The character of the book of Job
The book of Job belongs to the group of Old Testament writings known as Wisdom Literature, concerned with the meaning of life as it are experienced by people. In the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) belong to this kind of literature. In the Greek Old Testament, Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon (the Book of Wisdom), designated deutero-canonical by Catholics but designated apocryphal by Protestants, are Wisdom Writings. A few Psalms may be described as Wisdom Writings.
All societies have their
traditional teachings about what constitutes wise behaviour for the individual.
The traditional proverbs of any society contain easily remembered teachings
about the human experience of the society. The traditional oral literature of
African societies is rich in such teachings which have been passed from
generation to generation. The wise man is contrasted with the foolish man. The
wise man lives successfully.
Very ancient wisdom teachings
have been recovered from a number of Middle East countries, from the ancient
cultures of the Fertile Crescent. The Wisdom Writings of the Old Testament are
therefore related to a form of literature found throughout the ancient
countries of the Middle East, but they also have a uniqueness which
distinguishes them from the literature of other nations. The aim of the
Biblical writers of Wisdom Literature was to show, in various ways, that the
truly wise man was the one who knew God and who tried to find the answers to
the hard questions of his life through his understanding of God. True wisdom
comes from God, who alone is wise in the fullest sense of the word.
The writer of the book of
Job, as it is in our Bible, cannot be identified and remains anonymous, but he
took a very old story and used it to present his readers with important
questions and affirmations. The author of the book was a Jew and a poet, who
may have written in the period towards the end of the Babylonian exile or just
after it, but we cannot date the writing of this book with any certainty. The
author bases his book on a much older story of a man who was not a Jew and who
lived, according to the author, in a land which may be identified with Edom.
Ezekiel 14 : 14 and 20 refer to Job as a man whose goodness was like that of
Noah. In a Babylonian tablet which can be dated around 1600 B.C. there is a
story about a good man who suffered acutely but who was restored to health and
prosperity by pleas to his god, but direct connection between this text and the
Biblical book of Job cannot be proved. The Semitic name 'Job' is identified as
early as 2000 B.C. in Egyptian literature, but this only proves that the name
itself was not uncommon.