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good man who is true to God, no matter what happens, whose complete obedience is rewarded with greater prosperity. A closer reading shows that Job is a far more complicated character who challenges God. Some have called Job the “first existentialist,” because he questioned the seeming isolation of humanity in a hostile universe and then discovered that there were no answers. The more complicated, and not entirely satisfying, message of Job and his questioning of God is that humans, in the cosmic sense, “just don’t get it.” It is a message that seems more of a dodge than spiritually comforting. As Karen Armstrong wrote in discussing Job:

Together with his three comforters, Job dares to question the divine decrees and engages in a fierce intellectual debate. For the first time in Jewish history, the religious imagination had turned to speculation of a more abstract nature. The prophets had claimed that God had allowed Israel to suffer because of its sins; the author of Job shows that some Israelites were no longer satisfied by the traditional answer. Job attacks this view and reveals its intellectual inadequacy, but God suddenly cuts into his furious speculation. He reveals himself to Job in a vision, pointing to the marvels of the world he has created: how could a puny little creature like Job dare to argue with the transcendent God? Job submits, but a modern reader who is looking for a more coherent and philosophical answer to the problem of suffering will not be satisfied with this solution. The author of Job is not denying the right to question, however, but suggesting that the intellect alone is not equipped to deal with these imponderable matters. (A History of God, pp. 65-66)

The message for the Israelites of the time Job was composed may have been clearer: Yes, the righteous must sometimes suffer, but if they maintain their faith in God their fortunes will be restored, just as Israel was restored by God in 538 BCE. But Job, along with many other biblical accounts of God, seems to raise more troublesome questions than it fitfully answers. Most troubling of all is the none too flattering portrait the book paints of God, who is rather boastful in the first scene, like an overly proud parent crowing over a precocious child. Challenged by Satan, this God seems insecure, uncertain when pressed about his loyal servant Job. Is God so weak as to be pricked by an almost adolescent dare from Satan? Why does God have to prove anything to one of the “heavenly company”?

The Satan of Job, from the Hebrew ha-Satan, is more of a figure, say, a prosecuting attorney, than the figure of pure evil as Satan is now commonly conceived. Job’s Satan, who disappears from the stage after the opening scenes, not to be heard from again, is presented as a member of the heavenly company. Only in later Jewish and Christian writings did Satan become the chief of a group of fallen angels. The connection between the Satan of Job and the serpent who tempts Eve in Genesis was not made until the author of Revelation, the last book of the Christian New Testament, identified the serpent with the Devil.

To Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography, the book of Job represents a climactic event in the Bible, a moment in which the Lord faces the fact that even God can do bad things, or as Miles puts it, has a “fiend-susceptible side.” Noting that in the Hebrew scriptures Job marks the last time God speaks personally, rather than through some messenger, Miles writes:

The climax is a for God himself and not for Job or for the reader. After Job, God knows his own ambiguity as he has never known it before. He now knows that…he has a fiend-susceptible side and that mankind’s conscience can be finer than his. With Job’s assistance, his just, kind self has won out over his cruel, capricious self just as it did after the flood. But the victory has come at an enormous price. Job will father a new family, but the family he lost during the wager will not be brought back from the dead; neither will the servants whom the devil slew. And neither will God’s innocence. The