Something About This Old Testament Book …
When I first read the Book of Job from the Old Testament, I didn’t think much of it. I still don’t. There was God getting together with Satan to play poker or dominoes or whatever, and making a bet that affected the happiness of one of his most devoted followers. Then, too, there were those “friends” of Job who were zero consolation to the poor man.
I don’t like the idea of a God who is, instead of being the God of Love, some sort of Parimutuel Deity. He “makes it up to” Job in the end, but not before killing off his wife and children and sending him into what for anyone else would have been the pit of despair. We can speculate that the original Mrs. Job was a hag and a shrew; and the first set of children, all strung out on meth; and the replacement wife, a blonde hottie. But we have no grounds for thinking that.
When I was a student at Dartmouth College some time before the Pleistocene Era, I saw a play by Archibald Macleish that brought together the Book of Job with Death of a Salesman. It was called J.B. I would love to have seen the stage version directed by Elia Kazan and starring Raymond Massey, Christopher Plummer, and Pat Hingle (as the Job character). In 1959 it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
I know that Job was held up to be the model worshiper, a man who trusted in God through the most incredible adversities. But the God he worshiped was way too snarky for me.
Incidentally, the above illustration is from William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job.
Tarnmoor 
any post with a blake illustration is 5 stars for me. I read job recently, & it wasn’t clear if the wfe & cattle at the end restored were the sme ones or different. if different not a good exchange
I knew I had a problem with the portrayal of Jehovah in the Bible (as opposed to the existence of a God of love) when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Then, when Abraham has Isaac bound like a sheep or goat and the knife is at Isaac’s throat, Jehovah relents and substitutes a ram because Abraham is so “obedient.” If any sort of entity, came up to me and asked me to “sacrifice” my child, they would get a resounding “no” and have a fight on their hands from the mother of the species. I would of course call the police to help me deal with the psychotic creep. I thought this when I read the Bible at age 10 or 12 years of age, and it was read to me even before that, when I was younger in Sunday school. I felt very guilty because I didn’t like Jehovah. My feelings haven’t really changed, although I have made my peace with the Bible to a certain extent. The Book of Joshua is also very gruesome and scary and Jehovah orders his chosen people to commit all sorts of horrendous crimes against the inhabitants of Palestine. Of course the Abrahamic religions have evolved over the centuries and are much more that the literal words of the Bible.
I don’t like the Devil either: who is that supposed to be, in a monotheistic system? Christians and Muslims seem so obsessed with this character that he takes on the form of a second diety. Oh, well, enough. May the Goddess shower her bright blessings upon you!
Are you familiar with Robert Frost’s somewhat irreverent take on Job? It’s a “play” titled _A Masque of Reason_ with a cast of four characters: God, Job, Mrs. Job, and Satan (he shows up near the end).
Looks interesting, Fred. I’ll look it up.