Touched by the Hand of God

Job and the Problem of Theodicy Every human ordering must be reaffirmed over against forces of chaos and evil that threaten to undo it. Attempts to reaffirm the order of existence take the intellectual form of theodicies. Such explanations attempt to integrate the threatening chaos, whether moral evil or natural destruction, into the overarching religious order and thus preserve meaning. There is an “implicit theodicy” in all social order.77 In fact, the wisdom books of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach all address the problem of theodicy.78 This study of Job regards the problem of theodicy as a major theme in the book.79 Job’s suffering is clearly extreme, tragic, and unjust, and like every case of apparently pointless suffering raises the question of divine justice and the meaning and purpose of life. “To such disturbing questions,” Marvin Pope rightly perceives, “there is probably no better introduction than the Book of Job.”80 Job is not a theodicy per se, as I have indicated, at least in the classical definition of that term; nor is it an attempt to resolve the problem of theodicy. It does not finally justify God in the face of human suffering, which is what a theodicy invariably aims to do. If it is considered a theodicy in this sense, it is a “conspicuous failure,” as Rowley reminds.81 Often in the book, Job defends himself— not God—in the face of the friends’ charge that he suffers justly because he has it coming to him. Yahweh finally vindicates Job’s innocence, however, and condemns the friends for claiming that Job deserves his horrific fate. In this regard, then, book may be described, “not as theodicy but anthropodicy.” Theodicy is the justification of God’s love, justice, and power in the face of evil; anthropodicy, the justification of human beings against those who blame the human victim.82 While this distinction is important, the problem of theodicy, in one variation or another, is much in evidence throughout the book. It is a theme that is found on almost every page, so much so that Lusseau claims, “the problem of the suffering of the just confronted with the prosperity of the impious constitutes the work’s central object.”83 At the risk of overemphasizing the significance of theodicy in Job, I will place special emphasis on how the book deals with this conundrum. Disappointingly, the book fails finally to resolve the issue. It does not give us a neat, logical solution to the problem. At best, Job ponders the problem of theodicy in human suffering within the context of ancient Hebrew wisdom and the order of God in the world. In the dialogue, Job’s friends speculate that “suffering comes about sometimes as punishment for sins, sometimes as a warning against committing sin in the future, and sometimes, as in Job’s case, for no earthly reason at all, but for some inscrutable divine reason. In the end . . . readers cannot discover from the book any one clear view about what the reason for their own particular suffering may be, nor any statement about the reason for human suffering in general; for the book is entirely about the suffering of one particular and unique individual.”84 When we look at the problem of theodicy in the light of modern theology and philosophy, however, we discover a remarkable fact. The book of Job advances in rudimentary form several of the approaches to theodicy that have been proposed and developed philosophically by later thinkers—then rejects them. Job doesn’t propose formal theodicies of the type that will eventually be worked out philosophically and theologically. There do occur in Job, nevertheless, approaches to the problem of theodicy comparable with the formulations that will later be made in Western religious thought. What is remarkable is that the essential elements of these theodicies is already found within the book of Job. Is there really nothing new under the sun? These approaches are comparable to those of later development. We could even draw a line of development through the history of thought connecting the approaches in Job to modern theodicies.85 The ancients obviously contemplated this problem. Through the centuries following Job, particularly in the Western tradition, these approaches were more fully developed intellectually until they emerged in complete form in the West as the major theodicies we recognize today.