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So it was with the story of Job. The narrator established, as a fact of the story, that
Job is perfectly righteous. That's in the narrator's voice in the prose introduction.
He states it explicitly; he bolsters his statement by attributing the same assertion to God.
And the narrator also establishes as a fact of the story that Job is afflicted with horrendous
suffering that he didn't deserve. It's not a punishment for sin. And then he leaves the
characters to struggle with the implications. Job's friends cling to the idea that God rewards
and God punishes and so anyone who suffers must have sinned. We, as readers, know that
they are wrong because of the narrative facts established at the beginning of the story.
Job takes the other route. He knows, as we do, that he is innocent, that he is not being
punished for sin and therefore he concludes that God doesn't punish and reward at all--and
that's a radical idea. That God punishes the wicked and rewards the good in this life,
even if a little delayed sometimes is a fundamental idea in much of the Bible that we have studied
so far. It's going to get weaker in some of the books we'll be looking at. But Job denies
this idea and in doing so, he arrives at a radical moral conclusion. The truly righteous
man is righteous for its own sake even if his righteousness brings him nothing but suffering
and pain in this life or in any other. Remember that at the end of the book the narrator has
God state that Job is the one who has spoken rightly and not his friends. So be sure to
consider [this] point of view in your interpretation. You wouldn't want to go in and just lift something
out of Bildad's mouth and say this is what the Bible thinks, right? Taking a verse right
out of context that way. Don't assume that every character in the Bible is reliable,
look to the surrounding framework as you evaluate their deeds, and their actions, and their
speech, and their views. Finally, don't be surprised if after carefully looking at all
of those things a passage remains ambiguous. Now, there is debate among scholars over the
date of the Book of Job, as well as some of the other books of the Ketuvim. Ketuvim is
a Hebrew word that simply means writings, and it's the label or the name that we use
to refer now to the third section of the Bible. So we've talked about Torah, Neviim or prophets,
and now we're moving into the Writings or we have already really moved into the Writings,
the third section of the Bible. Most scholars would concur that many of these books contain
older material, but that the books reached their final form, their final written form,
only later, in the post-exilic period. Now, if these books contain material that predates
the exile, is it legitimate for us to speak of them and study them as a response to the
national calamities, particularly the destruction and defeat and exile, 587/586. In answer to
this question, we'll consider a relatively recent approach to the study of the Bible.
It's an approach known as canonical criticism.