Suffering and messianic hope

Overview

Recall questions on the book of Job, from the Adversary and Job's friends to the speech from the whirlwind and the ending, suffering as punishment, the suffering of the righteous, the meaning of messiah, the messianic age, messiah son of David and son of Joseph, and Maimonides on the messiah.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What happens in the opening chapters of the book of Job?

   Model answer

   Job is introduced as a wealthy man of exemplary integrity who is careful about religion even on his children's behalf. The scene then shifts to the heavenly court, where a figure called the Adversary questions whether Job's piety is genuine or merely a response to how well he has been treated, and is given permission to test him. In a single day Job loses his livestock, his servants and all ten children; he mourns but does not curse G-d. A second round removes his health, leaving him covered in sores; his wife tells him to abandon his integrity, and he refuses. Three friends arrive and sit with him in silence for seven days, after which Job finally breaks and curses the day he was born.

2. 2

   What question does the Adversary raise at the start of Job, and why does it set up the whole book?

   Model answer

   The Adversary asks whether Job's religion is disinterested, or whether he is devout only because devotion has paid. The suggestion is that piety under comfortable conditions proves nothing. This turns the book into an examination not of why the innocent suffer but of whether religion can survive when it stops being rewarded. It also makes the reader complicit, because the reader knows what Job never learns, that his suffering has no connection whatever to anything he has done.

3. 3

   What position do Job's friends take, and why is it a religious position rather than mere cruelty?

   Model answer

   Eliphaz, and then the others, argue from a settled doctrine of retribution: G-d is just, so suffering must be deserved, and therefore Job must have sinned even if he cannot see it. Eliphaz softens this by suggesting that suffering may be corrective discipline and that Job should submit and seek G-d, and by appealing to a night vision in which no human being can be righteous before G-d. The position is religious because it defends divine justice: to admit that Job suffers innocently would be to say that G-d is not fair. The friends would rather condemn their friend than their theology, and the book eventually says they were wrong.

4. 4

   How does the book of Job present the hiddenness of G-d?

   Model answer

   Job's complaint is not chiefly about pain but about absence. He wants to bring his case, and he cannot find the court: G-d is nowhere to be found, will not answer, will not state the charge, and cannot be compelled to appear. Meanwhile the reader knows there is a heavenly scene Job has no access to. The book therefore presents divine hiddenness as the real affliction, and it does not resolve it by explanation. When G-d does finally appear, he supplies presence without disclosure, answering the demand for a hearing while refusing the demand for a reason.

5. 5

   What view of evil and suffering does the book of Job present?

   Model answer

   It refuses the tidy account. Job's suffering is explicitly not punishment, the reader is told so at the outset, and the friends who insist otherwise are rebuked at the end. Nor is suffering shown to be educational in any way Job could recognise. What the book offers instead is that the moral order of the world is not transparent to human beings, that creation contains wildness and force that are not organised around human welfare, and that a person may hold on to both innocence and faith at once. Many readers find this an honest refusal to explain; others find it an evasion dressed as mystery.

6. 6

   What concepts of morality emerge from the book of Job?

   Model answer

   Several. That integrity is worth keeping when it brings no advantage, since Job will not confess to sins he did not commit even to end his suffering. That honest protest is not impiety, since G-d finally says the friends spoke wrongly and Job spoke rightly, despite the friends being the ones who defended divine justice. That comforters have duties, and that the friends fail them by arguing instead of listening. And that a moral life cannot be reduced to a transaction, which is precisely the Adversary's opening challenge.

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