I've been fascinated by the story of Job for a long while, even reading some commentaries from the theology section in the University of London Library back in the day. There are many interpretations of the story, in nearly all of which the interpreter forgets that it's God's fault Job has lost everything and gained a skin covered by sores, and blames the old man for his bad luck and miserable mood. These interpretations suggest that it's up to Job to accept God, or the world, or something else, so he can quit whining and get better.
Reading Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression sent me back to Job again. Job was a multi-millionaire farmer / landowner whom God allows the Devil to make bankrupt and cover his body with sores. His wife tells him to "curse God and die", which is a little short of wholly supportive. Then three old buddies show up and sit with him. After a while, Job starts to kvetch about how he wishes he had never been born, and what a dreadful place the world is. His friends tell him to stop moaning, that God doesn't do Bad Things and even if the wicked do prosper, it isn't for long. Job tells them they are hardly being sympathetic or helpful. Eventually a kid called Elihu tells Job that he should quit moaning and challenging God to explain himself, because he's an insignificant sinning worm and God is, well, God. At which point God appears, uses Elihu's own phrase about "multiplieth words without knowledge" against him, and informs Job's friends of their utter ignorance of the ways of the world, that they have been talking trash about Him and need to kill some fatted calves for Job by way of apology.
So why would anyone stick this story in their Bible? Well, there's a thing known in the trade as the Problem of Evil, which is roughly that if you are all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful and love the human race, why do you let bad things happen to good people? Ordinary people seem to have an almost genetic need to believe they live in a fair world, where they will be rewarded, or at least left alone, if they behave as they are expected to by the powers-that-be, from God to Revenue and Customs via whoever is running their company this week. This is what a child in a functional family who went to well-run schools would believe, as it would pretty much describe their experience.
By modus tollens, it follows that if you are messed about or left out of the prizes, you have failed to satisfy the Gods or the various Caesars in your life. Bad fortune is your own fault, you have a bad character. The wicked may and do prosper with logical consistency under this regime, but ordinary people treat prospering as a sign you are a good person, though perhaps a little pushy and grabby, because with magnificent circularity, if you were a bad person, you would not be prospering.
If this is your view of the world, then you get to criticise God for letting bad things happen to good people. Now it's one thing for Job to call God to account - he has a legitimate complaint - but the rest of us don't get to, even by disguising it as philosophy. Well, not in any organised religion you know about anyway. Complain about God and the next thing you know, you'll be trying to usurp the Pope or something.
So the scribes of the King James Bible put in a story telling us that God runs the world according to rules we don't understand, that indeed nothing in this world happens without God's permission, and that attempts to understand human affairs in merely human moral terms amount to blasphemy. I think Greenberg is right to say that the happy ending, where Job gets his wealth back and a long life as well, is put there to take some of the bleakness away.
God's argument is all bluster, of course, and worse, it can be modified by anyone in a singular position of power to their own end: how dare you criticise "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap or Carly "Cruella" Fiorina, what do you know of the stresses and strains of being a big-company CEO? It's an argument for the absolute autonomy of Very Powerful Beings from mankind's expectations of Him / Her / Whatever.
But en passant the Book of Job is an argument that, under certain views of the nature of God, the usual explanations of human suffering are not just wrong but utterly misleading. It's also is a hefty chunk of major poetry that expresses better than anything else how it feels to be desperate, dispirited, exhausted and utterly out of faith with the world, and how hollow and pointless it is to talk someone out of that feeling. Which leads me to the rest of Greenberg's book on depression in another post.
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