Most people who think of the biblical character Job remember the prose sections of his eponymous book. In the introduction, Satan (the accuser) meets together with the gods, and challenges them to put Job to a test … yada, yada, yada … he passes the test and obtains unfathomable riches, which make up for all of his suffering. This is the view portrayed in the Hipster Job video, which recasts the story in modern Williamsburg (and - buyer beware - uses lots of colorful language in place of the Hebrew).
But there is another way to read the text: discard the narrative portions and really delve into the poetry. With a few notable exceptions, most critical scholars view the narrative sections as late additions to the text. As Bart Ehrman put it in his book, God's Problem, "Most people who read Job do not realize that the book as it has come down to us today is the product of at least two different authors, and that these different authors had different, and contradictory understandings of why it is that people suffer. . . . "(p. 162). The prose author wrote a sort of folk tale ascribing Job's suffering to a divine test, while the poetry author offers no real theodicy. Poetry is the heart of the Book of Job, and its point is that suffering is meaningless and/or impossible for humans to comprehend.
Even if one chooses to read the book as a whole, as Carol A. Newsom and other postmodern scholars do, it is evident that there are several distinct ideas about God and suffering at play (hence, polyphonic texts). In order to chart these contradictory voices, I came up with a uniquely modern way of visualizing the arguments at the heart of the Book of Job. In the spirit of the Brooklyn hipster Job, here is farcical facebook conversation I made.
admittedly, this is not very funny or beautiful. It doesn't do the Book of Job anywhere near the justice that it deserves. But, still, it helps me to imagine this argument, where, oddly, no one comes out a winner.
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