Thoughts on Job 1

Today’s reading: Job 1; Romans 7

I find Job to be one of the most fascinating books in the Old Testament, but there are a couple things I used to misunderstand about the book that sent me down wrong roads theologically for a while, so I want to call them out here as we start.

“The Satan”

The first misunderstanding, and maybe the most important, is that Satan in this book isn’t Satan. You can easily find extended scholarly discussions of this topic all over, so I’m not going to go too deep on it, but it’s important to understand, so we’ll talk about it a bit here this morning. 

To start with, the Hebrew word “satan“ means “accuser” or “opposer.” It is a title or a role rather than a name. The English word “prosecutor” would probably be a good translation of the word in Job. Now, that said, it was very common for Hebrew names to not be names, but to be other words or phrases that describe the person or their circumstances, so “Satan” would seem like a reasonable name for the being that opposes and/or accuses God. The problem is that, grammatically, it cannot be a name here, or anywhere else it’s used in the Old Testament for that matter. Throughout the Old Testament, the Hebrew word “satan” is used a decent number of times, but it is always preceded by the Hebrew word “ha” (the), so the translation should read, “the satan,” instead of, “Satan” (honestly I think “satan” should be translated too, but the “the” is important here…). In Hebrew grammar, you cannot have a name preceded by “the.” In English, we generally wouldn’t do this either (I’m not “The Joe,” I’m just “Joe”), but maybe would in some circumstances to make a point or to draw focus, but Hebrew grammar doesn’t allow a name to be preceded by “the.”

So what that means is that when we see Satan in this story, it’s not talking about an ultimate spiritual rebel, or even a bad or evil being at all, but rather a being in the role of a prosecutor, cross-examining Job’s faith.  If we read this as being Satan, the divine rebel, then this story would seem to open with a being that just doesn’t want to see someone blessed for faithfulness to God and so he incites God against him. But if this is a heavenly prosecutor, it changes the picture as it becomes a being who legitimately questions whether Job’s faith is only the result of blessing.

That, in and of itself, brings up a whole set of questions about whether the things that are done to Job, in the name of examination, are evil. Certainly the death and destruction would only make sense coming from an evil spiritual being, right? But would we say the same of a tornado moving through a town and killing people along the way? Or an earthquake in a large city that claims many lives? Are those necessarily evil acts? We may not like them, but unless we are going to say that every tornado is the result of spiritual evil making a targeted attack on someone, then we can’t say it was evil that a strong wind blew across the wilderness and knocked down Job’s oldest son’s house on all of Job’s children. It may not be comfortable, but we do have to admit some amount of difference in perspective and ignorance in this regard, as God has simply not given us all the answers to questions and issues like these.

Fact or Fiction?

The second misunderstanding I want to point out is that Job may very well be a fictional story without undermining Scriptural inerrancy.

I was taught, in the past, that Job has to be taken as historical fact if we are going to hold to a doctrine of Scriptural inerrancy. And while it may very well be that the story of Job actually happened, it also may very well be the case that it is just a story. In fact, I have heard arguments for both cases and I’m not honestly sure which way I swing on this one, though I might lean slightly more toward it being fictional (but maybe that depends on the day…). One of the more convincing arguments, to me at least, is the style of Hebrew used in the book. The Hebrew Job was written in is a later Hebrew, whereas most arguing for the historical nature of Job require it to be the oldest book in the Bible, meaning you would expect a much earlier form of Hebrew to have been used in writing it. But if it was written later, then the open line of the book, calling Job a man from the land of Uz, would have been akin to saying, “Long ago and far away…” which is the kind of opening that immediately clues you into the fact that this is a story, and probably one with a moral or some kind attached. 

There are other markers too, that the book was intended to be understood as a fictional account, but I would encourage you to look into the question yourself if you’re curious, because I certainly can’t make the case well enough myself here one way or the other. Nor do I feel a need to try to make the case since I could go either way myself.

But I point that out because it may be the case that this is a fictional story intended to get us thinking about God and our relationship to Him in certain ways, or it could be a historical story shared with us for the same purpose, but there might be different effects depending on which camp you fall into. I certainly don’t have any axe to grind on the matter, but I did feel like it was worth pointing out that it’s not such a black and white issue as some make it out to be.