Right, well, time consecrated in prayer. Let's kick off this new Bible study on Job, it's called Job, Stead, Fast, and Suffering, and why I titled it that. It's gonna be very, very clear here, pretty darn soon. This is gonna be a four part series on the Book of Job, and this first lesson is going to introduce the book with all the very important cool topics like title, historicity, biographical details, the literature, the structure, and the typology, and the key themes, and all this kind of stuff.
And it'll take a good part of an hour. I think it's always really important for everyone who study just to lay that foundation. So I also wanna bring to your attention that you'll find in the introduction once you log in and listen to this entire lesson. You're gonna find in the introduction welcome for the Bible study on Job, a syllabus and suggested reading.
That's pretty straightforward. If you take a look at that, if you want to, you're just gonna have the lesson titles on top, and then down below the whole slew of different books and commentaries that you can consult. Usually of course, the go-to of these great resources we have from such awesome faithful Catholic scholars like the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible series, by Scott Hahn and his team, the Catholic Energy Deal Testament, by Bergson and Petrie, and a whole bunch. You can see the whole list right there.
So yeah, a lot of great stuff in there that we're going to be unpacking. I'm gonna curate all the best quotations from all these different resources in each of these lessons here. So let's introduce this book on Job. Now, what to say about Job?
What a daunting book on us. First and foremost, it's a daunting book, right? I mean, every Bible study is a little bit daunting because you want to approach accurately and read it from the heart of the church and have a good spiritual faithful approach to it. But Job is even a little bit more challenging because of its content, right?
So Job is so famous and it's so influential. I mean, right along with the Psalms, in the Old Testament, the Psalms are extremely influential. Hopefully you had a chance to take my 16 part Bible study on the Psalter, 16 lessons, each of those are about an hour and a half long, each, they're beautiful, typological of Christ. There's so much prophecy of Jesus Christ.
So naturally, you're gonna have a lot of saints, doctors of the church from the Patristic era, the Scholastic era, the modern era, who are going to write a lot about this. I mean, it kind of forms the heartbeat or the skeletal structure for the church's prayer and mass and all this stuff. But right there with the Psalms is the book of Job. Many, many commentators from every era of the church, there's so many people who want to delve into this study because Job addresses some of the most, if not one of the most difficult questions and mysteries of life, which is the problem of suffering, the problem of evil, how do you balance a good God and all powerful God with the problem of evil?
So I wanna share with you a couple of quotations here. This first one is from the handbook on wisdom literature and it says the book of Job is renowned as one of the greatest masterpiece, is not only the Bible, but also in all of world literature. In telling the story of Job, a man who in a day went from having everything to suffering utter collapse. It addresses some of the most profound, theological and philosophical questions posed by humans.
This ancient text, which has no precise literary parallels, has prompted interpreters to look in many directions, different directions as they seek to understand its message. And I really like that. That's a good quotation to start off our Bible study because it is a masterpiece and many individuals are studying, if you study the Bible obviously you're gonna study the book of Job, but you also have in various courses throughout universities all over the Western world and even I would dare say the Eastern world, it's just one of those classics with all other ancient Near Eastern and even Greco-Roman text. It's just a classic for what it addresses here and trying to answer the questions of evil.
Now there's one more little quote here I put in your footnote, foot number one from your Catholic and North of the Old Testament. It says in dramatic format, the book of Job recounts the life and sufferings of a righteous Gentile of ancient times as he undergoes prosperity, disaster, depression, but finally restoration during a painful period of testing by Yahweh. This book is a masterpiece of world literature and the Old Testament's most direct treatment of evil and the question of theodicy, which is the justice of God. We're gonna talk about all of that here pretty soon.
So pretty much any commentary you look at or any focused study on the book of Job of which there are many is gonna open up along those lines. It's just a classic of world literature, certainly of the scriptures because we have these deep questions about evil and suffering and we are asking God, why, why God, why do I have to go through this? Why does my loved one, my friend have to go through this? Why do even strangers across the globe have to suffer as much as they're suffering?
Why don't you step in? Why don't you do something? Of course God always is in his own way. So we always try to answer these questions and I remember a great quotation from G.K.
Cheston and hopefully you know who he is, one of the greatest writers in the 20th century in England, right? He's just got just all kinds of works and just classics. There's this little quotation, I mean, you can quote Chesterton for almost anything. He's just amazing.
But he says that the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of men. I'll let me read that again. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of men. And that is very, very true.
I mean, if you just sit back and just pause and trust God and think a little bit and take things to prayer, no matter what the situation is, we always try to find as many solutions as we can to any given problem or difficulty, but the mysteries of God or the riddles of God are still more satisfying. What a great quotation that is. So I gotta tell you, I mean, right off the bat here, I mean, I'm in my early middle age and I haven't really suffered a lot. So who am I to give this Bible study, this four part series on the book of Job?
Because certainly someone who has a lot of suffering, of experience of suffering, and they've gone through it and they've grown as a result. They've been pruned to use language of the New Testament, the language of Christ and John 15. You gotta, you know, the vine, Jesus is the vine where the branch is. And so keep prunes us.
We suffer in order to bear more fruit. Well, I mean, everyone suffers, of course. I mean, you can run from suffering, but you can't hide. Everyone's gonna suffer to a certain extent, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, whatever it might be.
And the older you are, the more suffering you generally have. But I mean, I gotta say, I really haven't suffered a ton. Of course, there's all kinds of little sufferings that happen. You get smacked with COVID.
I mean, I've had COVID three times, the first two times where as bad as any flu I've ever had. Then I got the flu and it was way worse than COVID. And granted, a lot of people experienced that. And it's not fun at all to be in bed for seven days with a fever, of course.
But some people of course suffer a lot through injury, illness, terminal disease, yourself or a loved one. I'm not experienced that. I'm very lucky that at the time of this recording, my parents are alive, most of my family are alive. I haven't experienced a lot of loss, although, of course, we had to set loss of our mother-in-law, my mother-in-in-law, my wife's mom, and that was really, really painful.
But by and large, I don't have a lot of experience to tell you, I've been through that. I've experienced the loss of a child or I've experienced a bankruptcy or whatever it might be. So nevertheless, I know that suffering is gonna come, eventually, maybe not for 20, 30 more years. Who knows?
Maybe, I don't know what the future holds. I could have a terminal illness and I struggled with cancer for a year and I slowly die. And I certainly hope death comes slowly so I can prepare for death. That's a prayer I think many people should have.
But anyways, I'm gonna do the very best I can to introduce this book, knowing that maybe you, as my students and listeners here, have suffered a lot. And I hope that this book gives you a lot of consolation, a lot of insight and a resolve to trust God and to put your entire heart and your life into his loving providence, because that is certainly one of the things that this book teaches. So anyway, there's a little caveat there, a little preamble as we dive into this Bible study. I just wanna get that clear, get that off my chest.
Look, the best I can, but I really can't say I've suffered tremendously, but I know it's gonna come. And so hopefully this book helps me as well, and studying it, preparing it, and teaching it as many times as I have. So when suffering comes, I can just trust God and respond to those sufferings the way Job does. All right, so with that then, let's look at some introductory topics here.
And again, I think these are all very, very important, meaningful things to look at before we dive into chapter one verse one. So the first thing to look at is the title and historicity and biographical details of this book. So the title is simple, it's just the book of Job. And the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts, they all have the same thing, just different spellings.
I have them right there in your notes there. Yobe or Yobe, right? So all pretty much the same pronunciation by and large with different accents. But it's called the book of Job because of the character.
But what's interesting is that Job means, depending on the commentaries you're looking at, Job means enmity or adversity or enemy or hated one variations on that theme. And when you realize that, you get a step back and you're like, wow, that's not a very good name. Or who in the world would name their kid, enemy, or hated one, for example, right? So it's probably a nickname or at least it's a literary name given to this character.
I really doubt his mother gave birth to him, looked at him, and then said, I'm gonna name you adversity or enmity. I don't think that's the case. So maybe I don't think so. It makes a lot of sense, though, however, when you consider his life and his story and the lessons that you learned from it, it's probably a nickname or literary name, is probably the case.
Or it is an abbreviation of a longer name. So who was he? Now, I'm gonna spend a lot more time talking about the identity and biographical details of Job when you look at the first few verses of chapter one in the next lesson here. But some of the big takeaway points here about this character is that first and foremost, and I think very significantly, is that he's not in Israelite, which kind of blows your mind when you think about the fact that the majority, the vast majority, I don't even know, I haven't done the math, but what 99% and 98% of the Old Testament is all about Israel.
And this whole huge book of many, many chapters is not about an Israelite. He's a Gentile. And there's a lot to say about that. So he is a Gentile who is living east of the Holy Land in this place called Uz.
Now Uz is in the general region of Edom. That seems to be the consensus. There's some other things, theories out there. But in the Bible, if you go flip two Lamentations, chapter four verse 21, it says that Rejoice and be glad of daughter of Edom, dweller in the land of Uz.
So Edom and Uz are pretty much the same place there if you look at Lamentations 421. So here's a little quote for you to kind of tie these things together. And there's a couple of scripture passages that this quote mentions. I want to actually take a moment and look at them.
And of course, fully well-knowing, we're going to review this in the next lesson and go a little deeper and look at some of the things. So here's a quote from a Catholic and New Testament, which says, the traditional identification of Job is with this character, quote, Jobab, the son of Zorrah, end quote, one of the ancient kings of Edom. And that's from Genesis 3633, which I'll read it to you in a second. Oh, but I have verses eight and nine, which I'll read for you again here really soon.
So from this point of view, Job would be either set in the patriarchal or prepatriarchal age. I actually disagree. I think it's very much the patriarchal phase, not prepatriarchal, and I'll explain why. And thus, in an earlier time period, then that presumed by any of the other books of poetry, which are largely associated with the Davidic and Solomonic eras, end quote.
So yeah, usually this is a wisdom book, which I'm going to explain a little more detail as we move through this introduction here. It is a wisdom book. Most of the wisdom books, if not all of them are associated with David like the Psalms, the majority of the Psalms were written by David or by people appointed by David with some anonymous Psalms, of course, there Solomon was famous for the genre of wisdom, literature with his trilogy of the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Psalm, Solomon, and then you have the Deuterical books of wisdom and Cyraach, which are attributed to Solomon as well, not well him personally, but to his inspiration, because those are definitely from the first intro before Christ. So but this book comes before David and Solomon for sure.
It comes from the patriarchal era. So it's very, very ancient, which is super cool and very interesting because I mean, the questions that it's dealing with, the question of suffering and God, his goodness, those are ancient questions people have been talking about this guaranteed for a long, long time. And so it's going to address these questions. Really, I would say we need to read, well, we need to read Job, one of the principles of biblical interpretation is read it in the whole context of the scriptures.
So when you read it in light of Genesis chapter three and the story of the fall from grace with Adam and Eve, and then you read it in light of Jesus Christ, the, who Job is a type of, then it all really begins to make sense, but nevertheless, this particular text, I think is arguably with a great balanced approach, which I'll explain here soon, is definitely in the patriarchal period, not pre-patriarchal period, because, well, I'm gonna explain, you know, Yum is the descendant of Isaac, right? So we'll get there here soon enough. Let me read these two passages, Genesis chapter 36, verse 33, which associates Job with the kings of Yum, which is really, really fascinating here. So let me just flip here really quickly.
Genesis chapter 33, I'm sorry, 36, 33, my fingers are a little bit rusty right here for some reason. All right, so 36, 33 says this. Actually, let me back up to 31 to give you the context. It says, these are the kings who reigned in the land of Yum before any king reigned over the Israelites.
Now really quickly, let me insert myself here and say, that remember Yum is the nickname, a second name for the character Esau. So you've got Abraham, who had a son, Isaac, and then Isaac had twin boys, Esau and Jacob. Esau was born, all hairy and red, like a little baby Elmo, or an e-walk or something like that. So then Yum means red, because he's a little ugly, hairy, red baby, right?
And then also he's called red because he sold a pottage of red lentils of stew of some kind to his brother and sold his birthright. So Esau was known as Edom, and in his descendants are called the Edomites, right? This is the reason why, if Job is this, well, let me keep reading here. If Job truly comes from the Edomites and isn't Edomites, he has to be after Abraham.
That's just simple deduction right there. All right, let me keep reading in verse 32, talking about these kings in the land of Edom that is descendants of Esau. You got this first character, Bella, the son of Beor. He reigned in Edom.
And then after he died, there's this character, Jobab, the son of Zorrah, who reigned in his dead. Now, more to say about this in the next lesson here, but some people in the tradition, it's not unanimous at all, but some people will say in the tradition that Jobab, this king of Edom, is this character Job here. All right, now the Edomites and the territory of Edom was very, very famous for its wisdom. So if you're going to go to the Book of Obadiah, and it's very, very short, so there's only one chapter, like Jude in the New Testament, Jude only has chapter one.
So if you're gonna refer to verses, you don't say chapter one, verse three or four, whatever. You just simply say verses whatever. So if you go to Obadietum, verse eight, because there's no chapters, it says this, well, I not on this day says the Lord, destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of Mount Esau. So there you go, right there, you can see Edom and Esau two names for the same person or same people.
All your mighty men shall be destroyed, O'Tamam, so that every man from Mount Esau will be cut off by slaughter. So this is, I can't get into the background for Obadiah, that'll be different, Bible study for a different time. This is basically punishment on the Edomites for their role in the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah. But in any case, you can see here that they're known for their wisdom.
So if Job was a wise man as an Edomite, and ascended of Esau ultimately, of course, Abraham, that makes total sense. When you look at all these various verses, Lamentations and Genesis and Obadiah, you kind of get a picture painted pretty nicely for you that he is definitely in the patriarchal period, and there's more to talk about that here soon. So did he exist? There's Job character?
Well, when you look at the historicity, you have this, you gotta look at scripture and tradition. This is really, really important that tradition gives you a perspective on the biblical text. So both Jewish and Christian tradition have always accepted Job as a historical figure. That's always been the case up until modern times, but really in modern times, modern scholars debate everything and call it the question absolutely everything, whether it's Moses or Jesus on two ends of the spectrum here or Genesis or everything in between.
There's always doubt and dispute, and was this historical or was it written at this particular time, et cetera, et cetera. So we gotta take that with a grain of salt. So Jewish and Christian tradition has always maintained that he is a historical figure, like with no exception. And the biblical perspective and the Old and the New Testament maintain that he is a historical person, for sure.
So here's Ezekiel 1412, the famous line here when looking at Job, Ezekiel 1412, it says, if even these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in the land, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness as the Lord. So these care, this is kind of a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, right? There's a parallel there. So the land is corrupt and the land is so corrupt even if Noah lived there, it would still be destroyed.
Or if Daniel, that's not the prophet, Daniel, probably is some other character Daniel, it would still be destroyed. And if Job lived in the land, it would also still be destroyed because it was so corrupt. That's definitely an echo there in Ezekiel 14 too, Sodom and Gomorrah. But still, though it's a historical figure, unless you're gonna be a modern scholar who denies that, but clearly Job is collected or grouped with other historical figures.
And then James 511 is a amazing verse and a very important verse from the New Testament. And James says, Behold, we call those happy or blessed who were steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purposes of the Lord and how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. So James clearly seems to refer to Job as a historical figure as well.
So when you look at both tradition and scripture, Job is a person who truly did suffer horrendous, terrible things, and we're reading about his story now. But really quickly, I'm just parenthetically pointing out that when it says, when James says, you've heard of the steadfastness of Job, that's where I got my title from. That's, I was thinking about this as a true story. A couple of weeks ago, as I was preparing notes for this and laying it all out, I asked my angel, because I had no idea what I wanted to subtitle this thing.
I always have subtitles for each book of the Bible study, right? I have no idea what to call this book. So I said, Hey, guardian angel, help me out with this one. What should I call it?
No joke. Steadfastness, steadfast and suffering. Okay, that works. That's a great little subtitle.
So the subtitle, steadfast and suffering, comes from James chapter five verse 11. Okay, so he's a historical figure. Now it is true that you have some other, like ancient texts, like Sumerian and Babylonian texts, you'll read about if you really dive into the weeds of this book, you have Sumerian and Babylonian texts that do preserve the basics of a story of a man who suffered tremendously, but you really have the broad strokes of that. Job is completely unique on his own.
So what I like to, the parallel I like to make is that of Genesis, the creation story and the flood story. So Genesis, of course, records, the creation of the world by God, ex-Nihilo, everything was brought into being through his word, which would be Jesus. And same thing with the flood, you have the story of this massive worldwide deluge. Now it's true that ancient texts have a variation on that theme, but the scripture specifically, Genesis preserves the real story of what happened.
It's interesting that other characters, or other cultures do have a worldwide deluge story, which points to the historicity of the event. I think that's really an important argument there. It did happen. They have a perverted or distorted or twisted version of the story, but the scripture is the inspired word of God gives us the real story of what happened and most importantly, why it happened.
That's kind of the same thing here with Job. So if you find in some of these ancient texts, like I said, Babylonian or Sumerian or whatever, a story of a man who suffered tremendously, like the greatest suffer of all time, that doesn't mean that the Bible took those stories and then invented a fuller version of this in the Old Testament. It's probably the fact that this dude did exist, but the scriptures are preserving the real story of what happened and most importantly, why it happened. Okay, so I really wanted to make that point as hopefully that's clear for you.
So yes, you have other cultural perspectives on this. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, and it doesn't mean that the book that we have today is word for word, what it was written by him or somebody else in an ancient time. I think a really balanced approach here, conservative approach is that the book of Job is preserving an account of a historical person, an actual man who suffered tremendously with some later inspired theological reflections about the mystery of that suffering, why it occurred. So here's a little quote for you, I think that summarize, this is very, very well from your Catholic, no, this is from your ancient Catholic study Bible.
It says, there's nothing improbable about the notion that Job was a historical individual who experienced extreme distress, nor does it contradict reason to hold that the inspired writer may have known about God and Satan's unseen roles in Job's life, probably through inspiration or something like that. But even if this is to be accepted, other evidence makes it reasonable to suppose that Job includes, and here's the point, Job includes a mixture of historical elements and artistic license. One could thus argue that the book of Job has its base in history, even if it's written expression, bears the imprint of the author's literary genius, end quote. So that's wonderful, that's a really great way, a super balanced approach to this book.
It has historical elements that do did exist in the patriarchal period, which I'm gonna argue in just a little bit, and there's no reason to doubt that scripture and tradition bears that witness consistently. But of course, there's artistic license in the description of what happened with the dialogues, with the poetry, the monologues, and so on and so forth. So I think that's my approach as well, I think that makes total sense. All right, then this brings us to the question of authorship and dating, which they always go together.
What you conclude on authorship is automatically going to determine dating naturally, right? Because if you say someone wrote it in the patriarchal period, well then the dating is the patriarchal period. But if you said someone wrote it after the Babylonian exile, well then you're gonna date at that time too, unless say the fifth or fourth century DC, right? So first authorship them.
Well, we don't know. I'm sorry to break it to you, but we really truly do not know. It's unanimous, excuse me, it's anonymous. It's probably, as your commentary will say, when your commentary is some kind of ancient wisdom sage or like sages, like if there are multiple authors, which probably is the case.
And why is that a wisdom sage? Well, because of the knowledge that it's talking, the knowledge, the experience, the vocabulary, the language that's used, the poetic expressions that's used here, the terms of phrase, if you really dive into the weeds and study the ancient languages, it's really, really amazing, beautiful stuff. A mixture of old, Hebrew and Aramaic and newer versions of that too. It's just clearly a work that has taken place over the mystery of the past of time.
But it's for sure someone who was wise, a scribe of some kind or multiple scribes who had put this together over the course of history, a mystery that we won't know until we get to heaven. And they're the ones who put it together. Now, some ancients will say, it was Moses, some will say maybe Solomon, and some will say it's Job himself, writing in the third person. And who knows, it could have been all of the above, where we're just simply not gonna know, but it really is anonymous, which means the dating is unknown as well.
It certainly has ancient roots, for sure, because of the language that's used much of the language, or some of it is ancient, ancient Hebrew. But the details of Job's life, the historical setting of where he lived, how he lived, the details of his biography, they're all clearly archaic. That would be, and certainly, as I'm gonna explain to you right now, in the patriarchal period. So just a broad stroke here, Abraham lived roughly 2,000 BC.
So if he is an Edomite, which seems to be the case, you could argue that very, I think, plausibly, in my opinion. If he's an Edomite, well then, he's a couple generations after Abraham, right? So Abraham has Isaac, if an Isaac has Jacob and Esau, if the time goes on, and this character Job or Jobab, King of the Edomites is a couple generations after Esau. That might be the case right there.
And you're gonna have support of the patriarchal period in the description of his story. And again, we're gonna come back to this in the next lesson here too. So Job's life resembles the patriarchs, and here's a number of pieces of evidence to prove that. So number one, his wealth is not precious metals and gold and all this stuff, or it is cattle and servants, just like the patriarchs.
And Job acts as a priest. As a head of the family, as a patriarchal figure, he is a priest. And that was what happened with the patriarchs. So there's no central altar, there's no temple that's described at all.
The patriarchs made altars wherever they went. And there's many examples of this in Abraham's time and Jacob's time. They would make an altar during their travels because they're heads of the family. This is long before the Levitical priesthood.
So there's a second point. The third point is that he lives to be 140 years old, which is very similar to the ages of the patriarchs. Number four, the principle of name used for God is that same as the patriarchs, El Shaddai, which just simply means God Almighty to the top of the mountain, you're closest to heaven or closer to heaven. And also because God always made his covenants on mountains as well.
So El Shaddai, if you know any grand song, well, you'll never forget that, okay. So that's the name, the principle name used for God. Yahweh is used in the prologue, but we'll talk about that later on in the next lesson here. So in the main body, it's El Shaddai.
Number five, the marauding bond, the bands, the peoples who attacked Job's belongings and his servants, those are the savings and caldians, those are enemies of patriarchal times as well. And finally, point number six here, Job's three friends, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. They're all of Gentile patriarchal origins, also from Edom or maybe Arabia as well. Okay, so clearly the setting is archaic, it's ancient, it's after Abraham, it's in the second millennium BC, and he is a descendant of Esau, so he is like a great, great, great, great grandson of Abraham.
So he's not descended from Jacob, right? But he is still descended from Abraham, which I think is gonna be really cool. When you consider that, he is related to the Israelites, but he's still a Gentile and he's still faithful. And there's a lot to say about that when we get to the main themes.
Okay, so then the canon and the textual history of this book. Hey, this is Doc Nick, thank you so much for listening to this course sample. If you enjoyed it and want to listen to the entire lesson, please become a student over at scripture and tradition.com where you can listen to this entire course, in the S&T audio library, where you can listen to them on demand, however, and whenever you want. So thank you so much, God bless you and keep studying your Bible.