Three monologues: Poem to Wisdom, Job's closing monologue, and Elihu's speeches He suggests that the wicked have taken advantage of the needy and the helpless, who remain in significant hardship, but God does nothing to punish them.
He then shifts his focus from the injustice that he himself suffers to God's governance of the world. He sees God as, among others, intrusive and suffocating unforgiving and obsessed with destroying a human target angry fixated on punishment and hostile and destructive. He moves away from the pious attitude shown in the prologue, and begins to berate God for the disproportionate wrath against him. Job's responses represent one of the most radical restatements of Israelite theology in the Hebrew Bible. Since a just God would not treat him so harshly, patience in suffering is impossible, and the Creator should not take his creatures so lightly, to come against them with such force. Job responds with scorn: his interlocutors are "miserable comforters". His three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, visit him, accuse him of committing sin and tell him that his suffering was deserved as a result. In chapter 3, "instead of cursing God", Job laments the night of his conception and the day of his birth he longs for death, "but it does not come". Job's opening monologue and dialogues between Job and his three friends
Job sits in ashes, and his wife prompts him to "curse God, and die", but Job answers: "Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil?" Įnglish theologian Stanley Leathes describes this prologue as "just sufficient to make the reader acquainted with and interested in the hero of the book, relating who he was and what was the occasion of the following controversy, but nothing more". God gives Satan permission to take Job's wealth and kill his children and servants, but Job nonetheless praises God: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away blessed be the name of the Lord." In chapter 2, God further allows Satan to afflict Job's body with boils. Satan accuses Job of being pious only because God has materially blessed him if God were to take away everything that Job has, then he would surely curse God. The scene then shifts to Heaven, where God asks Satan ( Hebrew: הַשָּׂטָן – haśśāṭān, literally "the accuser") for his opinion of Job's piety. In chapter 1, the prologue on Earth introduces Job as a righteous man, blessed with wealth, sons, and daughters, who lives in the land of Uz. Job's Tormentors from William Blake's Illustrations for the Book of Job. Two speeches by God, with Job's responsesĥ. Job's opening monologue, – seen by some scholars as a bridge between the prologue and the dialogues and by others as the beginning of the dialogues and three cycles of dialogues between Job and his three friends – the third cycle is not complete, the expected speech of Zophar being replaced by the wisdom poem of chapter 28 Įliphaz and Job's response Bildad and Job Zophar and Job Įliphaz and Job Bildad and Job Zophar and Job Ĥ. Prologue in two scenes, the first on Earth, the second in Heaven Ģ.
It is common to view the narrative frame as the original core of the book, enlarged later by the poetic dialogues and discourses, and sections of the book such as the Elihu speeches and the wisdom poem of chapter 28 as late insertions, but recent trends have tended to concentrate on the book's underlying editorial unity. The Book of Job consists of a prose prologue and epilogue narrative framing poetic dialogues and monologues.