy assumption that the righteous always prosper and the suffering are always being punished. It refuses to give a formula, insisting instead that God is trustworthy even when his ways are hidden. Its honesty gives permission to lament, and its ending, where Job is comforted not by explanations but by the presence of God, points toward the day when God would enter human suffering himself.

Where Christ is in Job

Job's longing for a mediator who could stand between him and God, and his cry that his Redeemer lives, reach forward to Jesus, the mediator and Redeemer Job hoped for. Christ is the truly innocent sufferer, who bore pain he did not deserve, and in him God does not merely answer suffering from a whirlwind but enters it, taking it upon himself at the cross so that our own darkest sorrows are met by a God who has been there.

How to read Job well

Read Job when you are in pain, letting his honesty give you permission to lament and to bring your hardest questions to God. Resist the friends' temptation to explain away every sorrow with neat theology, and hold on, as Job did, to a God who is trustworthy even when he is not understood. Above all, find in his cry for a living Redeemer a hope now fulfilled in Christ, whose presence answers more than any explanation ever could.

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