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You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is generally understood to have effected a
break from mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from various natural
forces, limited by meta-divine powers and forces of the cosmos. The biblical God wasn't
another Ancient Near Eastern or Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent
power--He was figured this way in many parts of the Bible--known not through the involuntary
and recurring cycles of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions
in historical time. Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine retributive justice.
Only an essentially good God who transcends and is unconstrained by mechanistic natural
forces can establish and administer a system of retributive justice, dealing out punishment
and reward in response to the actions of humans in time. Is the author of Job suggesting that
history and the events that befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of revelation?
Is God a god of nature after all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural world
and not in the unpredictable and incoherent arena of human history and action? If so,
then this is a third fundamental biblical assumption that has been radically subverted.
So we'll turn now to God's direct speech to Job in 40:8, 40, verse 8, excuse me. "Would
you impugn my justice? / Would you condemn Me that you be right?" God, I think, is now
getting at the heart of the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you. They attributed
sin to you, so that they might be right. But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me, attributing
wickedness to Me so that you might be right. Job's friends erred because they assumed that
there's a system of retributive justice at work in the world and that assumption led
them to infer that all who suffer are sinful, and that's a blatant falsehood. But Job also
errs; if he assumes that although there isn't a system of retributive justice, there really
ought to be one. It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a sign
of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a falsehood. Job needs to move
beyond the anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of Scripture and the Genesis 1 account
of creation, according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process of creation.
God's creation, the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such teleological and rational categories.
In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a moral accountant. The idea of God as a moral
accountant is responsible for two major errors: the interpretation of suffering as an indicator
of sin, or the ascription of injustice to God. In his final speech, Job confesses to
a new firsthand knowledge of God that he lacked before, and as a result of this knowledge
Job repents, "Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes," 42:6. Here we
see the other meaning of Job's name, "one who repents," suddenly leap to the fore. What
is he repenting of? Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the accusations against
Job. Indeed he states explicitly in a moment that the friends were wrong to say he had
sinned. But he has indicated that guilt and innocence, reward and punishment are not what
the game is all about, and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the wicked
and the righteous actually get what they deserve, he nevertheless had clung to the idea that
ideally they should. And it's that mistaken idea--the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness
to God--that Job now recants. With this new understanding of God, Job is liberated from
what he would now see as a false expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a
covenant relationship between God and humankind, enforced by a system of divine justice.