And the Lord said to Satan,
“Have you considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him on the earth,
a blameless and upright man,
who fears God and turns away from evil?”
[...]
Then Satan answered the Lord and said,
“Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life.”

Job 2:3-4
(ESV)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I summarized the Book of Job in my previous post on Judaism. I’d like to expand upon it here.

Apparently there was debate on whether or not this story should’ve been included in the canon at all because its meaning isn’t exactly clear. (It doesn’t help that the dense poetry was difficult to translate and it’s rumored almost half the text we see is not original.)

Anyway, the author set out to answer the philosophical question of why the innocent and righteous suffer as frequently as the corrupt and wrongdoers. (I’m sure you can imagine examples on your own, but if not just turn on the news.) Atheists can declare the universe a random and chaotic place with no rhyme or reason, but for believers in a loving God, the search for why is inevitable.

Traditional lessons derived from this story are things like humility (as God reminds Job who is in charge), steadfastness (as Job refuses to curse God despite these events), and the reward for patience (as the latter part of Job’s life is blessed beyond the former), but they’re not exactly an answer to the question asked.

Also, who is to say these understandings are correct? The authors of these stories are long since gone, so we can never ask them. And just because a traditional understanding stuck around as the mainstream point of view doesn’t mean it’s right. It means someone proposed an interpretation and found an echochamber of ‘Yes’ men that further promoted it as THE interpretation until it became THE interpretation.

But how can you declare an official meaning if different people derive different meanings from these different stories by different authors in different languages in different times and different places?

Steve Allen (on the Bible, Religion, & Morality) sums up God’s response to Job’s questioning of his suffering as, “How dare you, puny man, presume to trouble the mighty creator of the universe with such paltry puzzles? Do you think that I could not answer such questions if I wished to? Be quiet and make no more such demands on me.”

So does skirting the answer with a display of all mighty power seem fair? Perhaps not. But then again, who are we to demand an explanation from the Almighty for anything? Maybe it’s one of those questions that is never meant to have a satisfactory answer. Maybe the answer is that extremely unsatisfactory answer we often heard in childhood: Because I said so.

Or maybe this all really was to prove to Satan (or perhaps to Job) that even if he was so afflicted by misfortune that he’d rather die, he still wouldn’t give up his faith in order to purchase life.