Understanding Genesis and Exodus by Way of the Book of Job

Lee Cyphers

The later books of the Hebrew Bible, or Writings, expand upon and grow out of the Torah, often applying God’s Law to life on Earth. These books seek to answer questions of existence as they would have come up for contemporary followers of the Torah. For example, the Song of Songs looks at questions of pleasure, and what it means to love and accept living in a body as someone who worships God. The Book of Wisdom is about the beauty of the mind and the pursuit of knowledge. The darkest of these books that we read in class was Job. It addresses pain, suffering, punishment and sin. Although the Book of Job is not very hopeful or optimistic, the interpretations of Genesis and Exodus through Job are more illuminating than Genesis and Exodus are on their own; Job helps make sense out of the Torah. As a modern reader, all the Writings are easier to relate to than the Torah, because they are centered around people and emotions, rather than centering on God’s actions. Although emotional relatability is not the only way to tell an effective story, here it helps the reader understand how to apply God’s Law. In real life, problems of faith and morality do not often present themselves as simple questions like, “Should we worship the false gods of Egypt or the one true God of our fathers?” Instead, they are intertwined with emotions, often becoming blurry and obscured. Job presents these problems as they appear in life, while obviously being a continuation of the Torah because God is still interacting with the human characters directly, through the whirlwind. Therefore, the Book of Job acts as an intermediary between the distant cosmological stories that center God’s actions, and modern stories about secular life. In addition, the Book of Job paints a more complete picture of who and what God is, as a character, which helps explain the motivations for his actions in earlier books.

The main question that the Book of Job addresses is one that is still incredibly familiar to anyone who’s ever had a discussion about religion: “If God is good, then why is there so much human suffering?” One of the traditional responses is that suffering only occurs as punishment for sin, and that if a man suffers, it is because he has offended God in some way and must repent, or else deserves his fate. However, after observing the world, one can think of many instances of people who followed God’s Law and still suffered, and many who blatantly disregarded God’s Law and live quite comfortable, charmed lives. Job himself addresses this problem directly, saying “[The wicked] harm the childless woman, / and do no good to the widow. / Yet God prolongs the life of the mighty by his power; / they rise up when they despair of life” (Job 24:21-22). Job was a good, blameless man, who always lived by God’s Law. Yet he was singled out by God and had everything taken from him, and was cursed with painful boils all over his body. This book takes the position that suffering cannot be explained away as a punishment for sin.

Another question the Book of Job seeks to answer is how to overcome adversity as a religious person. The people around Job have different answers to this question. His wife, as soon as he is cursed with boils and after he has lost all of his possessions and children, tells him to give up on life and on God, asking him “Do you still persist in your integrity? / Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). Job’s wife has perhaps the most extreme reaction, but it really illustrates the depth of agony of their situation. It also reminds the reader that Job is not the only one who suffers in this book. His wife has also lost all of her children and her home and her things, and now she has to care for her ailing husband, witness his pain, and watch as he becomes a laughingstock in their community. On the other hand, his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, insist that Job must have done something horrible to offend God, that he deserves all his pain, and that he must repent in order to make it stop (Job 11:13-15). Job himself responds to his situation, quite understandably, by crying out to God. He curses the day he was born, he prepares himself for the relief of death, and he questions why God torments him and so many other innocent human beings (Job 24:9-12). When God Himself finally arrives in the whirlwind, He challenges Job to face Him, listing all the great things He created and destroyed, and reminding Job and the reader that God is all-powerful (Job 38:4-41). As it turns out, all the humans in the story were wrong in their attempts to handle suffering. The only true response is to acknowledge that humans are nothing compared to God, or as Job says, “therefore I despise myself, / and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6).

The Book of Job is very helpful in examining many passages from the Torah. In the Book of Genesis, for example, in the story of Creation, it is written that Adam and Eve doomed women to painful childbirth and men to toil in the fields forever by sinning against God and eating the Forbidden Fruit (Genesis 3:13-19). Here, the punishment does not seem to fit the crime, especially given the later passage in Genesis about Cain and Abel. In this story, Cain kills his brother Abel out of jealousy, and when God asks him what happened, Cain lies and says “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9). What kind of God would decide that eating the wrong fruit deserves not only banishment from Paradise, but unending pain and misery for all of one’s ancestors, while murdering one’s own brother only deserves exile? This hardly seems just. After reading Job, it seems likely that there are other possible parts to these stories that aren’t written. Perhaps the Fall from Eden was part of some larger plan of God’s, or even a game He was playing, or a bet He made like in Job. Maybe the life of a human isn’t as important as a promise made to God.

Similarly, the Book of Exodus is full of instances where God seems to act immorally. God sends Moses to free the Hebrew slaves from Egyptian bondage, but this begs the question of why God allowed His people to be enslaved in the first place. Then when Moses brought down the Ten Plagues of God onto the Pharaoh, this must have created immeasurable pain and suffering for Egyptian citizens, most of whom were not slave holders. Common Egyptian people lost all their livestock, had their water turned to blood, their food contaminated by frogs, their skin covered in painful boils, and even lost their first-born children (Exodus 11:5). God did this even though He presumably had the power to free the Hebrew people by other means, like simply changing Pharaoh’s mind; one of the recurring phrases in the passage describing the Plagues reads “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go” (Exodus 10:20). After reading Job, it becomes clear that this God is much more interested in demonstrating His might than in reducing human suffering. Throughout Genesis and Exodus, God also continues to reaffirm to Abraham and his descendants, including Moses and the liberated Hebrews, that they will be able to rest in a promised land that belongs to them and all of their ancestors (Exodus 6:8). The writer of Job must have noticed the way this promise keeps reappearing in the Bible, while in real life God’s “Chosen People” continued to be subjected to slavery and political turmoil for over a thousand years. The Book of Job makes sense as a way for readers of the Torah at the time to better understand or accept the way that God kept failing to follow through on his promises to humans.

It is also clear the the Book of Job influenced later adaptations of Genesis, especially Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. In Atwood’s apocalyptic dystopian novel, the radical environmentalist religious group known as God’s Gardeners center much of their belief system on Genesis. Leaders within the group are known as “Adams” and “Eves,” their communal home is called “Edencliff Gardens,” and many of Adam One’s sermons are about the Creation narrative or the impending “Waterless Flood” that the Gardeners predicted would resemble the story of Noah. Much of Adam One’s ideology seems to be shaped by Job as well. One of the characters, Toby, observed that “Adam One thought that even the most terrible things happened for ultimately excellent though unfathomable reasons” (Atwood 287). He counsels his followers to accept their own ignorance and to rejoice in the knowledge that God is in control of the universe. Adam One also preaches that humanity is just one small piece of God’s Creation, and that an individual’s well-being is essentially unimportant in the grand scheme of things. In a sermon on the Gardener holiday called Predator Day, for example Adam One says, “Let us pray that if we must sacrifice our own protein so it may circulate among our fellow Species, we will recognize the sacred nature of our transaction... should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life” (Atwood 387). This stark and disturbing quote, which Toby recalls somewhat glibly as she fears for her life, is reminiscent of God’s speech to Job about the insignificance of man. Atwood uses sarcasm and dark humor to acknowledge the glorification of suffering practiced in many Biblical traditions. Not only are the beliefs of certain characters in The Year of the Flood influenced by Job, but so are the events in the novel. Many of the Gardeners, especially Adam One, spent their lives trying to do good and to follow the Word of God, yet they were still faced with utter destruction and extreme suffering along with most of humanity. It is true that a few Gardeners seem to survive at the end of the novel, but so do two Painballers, escaped prisoners who had brutally killed, tortured, and raped without any signs of remorse, and were likely some of the worst people in this society. They definitely illustrate Job’s point that God often allows the wicked to go unpunished.

Part of the reason the Book of Job makes more sense than Genesis and Exodus do on their own is because God’s character is finally put into context. He is not shown to be particularly kind or loving, but He also isn’t really depicted as angry or spiteful, at least not in the way that humans are. In Job, God’s main character trait is incredible, awe-inspiring, terrifying power. Understanding that God’s motives are necessarily beyond human understanding helps the reader accept the seemingly contradictory and morally reprehensible actions He takes throughout the Torah. This also makes sense when looking at the world; if there really is a being that is both all-knowing and all-powerful, it would have to be either cruel, unfeeling, or operating based on a morality structure humans cannot see or understand in order to allow the sheer quantity of horrors that occur on Earth. This is a very bleak outlook. However, it can also be freeing; those afflicted by illness, injury, poverty or bad luck don’t need to bear the additional burden of trying to figure out how they have offended God and what they need to do to repent. In the Book of Job, sometimes suffering is just suffering, and humans are not supposed to know or understand everything God does.