Theodicy, or Why Good People Suffer: The Biblical Book of Job

The book of Job asks why bad things happen to good people, as an entry point into questions about the relationship between God and humans. 

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The book of Job touches on a number of the most important issues in religious thought: the reason for suffering, divine justice, human intellectual integrity, and the motivation for piety. Often described as wrestling with the question of why the righteous suffer, it is, more broadly, a quest for knowledge about the nature of God and the universe, and the place of humans in it. It is essentially an inquiry into human and divine wisdom, about the possibility of arguing against accepted truths, and about exploring the human condition.

The book is rhetorically sophisticated and artfully structured. The central structuring device is the dialogues between Job and each of his three friends in turn. The dialogue, or disputation form, is familiar in ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, from both Egypt and Mesopotamia, and is perhaps best known from the symposia of ancient Greece. The book’s vocabulary is extensive and at times esoteric, and numerous Aramaic or Aramaic-like words add to the foreignness and the learnedness of the discourses. Rhetorical questions are another feature of the book, as are extended lists and descriptions. This is perhaps the most difficult book in the Bible, both in its thought and in its literary expression.

A prose narrative frame, consisting of a prologue in chapters 1–2 and an epilogue in 42:7–17, surrounds the dialogues, which are in poetic form. The frame draws on an apparently ancient folktale (see Ezekiel 14:14, 20), retold in a highly structured manner to introduce Job, a sinless man who suffers great losses but refuses to blame God. The prologue is arranged as scenes that alternate between earth and heaven. The poetic speeches that constitute the body of the book move back and forth between Job and each of his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, for almost three rounds (Bildad’s third speech is short and Zophar lacks a third speech). Job, with increasing vehemence, denounces God’s injustice, while his friends respond by defending God’s justice and arguing that Job must have sinned. The friends’ arguments are supplemented by a fourth speaker, Elihu, who is introduced in chapters 32–37. (Scholars think that Elihu is a later addition.) God, too, speaks, in chapters 38–41, with Job responding. In the epilogue, God rebukes the friends and restores Job to his former state. Standing outside of the dialogic structure is chapter 28, a poem about wisdom.

The book is generally dated to the Persian period, probably during the fifth–fourth centuries BCE.

Related Primary Sources

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Where Can Wisdom be Found?

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There is a mine for silver, And a place where gold is refined. Iron is taken out of the earth, And copper smelted from rock. He sets bounds for darkness; To every limit man probes, To rocks in…

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Prologue to Job

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There was a man in the land of Uz named Job. That man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. Seven sons and three daughters were born to him; his possessions were seven…

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Job Curses His Birth

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Afterward, Job began to speak and cursed the day of his birth. Job spoke up and said: Perish the day on which I was born, And the night it was announced, “A male has been conceived!” May that day…

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The Dialogues between Job and his Friends. The First Cycle

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Then Eliphaz the Temanite said in reply: If one ventures a word with you, will it be too much? But who can hold back his words? See, you have encouraged many; You have strengthened…

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The Dialogues between Job and his Friends. The Second Cycle

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Zophar the Naamathite said in reply: [ . . . ] Do you not know this, that from time immemorial, Since man was set on earth, The joy of the wicked has been brief, The happiness of the…

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Job’s Final Speeches

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Job again took up his theme and said: O that I were as in months gone by, In the days when God watched over me, When His lamp shone over my head, When I walked in the dark by its light…