Hello Aly,
Sorry I didn’t get back to this earlier but I see you’ve have had good company.
— Justice isn’t an instigating act or will, hence why I see ‘wills’ in God that are prior to or that have nothing to do with justice. Justice comes after, when the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. That is justice, or is what I would call justice. But as such justice can only be willed, or God’s will can only be called ‘just’, when it deals out these retributions. Justice is a response to a human will that is itself a response to a more prior divine will.
O- The key factor is the fuzzy meaning of “after”. Because of this, you place a time of your choosing to judge God’s actions as either just or not. But again the time of retribution can be anytime. (As I said before, “Justice is in the eye of the beholder”). The Bible recounts in many places how the people would suffer but kept their faith God who they believe would eventually rewarded as accorded and deserved.
By the principle of retributive justice, God was just to do as he did to Job. As Job says: The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Even his life is not of his own merit. But retributive principles also dictates that one sticks to their end of a contract. Job is part of the people of the covenant and as such, entitled to the expectation of justice from God when he acted in a righteous way (righteous in accordance with the giver of the covenant). But he also knows that this covenant has only the merit or right that God entitles it it to have, so that quite frankly he is as entitled to expect God to keep His end of the contract or that God may rip the contract all to hell. As you said, God may simply “fire” mankind and have nothing to do with it. That is His prerrogative, His right, since He gave it and He can also take away.
With this in mind Job curses the day of his birth, his life, for he is left almost to the point that he believes he has no recourse. Job is between two opinions within himself. If God has withdrawn His covenant (and given the “rewards” he has received for his good works, Job is entitled to this belief) then this painful life gives us no recourse and it would be better, if you object to it’s sufferings, not to be born at all. But he also believes that a mistake has been made, that he can plead his case with God and either demonstrate his innocense or be shown how he has come to deserve his sufferings. The second is the dominant mentality of a believer, while the first can only lead to agnosticism.
When God does confront him, Job has no case to make for himself, even though he is invited because if he had a case, if he could justify himself that would still leave him with no recourse, with no contract or with a contract giver that may or may not uphold his end, which is just the same. Here is how God puts it: “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” What would his victory serve him for when he cannot save himself. It is the Darth Vader argument: When Lando Carlisian objects that taking the princess with him was not part of the deal, Vader turns to him and asks Lando that “perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly?” Lando says no of course, because he is not in a position to bargain. And at the end that is how Job resolved the issue, by despising himself, humbling himself and Praising God.
But mark this well- This is not an answer to the question but it’s deferral. As you say “it can only be called just…”, so Job decides not to call it unjust even if he feels it. That said, let’s look outside of Job- how many die in expectation of deliverance? Job, an innocent righteous man was rewarded. But what about those who were not? Those who died brutalized in the expectation that God would be just?
— Thus in the case of Job, in God’s testing of Job, there is something other than ‘justice’ going on. (In fact, it is precisely justice that is temporarily revoked.)
O- I agree. Even God laments that Satan “incited me against him to ruin him without any reason”, that is to say without any justice.
— But What is God’s will here? My suggestion is that God is trying to reconcile the satan and humankind. God is not willing justice but reconciliation. The satan, in wandering the earth, has lost faith in humankind. God is trying to bring them back together again. To create a connection, just as you said Job receives in the end with God.
O- Hmmm…Perhaps it isn’t that God is trying to get Satan to have faith in mankind as a whole, for even God does not, but to stop using man as a justification, perhaps, for himself, because if Satan is right, then are we really better than him, a rebel at heart? I think that the conversation between them might have been about Satan’s refusal to obey, his open rebellion against God. Think of Genesis; there Satan does nothing but speak the truth. It causes man to rebel, as it pursues it’s own self-interest. In order to gain the power of eternal life man disobeys even the prohibitions set by God. In Job’s case something similar. Satan again speaks the truth. The difference is that Job was wise enough to stop loving himself above God at the right time, ultimately for the same reason however, the maintenance of at least a measure of control.
— So if a tsunami wipes out an island of people it is not evil per se, but only evil because this is how human beings perceive it?
O- No. If it wiped 50 villages, some with children, then it would be an evil. My point is that tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes have been a part of earth’s history even before man made his entrance. But it is only after man that now these phenomenons have achieved a moral gravity. And it is not how it benefits or threatens just anybody, but how it affects the innocent. If an earthquake destroyed a maximum security prision, reserved only for those on death row, people would call that Divine Justice. When Abraham is bartening with God about those cities, his issue is not with the destruction of a city filled with humans, but a city that may have had some innocent human beings. Once God takes care to evacuate the innocent, Abraham has no further comments on the destruction of the cities.
— That in truth, there is a grander scheme that could justify it all? You say this yet you go on to challenge my view of the anthropological origin of evil by calling upon the evil caused by natural disaster, which you just said isn’t evil.
O- I said that evil is a POV provided by intelligent minds that are necessary to make the distinction. Maybe His ways are not our ways, His Justice completely different from our idea of justice, but if so then there is no covenant between God and His People and no communication possible. What then is left for a man like Job in his hour of suffering? Nothing. But Job believes that God has made a covenant with man and that it rest on an agreement about what righteousness is. God in the prologue calls Job “righteous” and throughout the dialogue with his friends Job defends his integrity, his innocent, his righteousness as he tries to convince them that his sufferings are all undeserved, unjust, not just according to him or his friends ideas, but even God’s ideas, which were in place in their covenant with God.
— In regards to whether natural disasters cause evil I would say that they do not. Rather, the suffering they result in is part and parcel to a wild creation. We are told point blank that it is a wild world that must be subdued. That means danger lurks around every corner. There are seas that rise up and an earth that shakes. Also animals that bite.
O- But also we are told how those of God are inmune to the venom of the snake. Why go through this little exception for one and not others?
— It’s not evil when a lion eats a lamb or when a tsunami wipes out an island. There can be terrible unfortunate events in nature that may cause us to question God but they are not indicative of evil. Rather of wildness.
O- A wildness by design, wouldn’t you say? After all isn’t God the Intelligent Designer of this wild earth? Death is is an unfortunate, but natural event, and yet it is from this that we seek, and supposedly have been granted salvation from. Death itself may not be indicative of outright evil, but resurrection is indicative of it’s very opposite. That in itself is an injunction against that which is natural, even by God.
What is the difference? What makes human killing evil? I would say because in our being cultured we know better. Knowledge of good and evil and the power to discern between them are important qualities for human beings.
O- But you wouldn’t say the same about God?
— Yes and no right? It’s a delicate balance and at some point you’re going to have to let your daughter cook or cross the street or go out on her own. I believe the analogy is like learning to ride a bike. Yes, run behind and hold on as they start, but at some point you must let her go and risk her fall. There’s no escaping it unless you hold on forever. And that’s overparenting, an evil in its own right.
O- I don’t think, my point is, that Adam and Eve were not there yet. I don’t liken them to adults but to babies. If I let my daughter eventually to handle fire, electrical appliances and cleaning supplies, it will be because she knows good and bad, right and wrong ways of doing things. But A&E by definition did not know of any of this.
— Depends what you mean by omniscent. Does God see into Job’s heart and know the quality of it? Absolutely. Does God know precisely how Job will react or what will transpire? I don’t think so.
O- Fair enough.
— Then why did God spare Noah? Why didn’t God wipe us out completely so as to start from scratch? Of course God keeps faith in humankind, or affirms that man could right himself.
O- In this man, Noah, or that other man Job, but God says of mankind as a whole after He destroys the world by the flood: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.
— Maybe. If the wife is not on board with God’s work of reconciliation then yes, she would be repulsed. If not, maybe she would understand and would be happy to take it.
O- Why would she be happy? Only if it seem like a reasonable cause of her sufferings; she would think of it, for the sake of a noble reconciliation, as justified. Thus we leave now the realm of the POE and just have an act of justice.
— I guess the question is, how else is the satan’s faith to be restored so as to be reconciled to humankind? How else than by the example that Job is made to set? There is no other way in this case.
O- If that is even the goal. Nothing is said for example, at the end, as to what effect this whole exhibition has had on Satan.
— I’ve read it your way and admit its merits. I’ve said from the beginning that I believe the book of Job leads us to your view. Try reading it mine. It has certain advantages. Namely, it does not deny our being tselem elohim as I believe your view does (note the disparity, versus potential equality, that you stress between humankind and God, how we can’t know the greater scheme where the evil we perceive is no longer evil).
O- I have tried throughout to find common ground…I wouldn’t be a good reader if I didn’t do that. But one cannot go from a desired condition or consequenced, to determining it’s merits. It may lead to gerrymandering, retracing boundaries and definitions until they fit our goal. So, I know the benefits of your view, but they are only actual benefits if the fall in accordance with everything else.
— Again, then why would Job sit in the ash heap? If he didn’t think he belonged there why would he go there? You have to reconcile a rather sharp discontinuity between a Job who is happy to protest in chaps3-31 and a Job who timidly resigns himself so meekly to the garbage and never gets up in verse2:8. (If what you say is true, wouldn’t we expect, at the start of chap3, for Job to arise from the dung heap in his protest? If this was his point, that he does not belong there?)
O- If leprosy was his infirmity maybe it had nothing to do whatsoever with what he thought of himself or about mankind fundamentally. I doubt that he sat in a dunghill, first of all because that would go beyond the Law of God. Humiliating oneself before God would not be a strech, but this was done through fasting, shaving one’s beard etc, not sitting on shit. Ancient settlements would have had pyres to discard trash. I wouldn’t doubt that lepers were pushed to the outskirts of society and that like the homeless today, they would have had to scavenge for their substinence. Near by, I am sure, Job could have found ashes. Sitting on them naked might have had a symbolic value, humiliating himself before God (42:6), but also medicinal (2:8) to stop bleeding that he might have induced by picking at his scabs with a piece of shard. Job initially lies in ashes but out of the belief that this would have had a certain effect, ie aliviate his suffering. He performed the rite, though like Paul when he repented publicly, he did not believe that he was guilty. He performed the rite out of perfunctory concerns so that no stone was left unturned. But this is early in the dialogue, and I think that as his ordeal went on, only then did he gather the convinction that this was wrong of God to do to him.