Many are confused by the book of Job because it seems, in the end, that God doesn’t address Job’s concern, namely why there is innocent suffering. But is this the case?
What we see in the very beginning is that God’s principal role in the story is as defender of Job. God has to prove Job’s integrity, not to Godself, for God already knows that Job is pure, and not to Job, for Job knows this as well, but rather to Satan, for it is Satan who demands to be shown that Job is a good man, and that Job will stay true to God even when there is nothing in it for Job.
Job suffers so that Job’s integrity will be proven to Satan. This is essentially what God tells Job in His speech at the end, when He consoles Job by listing all of His victories, which gives Job insight into God’s purposes. Job sees that his suffering is not over some sin he committed, but rather it is for God’s victory, not over some creature of the earth, but over Satan himself in heaven. Job must suffer so that God can have the greatest victory of all; and caught up in this glorious cause Job’s suffering takes on the greatest meaning of all. Without Job, God cannot win. Job sees this in the end and says “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted”. Job says this in relief, even as he despises himself for questioning God, and not seeing his suffering as a vital part of God’s victory over Satan.
But even if Job’s suffering takes on this meaning, what, exactly, is this meaning worth? Job is consoled, but how is it of consolation that Satan be defeated, or that God has victory over some abstract being in heaven? Who is Satan that God must defend Godself before him, and triumph, even if it comes at the cost of innocent suffering? Is Satan the evil one, as he’ll eventually be portrayed? What does Satan do in the book of Job that is so evil? All Satan does is doubt Job, and demand proof of his integrity. Is that so bad? Or is Satan something akin to Behemoth and Leviathan, and if so what is the spirit of these creatures that they must be defeated?
Are you rhetorically asking what Satan’s role was because you want to share your belief on this later, or are you asking what Satan’s role was in the Hebrew lexicon of theology at the time period under question?
Erm…that depends on which theology you ask.
There is no objective answer to what Satan represents.
However, the Hebrew vantage was of a prosecutor.
His role was pretty much as you saw in Job; to make allegations.
God’s role was to judge.
Your role was to act, and your heart was what should cause your actions.
Thereby, Satan would point out your actions (or logic to show how your actions weren’t really good if you conjure up someone that only has good actions) that were bad, and show how you weren’t righteous.
God would then weigh that against what he saw as your heart; your motive, so to speak…or…your nature. However you want to interpret the concept.
So Satan was pretty much just that.
Hence what you described above.
That’s the basic concept.
He was the figure that places things on one side of the scale, while you stand on the other side of the scale.
God figures out where the balance lies.
If it balances (at the least) then you are good to go.
If it doesn’t balance against your favor; well…expect some punishment to be on it’s way because your scale needs be balanced and punishment is expected to straighten your heart out to balance the scale back.
It was continual and not after this life that Satan had a role in this perspective.
Judaism really doesn’t discuss the after life all that much; it’s focus of judgement is this life, so the balance of the scales is within this life; not really the next.
And therefore Satan’s role takes place in this life, and not really anything discussed about for the next.
The competition is between the willingness to face and stay within the lanes of truth (righteous) or fall due to one of lustings into darkness (the use of deception).
Satan is not merely an accuser, but one who specifically wishes for deception to reign rather than actual truth, thus a false accuser and blame-shifter. By the reign of deception, Man under Satanic governance, can “play god” and not be easily distinguished from God. This was the promise given to Ahdam back in Eden.
By God allowing bedevilment of Job (removing the fences), Job is easy prey for Satan(ism) to tempt into the use of deception rather than maintaining loyalty to truth.
The end result for spectators and politicians in future generations, is to show that even when Satan(ism) is given free reign to bedevil the righteous like Job, Satanism still cannot acquire servitude from the Job’s in the world.
The clear understanding prevents many future generations from thinking they might want to try Satanism just to see if it works as well as it would seem. Satanism offers grand god-like power over a very large part of the world, thus it is very tempting to use when under stress. The US Senate failed the test. Jesus did not.
No? Well Satan does mean what, adversary or accuser? Wouldn’t that count as an objective meaning of sorts?
Given this, Satan sounds like an integral, indispensible figure. If so, I wonder why it is necessary that Satan be defeated? Why must Job suffer just so that God can prove Godself right? Is there something wrong with making allegations, even against a righteous man? Or is the whole ordeal Job undergoes not to defeat Satan, but for God to see for Godself whether or not Job will remain true? …
Anyways, I’m also curious what you mean by Hebrew theology…
Sure, but why is there this competition in the first place? We’re talking about a man’s life here, so there must be more at stake than just a wager between two heavenly beings…
Where do you get this from?
Is it the promise of the serpent you speak of, that Adam will be like God, knowing good and evil? If so, you read a lot into this little statement…
Interesting. I wonder if Job remained blameless though throughout the ordeal. At the least, he repents at the very end, and a man of his integrity wouldn’t repent, I don’t think, unless he did something wrong (“speaking without knowledge”).
Also, is this what consoles Job in the end? Knowing that future generations will know that it is possible to withstand Satan without God’s help? I wonder, where is it said in the story that Job suffers for this cause? How do you glean this consolation from the defense God delivers for Godself at the end? Does God list all the wonderful things He has done in order to help Job see that his suffering will give hope to those who come after? …
There are many things which can be taken from the story of Job. From the aspect of God’s seeming collusion with satan. The accusations and assumptions made on the part of Job’s family and friends. Job’s confused conclusions as to why God had supposedly forsaken him when there was no apparent reason for those things that happened. Though it is most likely these things occured historically, I perceive these events contain mostly allegorical overtones.
The most important thing in my mind is the exegesis concerning God’s answer when He explained to Job that His Sovereign right with His Creation was not up for debate when questioning Him about such. Job received a good ear slapping back at the expense of discontent which his mind conjured up. In this case, ‘Father knows best’ appears to be the point du jour as the moral of this story.
From this discussion I was inspired to read Job and have only read the first 7 chapters so far.
From what I understand, the original meaning of Satan in Hebrew was adversary.
From what I have read so far the Book of Job appears to not be that much about Satan.
I am intrigued as to why it takes up so much attention.
I have heard the conversations and struggles of Job many times and continue to hear them on a daily basis.
When a person is dying the words, questions and demands of Job flow effortlessly from their mouths.
From what I have read so far, Job is instructing what lies ahead for all of us.
I especially liked this part:
Job 3:25-26 (KJV)
“For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.?”
Depends on who’s theological dictionary we use.
In the Hebrew, close enough…it means adversary or opposer.
Diabolos in the Greek means slanderer, or accuser.
In the Hebrew there is Shed, and means a thing that destroys, ruins, or spoils; but that’s not directly given as an adjective of Satan anywhere that I’ve ever read in any manuscript.
It’s something more of a state in presentation…almost like we use the term today, “personal demon”, but without inherently meaning “personal”.
The objective of Satan, at least in Hebrew, means adversary or opposer, but what I meant was that you are going to be hard pressed to find a definition of Satan that is objective in the sense that everyone is on board with your definition.
Pretty much.
He’s not defeated really.
He’s sometimes proven wrong and sometimes proven right.
If a man is wicked, then he is right.
If a man is righteous, then he is wrong.
It’s only false accusation if you aren’t wicked.
And the false is something that has to be paid attention to there, because it doesn’t mean that what was brought up was false, or even that it was false at the time.
However, it means that the final ruling found it to be false, or blameless rather, which means that the accusation is therefore not valid or found in favor; “false” is our best translation.
It would be called a false accusation that OJ Simpson was guilty of murdering his family if we were writing about it now because the courts ruled that he was innocent.
Regardless of the conditions during.
There’s nothing wrong with it…in fact, many characters accounted for in the OT make allegations against God and it’s accepted.
The issue at hand was whether the Hebrew’s that were righteous were being righteous because God had blessed them so much that they had self-serving interest to praise God and be righteous.
Basically, Satan points out that the scale system biases people to behave righteous whether they would have been that way naturally.
God disagrees.
And so, Job is put to the test.
It’s important to keep in mind that this story is quite likely originating at the time period that the Hebrews lost all of their land and went into hiding before the Maccabees revolution.
So they were trying to reconcile why bad things were happening when they had been, in their opinion, collectively overall righteous as the ambassador’s of God to other nations.
Job explores this dilemma and arrives at a strong holding piece of hope for them; that they are suffering for a later greater reward.
That this was to prove their inherent righteousness without reward imminent or known.
If there’s one thing that the Hebrew culture, even today, is remarkable at, it’s enduring suffering.
Technically “Evil” is the adversary to life. And it is certain that Satan is considered evil, Satan is not evilness itself, but a user of evil; “doer of evil”, “d-evil”. Since the entire Biblical theme is structured around enlightenment and the adversary to enlightenment is deception in a variety of forms, the user of deception, Satan is the Bible’s “bad boy” discipliner. Satanism is a specific construct of governance that utilizes the imbalance of passion (the lusts and fear - anxiety, sexual lust, rage, and other over-passions such as to blind the mind) to create a control of perception into eternal misperception (the “Matrix”).
The concept of “Israel” is “the manifest cause of enlightenment” to the world (Is-Ra-El). A part of the cause of enlightenment is the adversary to enlightenment - “darkness”, deception. Israel separates society into the unteachable, ruled by Satanism in Gehenna (the burning trash heap, “Hell”), and the humbly enlightened or learning ones in Zion, “city of God”.
The very concept of “Ju” (from where we got “Jews” or in Latin, “Juus” and the name of the city Judea) is to separate or “judge” the good from the bad. Such became a practice involving judging people, not merely ideas.
Job and Jesus are archetypes of virtues related to maintaining faith toward truth and enlightenment through even the worst suffering, accusations, and deceptions, without which the world will be ruled by the formula for eternal deception, Satanism. Jesus proposed a formula for anti-Satanism which dispermitted the lusts to be used to overpower and control a society (“calming the waters”). Today’s technology provided a new inroad for control through induced lusts and fears. Thus the challenge rises again as Christianity is thought to be insufficient to control Satanism and the judgers rise to “take the field”.
All that you see going on in politics, medicine, and religion and almost every thread on every Internet forum relates that very same struggle.
This is my working sense. But ‘adversary’ doesn’t quite cut it, does it? Maybe adversary to God would be better, but then we’d have to posit some other heavenly being either in eternal conflict with God or else somehow emerging from God’s creation. The first option takes God off the hook for evil, but it doesn’t quite fit with the creation narrative where everything is good. The second option implicates God in evil, and the only way out is to posit something like free will.
Satan only shows up in the prologue. You could consider Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (and Elihu?) to be Satanic representatives, and perhaps even Job as he verges on accusing God, so Satan is at work throughout the story if not in name.
It takes up so much attention for me because the whole ordeal was sparked by Satan, or more precisely God’s desire to show Satan a righteous man. Who is Satan that God would care to do such a thing? Who is Satan that God would make a righteous man suffer so that God can prove God’s case? …
Could be. But keep in mind that Job is righteous man… He’s not just anyone.
I wonder what Stumps would say to all this word play! I’m certainly not adverse to everything that you say. Evil may very well be against life, and Israel is certainly meant to be a light to the nations. I wonder if you’re being a bit reductive, though, and confused.
For example, you’ve set up a few pairs of opposites, life and evil, enlightenment and deception, Satan and God/Jesus (implied)… So one question is: what is the relationship between the life-evil pair and the enlightenment-deception pair? How does enlightenment lead to life, and deception death? If you think this is so, then how do you deal with the obvious teaching of Job, that the righteous do not necessarily live nor do the wicked necessarily die?
Also, why is it that Satan would want to deceive? Wouldn’t Satan want to live, and therefore be on the side of enlightenment? What drives Satan on, compelling Satan to deceive and spread deception? Also, in terms of your reducing Satan to deceiver (which is far from the Hebrew meanings of “adversary” and “accuser”), how do you account for very Satanic actions such as not feeding the hungry or killing an innocent? Where is the deception in these evil acts?
Would you take later NT references to Satan being crushed under our foot as a change in models (from Hebrew to Christian), or more simply would you take it as a teaching of our future glory? i.e., If all are righteous, then all of Satan’s accusations will come to naught and he will be downtrodden…
I like this, but I’m still worried about the problem of evil, even moreso now, since Satan is an integral part of God’s system of judgment. Where does evil come from then? Our free will?
I also wonder how Satan developed such a bad name if this was his role. Did we push evil onto Satan in order to relieve ourselves (and God) of responsibility? …
Interesting… I have to tell you though that I don’t react well to the meaning of suffering “that it is for a later, greater reward”. How do you reconcile this with the idea you quite rightly pointed out at first, namely that “the scale system biases people to behave righteously whether they would have been that way naturally”.
The story of Job, if it is meant to teach Israel that they suffer for later, greater rewards, would still have Israel operating for the sake of reward. What you suggest to beJob’s solution doesn’t improve upon the situation, does it? Granted, it’s no longer a straightforward “righteousness will be rewarded and wickedness will be punished”, but when taken up into the “greater scheme of things”, where the suffering finds meaning, this is essentially what it boils down to!
Take care not to presume that any of us trying to help you answer your questions necessarily personally believe the accuracy of the story’s message(s). We are each trying to relay what we see was the intent of the author, not necessarily what we believe to be true in life.
Stumps tends to focus more on the Hebrew lettering to which I very seldom disagree. I usually bring out the Anglish-to-English result of that lettering and other influences that fewer people talk about. Many originating concepts in such languages were never intended to be known by the common masses, but today when investigating the deeper or more precise intention of ancient stories intended to be told to the offspring of foreign peoples, it becomes important to realize how much of your own language has been skewed slightly from its origin. You are still speaking of Satan as though Satan was a person.
In Anglish (original English of the Anglos), the word “evil” is quite intentionally the opposite spelling of “live”. The Germanic version, “Efyl” when reversed yielded, “Lyfe”. Most of our languages were constructed, not merely evolved from caveman grunts as many today would have you believe.
As Stumps can point out, Hebrew is a very structured formulaic language. Very many words can be reversed so as to convey the meaning of the opposite. The very idea of “spelling” (casting a spell in magic) comes from the formulating of the right letters thus conveying just the right combination of thoughts into another person. Spiritual cursings and blessings come in the form of thoughts and beliefs. Thus the word “spell” in English carries both meanings. Today we merely call it “information control” (casting a spell) or communication (spelling a word).
A modern day spelling endeavor involving the rewriting of history has made efforts to redefine original Hebrew letters so as to “cast a different spell” by reading original writings. One very blatant conversion is the word/letter “Ra” originally meaning “light”, “awareness”, and even “wisdom”. Its new meaning is proposed as “error” and “foolishness”. Thus in a few generations, the word “Israel” would be translated to mean “The manifest cause of error”. Deception at work.
That is largely an issue of definitions. Enlightenment refers to the awareness and wisdom that life requires. The degree varies from the most elemental semiconscious reactions of a tiny germ to the most sophisticated deliberation ever known to Man. Thus deception, the opposite of what is required of life, naturally falls into the realm of evil, the very definition of what opposes life.
They all die. The only question is when and how. But underpinning every life is the circumstances in which it is born. When a tree drops seed, every seed is certainly not given equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As Liteninbolt accurately pointed out;
“Want”??
Again, a concept skew from the intention. Let me ask you the same question… “Why would darkness want to run from the light? Wouldn’t the dark want to see clearly therefore appreciate the light? What drives darkness on, compelling darkness to retreat and cause blindness?”
It is only by deception from enlightenment that such things occur. You demonstrate the darkness/deception involved. You think that feeding the hungry has nothing to do with wisdom and/or the pursuit of better life of the giver. Also, you seem to believe that Satanism doesn’t feed the hungry or ever care for the needy. How could an expert deceiver be so blatantly obvious as to always do the same heartless deed? The concern is to fool all of Man (many people much more clever than you or I), not little furry bunnies.
The book of Job is not primarily concerned with human suffering. It is not about the devil, either. Those factors are incidental to the overall message of the Bible, which concerns and centers on the Messiah, the Christ. The Christ is always the clue to understanding the Bible, from the first word of Genesis to the last of Revelation. For the sake of humanity, the Bible points to the glory of the Christ, because ‘Christ’ means ‘Savior’- one who clears human conscience.
Job himself is the not-Christ anti-type- that does not actually exist, but he is said to exist for the purpose of the book. That is because he is innocent, but cannot allow people to fail to recognise has innocence (though, according to the Bible, guilty persons also may protest innocence). So he goes on, for chapter after chapter, trying to justify himself, until eventually a true prophet comes along and puts him right. He contrasts with Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary artisan, the Christ because he was willing to be thought evil, and to take the blame for the sins of the world.
There is allegorical sense to the story, which may not have had some relationship to an historic event. But to have concern about that is to miss the point.
It’s obviously a change in models.
That’s Romans…a Pauline epistle.
Paul of 50-60 CE…Hebrew theology of <160BCE.
That’s at least a distance of over a two hundred years.
Think of two hundred years back in American theology compared to now.
Alright, now remove the profession of history, and the advance of electricity, and replace it with massive distances and letters are the only method by land or boat.
I’m fairly sure the model changed after leaving the Hebrew culture of the Judean belt region.
Hell, it was changing into Rabbinic Judaism within the Judean belt even.
Paul generally feels vulnerable.
He’s not a confident man.
He sees it as very easy to fall to vices and the rest of it.
Satan, in his mind, would not be odd to think of as a curse and terrible tyrant of haunting.
Paul is like a recovered alcoholic with the way he acts.
Banning outright because he’s not strong enough to be in the company of.
If all are righteous; then man is dead and I will want nothing to do with man.
Evil?
It’s man’s idea of two things:
bad crap
non-empathetic people
The Hebrew word means all of these together but changes depending on what you use them on.
If you use the Hebrew word on the weather, “that is an evil storm”, then it means bad.
If you use it on a person, “that man is evil”, then it means he is twisted or cruel to the tribal empathy idea of communal relation.
The word just meant “negative”; pretty much.
But it changes as you move it around, as to what that “negative” means.
As to where evil comes from as a thing…well, it’s not a thing.
It’s a bad crap or non-empathetic people.
And that’s subjective because different groups will assert non-empathy towards different groups.
So they may still be holy to their own people in which they are still empathetic towards, and evil to their foes.
The most evil a man can be is simply removing all empathy and treating man as nothing more than toys that humor him as other humans are attached to these toys and therefore so easy to manipulate and control.
That’s generally perceived as the shade of lacking empathy that many will call pure evil.
Follow James a bit there.
Most of the real strong personification comes about during the later time periods of theological considerations starting around the 12 or so century.
Well, aside from Paul, but Paul…like I said…he’s kind of sensitive.
You won’t find, for instance, Satan mentioned once in Matthew.
Oh, alright, you will.
The only instance is Jesus saying ‘what sense does it make for my adversary to attack my adversary?’
Paraphrasing.
But other than that word being translated to Satan (which bothers me because the Greek is satanan, which means we didn’t translate; we transliterated =D> )…nada.
Nah, not a real problem there because the previous concept was that of more immediacy.
This time period where they were in hiding was generations upon generations of time.
Many, many died never seeing the reward, and no one knew when it would come.
They had to accept that they may never see it, and only have faith that it would come some day for those left after them.
That was the change.
Before, you would expect it within the same life and many times.
Suddenly there is a waiting time beyond the same life…and ever so rarely; only once.
That’s a large shift, and it reshaped the Hebrew perspective.
The perspective can be see to not be the reward at all, but as the punishment to create enough humility.
This was a common thought as well.
If there is a massive suffering such as this, then it was to prepare the Hebrews for a great task which came with great rewards, and to prevent corruption and cockiness they were made to suffer to create humility beforehand.
The amount of suffering was weight opposite to the amount of greatness that the task would bring; and thereby the need for the humility.
shrug
So one Hebrew perspective goes.
Now…it’s up to you to decide if they ever got that greatness or not after the Maccabees revolution.
That’s fine. All I want to work with is the text itself; I hesitate to even step outside and draw upon the rest of Biblical scripture (as you seem to do in your suggestions, i.e., Satan as deceiver, which seems more of a NT formulation).
How does evil differ from death as the opposite of life?
So evil is any obfuscation or barrier that blocks the light of enlightenment, and Satan is this obfuscation/barrier or, in a word, deception. But if we turn to the story of Job, how is it that Satan is a deceiver? Doesn’t God know the truth of Job’s heart? In which case, who is Satan trying to deceive here, and more importantly how? The likely answer is Job, but this means that God purposefully calls upon Satan to go to work on Job. But why would God do this? Doesn’t God already know Job is true? …
So… what is the point of enlightenment? It sounds like we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t, so why bother if “Father knows best” and it’ll go according to His plan anyways? Does being enlightened somehow change when and how one dies?
So you compare Job to Christ and you say that Job is an anti-Christ figure because, even though both were innocent, Job defends his integrity and won’t accept blame, whereas Christ was willing to accept blame?
Interesting. But if we put ourselves in Job’s shoes, so that all our friends are telling us that we suffer because we are guilty, then wouldn’t we be quite right to ask “what did we do to deserve this?” … Is it the case that Job “cannot allow people to fail to recognize his innocence”, or is it the case that Job simply wants to know where he went wrong, and in knowing that he will gladly accept his hardship just as Christ did? Isn’t there an important difference here? Is it so anti-Christ to want to know where we went wrong?
