The Book of Job

Job: Why is God so mean to me? I am such a good guy!
Friends: God is mean to bad guys and good to good guys. You should repent. But, anyway, if you were REALLY REALLY bad, he would just kill you in your sleep.
Job: But I'm good! And plus, bad guys get away with all sorts of stuff.

(fill in the blank) begat (fill in the blank).
repeat ad nauseum

When I was little, my uncle gave me a comic strip bible. It was awesome. I wish I still had it. :(

If God had a name, what would it be
And would you call it to His face
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question
Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make His way home
If God had a face, what would it look like
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the Saints
And all the Prophets and...
Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

I wonder if that would make me go to hell. It seems worse than anything Job did.

I wonder what Ozzy Osbourne would say about God or Job. :-)

It's called 'Faith'. I don't know which hippy is responsible.

hmmm... I confuse myself once again.

"Testing your faith" is, I'm pretty sure, a more modern concept than would apply to Job, but that's probably a good description of how the text is used now. I wish it hadn't been so long since I read Jack Miles's God: a Biography, which is pretty much the best overview of "the character of God" in the OT/Tanakh. But what I remember of what he said, combined with the way I look at things from other sources, the book is most likely an oral legend -- possibly not originally about Jehovah, but one of the Elohim (i.e., I don't remember which form of "God" the book is written about) -- rewritten for the monotheistic or henotheistic crowd. It's an artifact of the "angry, vengeful, unknowable God," fairly at odds with the God of love and kittens and not-so-much-of-the-smiting.

I think a good part of the importance of the story to the monotheists would be both the unknowability of God and the idea that you worship God even if he doesn't give you anything -- it makes less sense to stress this point in an already monotheistic community, but in the context of the struggle between the monotheists and the traditional polytheists within the Hebrew communities, it's critical. "Why should we worship that God? He's never given us anything!" "Well, yes, but you should worship him anyway. He's wicked tough."

(xp: the time travel thing I meant)

But for instance --

If you travel into the past, is it or is it not to pray for the intercession of saints who have not yet been canonized in the local time period?

Which church doctrines are you bound by, those of the local time or those of your native time? (sub: if you travel back to before Christ, are you bound by laws of ritual cleanliness?)

Is changing the past the fulfillment or betrayal of God's Plan (sub: is it even possible to "betray" God's plan -- paging all the free-will/predestination theorists, you're wanted on line 2)?

To what extent should ethics consider the indirect consequences of actions done in the past?

And etc. I've been working on it here and there on the side, but between the frivolity and the reliance on Catholic writers, I think it'd be marketable to absolutely no one (unless I expanded it to a book; "What does the Church say about cloning/time travel/the possibility of sufficiently-advanced robots having a soul if a soul is an emergent property.")

It is frivolous, but by the same token it addresses a lot of doctrinal issues in terms of how and when prescriptive behavioral doctrine becomes binding.

One one level, there is the "testing your faith--if you keep it, you will be rewarded" which is really a "Don't give up" message.
On another level it explains "why bad things happen to good people". Answer: "No reason that you can control. Not your fault, just get through it."
Another nice message from Job is hope: "If you stick it out, things can get better through forces that are just as beyond your control as the forces that made things go bad".

Taken as a whole, I think Job is a rather Zen book.

Really, though, Job's story has proven to be utter and complete solace to me over the last couple of weeks. The parallels between his trials and challenges and my trials and challenges have comforted me, especially knowing what happens to him when he keeps his faith. I also sorta understand some of the reasoning behind keeping one's faith up even through the roughest of times, because I felt this wonderful sense of calming and "refuge from the harsh glare of the outside world" whenever I would enter into my daily prayer (yes, I pray once a day) or go to Sunday Mass. I still do draw tremendous amounts of strength and peace from praying and being religious (or if you'd prefer, being spiritual).

Sure, I still have stressors in my life. Sure, life isn't a walk in the park. But life has become a little bit sweeter and a lot more wonderful and precious and amazing. That's what I feel.

(That isn't meant to be dismissive of any of the various interpretations; it's just a good example of interpretive drift.)