Did God let an innocent man be tortured to make a point?

What the prologue says

Job 1:6-12 stages the first scene in the heavenly court. The sons of God present themselves before the LORD. The accuser (ha-satan, with the article: 'the accuser') comes among them. The LORD opens with a question about where the accuser has come from. Then the LORD boasts about Job: 'Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?' (Job 1:8). The accuser answers that Job's piety is mercenary. Take away what protects him, and he will curse God to God's face. The LORD grants permission to strike everything Job has, with one limit: 'only upon himself put not forth thine hand' (Job 1:12).

Four messengers arrive in rapid succession (Job 1:13-19). Sabeans take the oxen and donkeys and kill the servants. Fire falls and burns up the sheep and the servants tending them. Chaldeans take the camels and kill those servants. A great wind from across the wilderness strikes the house where Job's seven sons and three daughters were feasting, and they all die. Job tears his robe, shaves his head, falls to the ground, and worships. 'The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD' (Job 1:21). The narrator concludes the chapter: 'In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.'

Job 2:1-7 stages the second council scene. The accuser returns. The LORD again raises Job's case. The LORD says something the prologue did not say in chapter 1: 'thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause' (Job 2:3). The Hebrew is hinnam, the same word ha-satan used in Job 1:9 ('Does Job fear God for nothing?'). The LORD names the suffering as without cause and acknowledges the LORD's own hand has done it. The accuser then asks for permission to touch Job's body. The LORD grants it, with one limit: 'but save his life.' The accuser strikes Job with painful sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job sits in the ashes scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery, and his wife says, 'curse God, and die' (Job 2:9). Job refuses.

The four positions on the prologue

The four classical theodicy frames

The book of Job stages and rebuffs four distinct ways of accounting for innocent suffering. Three of them are the standard theodicy frames in the Western tradition. The fourth is the frame the divine speeches themselves seem to operate inside, and it resists all three of the others. Reading the book is in part watching each frame come up and watching what the text does with it.

The divine speeches (Job 38-41)

Four chapters of the LORD speaking out of a whirlwind. The speeches do not address Job's specific complaint. They do not justify the prologue. They do not defend the retributive frame the friends offered or the soul-making frame Elihu offered. They are a tour of the cosmos. The LORD asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid (38:4), whether he has commanded the morning (38:12), whether he knows the dwelling of light and darkness (38:19-20), whether he can bind the Pleiades or loose Orion (38:31). The LORD asks whether Job has provided food for the lions, the ravens, the wild ass, the wild ox, the ostrich, the warhorse, the hawk, the eagle (38:39-39:30).

The second speech narrows. The LORD asks about Behemoth (40:15-24) and then Leviathan (41:1-34). Both creatures are described at length, with attention to their power, their freedom from human control, and their place inside the LORD's creation. The Behemoth and Leviathan speeches are the longest sustained focus in the divine speeches. Whatever they are doing in the book's argument, they are doing it slowly and deliberately.

Job responds twice. After the first speech, Job says, 'Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth' (40:4). After the second, Job says, 'I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes' (42:5-6). The Hebrew of 42:6 is contested. The verb translated 'repent' (nicham) can mean change of mind, regret, or consolation. The phrase 'abhor myself' has no direct object in the Hebrew; the verb 'em'as could mean 'I reject' (something unspecified), 'I am sorry,' or 'I melt away.' Translations differ significantly. The book ends with Job's response and the LORD's verdict that Job has spoken rightly (42:7), but what Job has just said is itself part of the interpretation.

Job's new children

Job 42:13: 'He had also seven sons and three daughters.' The same numbers as Job 1:2. The Hebrew uses different numerical constructions in the two verses (1:2 uses 'born to him'; 42:13 simply states the count), but the symmetry is exact. Job's wealth is doubled (42:12: fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys, double the figures in 1:3). The children are not doubled. The text gives seven and three again, the same as before.

Several Jewish and Christian readings have observed that the children might be considered 'doubled' in another sense: the first seven and three are still alive with God, and the new seven and three are added to them. This reading is found in some rabbinic sources and in church-father commentary. Whether the reading is sustainable as exegesis or whether it is a pastoral response to the cost of the prologue is debated. The plain sense of the text does not say the first children are anywhere. It records their deaths in chapter 1 and gives Job a new set in chapter 42. Each of the four positions has to take a stand on what the symmetry means.

The names of the three new daughters are given (Jemimah, Keziah, Keren-happuch, Job 42:14), which is unusual for biblical narrative; sons' names are recorded more often than daughters' names. The daughters are also given inheritance among their brothers (42:15), which is unusual under standard biblical inheritance law. The epilogue is doing something specific with the daughters that it does not do with the sons or with the doubled livestock. What that something is depends on which position one is reading the book through.

Where the positions actually disagree

Stepping back, the four positions disagree about three things the text does not settle. First, what kind of moral significance the wager has. The pedagogical reading takes the wager as the necessary setup for a vindication of disinterested worship. The theodicy-protest reading takes the wager as the cost the book stages so the protest can be heard. The open-future reading takes the wager as a real relational moment between God, the accuser, and Job. The ethical-rejection reading takes the wager as the morally indefensible setup the book includes precisely so the reader can refuse it.

Second, what the LORD endorses at 42:7. The LORD says Job has spoken rightly and the friends have not. Each position reads this differently. The pedagogical reading takes Job's final confession at 42:5-6 as the right speech the LORD endorses, and the friends' retributive theology as the wrong speech the LORD rejects. The protest reading takes Job's protest itself, sustained across twenty-eight chapters, as the right speech, and the friends' defensive theodicy as the wrong one. The open-future reading takes Job's real engagement with God across the whole book as right and the friends' deterministic frame as wrong. The ethical-rejection reading takes Job's refusal to defend God's actions as right and the friends' attempt to defend them as wrong.

Third, what the epilogue means. The pedagogical reading takes the restoration as the book's vindication of Job and of disinterested worship: God is just, the test ends in vindication. The protest reading is more cautious, often reading the epilogue as a folk-tale frame the dialogues have already destabilized. The open-future reading takes the restoration as relational repair after a real trial. The ethical-rejection reading reads the new children as the book's refusal to pretend the cost of the prologue can be undone. The seven who died are still dead. The seven who are born are different people.

Reading the prologue with the question open

The book of Job is one of the texts readers come back to this text. The four positions above do not collapse into each other, and none of them dissolves the discomfort the prologue produces. What they do is name what each reader is trading off. The pedagogical reading preserves the integrity of the canonical text by reading the prologue inside the frame of the whole book, at the cost of accepting that the framing logic includes the deaths of Job's first children. The protest reading preserves the moral weight of the book by reading the protest as the book's own voice, at the cost of treating the prologue as a setup that the rest of the book then contests. The open-future reading preserves an account of God who takes real risks with creation, at the cost of an open-theist account of divine knowledge that not all readers accept. The ethical-rejection reading preserves the moral seriousness of the prologue by refusing to defend it, at the cost of treating the canonical text as internally divided. The divine speeches refuse all four frames in their own way. Whatever Job is doing, it is doing it by holding the question open for as long as a book can hold a question.