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Southern Adventist University

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature

Jan Haluska

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature: Introduction

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 1 (Ch. 1-4)

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 2 (Ch. 5-14)

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 3 (Ch. 19, 21, 27, and 28)

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 4 (Ch. 31-42)

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 5 (Overview)

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 6 (Overview 2)


The following 6 lectures on the Book of Job were presented to Southern Adventist University students in the course Ancient Classics during February of 2014. A couple of lectures were recorded in my office to make up for snow days. You should know that each class period began with prayer and a quiz even though the videos mostly skip that part, the ones that are in the classroom. During the first 13 lectures, the students were studying Homer's Iliad of Odyssey, which served in roughly the same relationship to the ancient Greeks that the Old Testament served to the Hebrews. The Bible is immensely superior to Homer or any other book though.

There is such a difference between Homer or any other religious books and the Bible. The Bible is a highly complex narrative, first of all. It has stories and wisdom literature in it, all telling how God related to his people. To see 1 reason why it's so unique, we can start by realizing that literary critics look for at least 3 kinds of unity in any top-quality narrative. And the Bible has at least 3 kinds of unity.

Unity of plot, unity of illusion or reference, unity of theology. At least those 3, perhaps there are some others, but those 3 are enough. Plot. Well a plot is an account of events having a beginning and an end, according to Aristotle. Well, for the Bible, Genesis is the beginning, the cross is the thematic center point, and Revelation is the end.

It's a unified narrative, however complex it is. Unity of allusion or reference is we can illustrate it with the imagine a short story about people out west doing something And in the beginning of the story, somebody says, watch out, bears are a problem around here. You're going to have some trouble with bears. And then somewhere around the thematic climax, we have an encounter with a bear and somebody says, see there's a bear here, I told you so. So it's referring forward to what's going to happen in the action, it's referring backward also to what was predicted.

And of course the Bible is full of this. It's called prophecy. We have prophecies. In fact there are 5 great prophetic epochs in the Bible and each has a prophet at the beginning saying here's what's going to happen here's a prophet at the end saying here's what happened So the Bible prophecy looks forward, later prophecies or references talk about earlier things including prophetic fulfillment Isaiah 53 for example is referred back to in the Gospels, particularly Matthew, and so on. So you have illusion in the Bible.

Unity of illusion. There's unity of theology. God is exactly the same in the Old Testament and the New Testament. There's no difference. People who try to discredit the Bible use that idea of a disunified theology to attack the Bible.

But they're quite wrong. They claim that God changes as things go forward. God is a God of hatred and sternness in the Old Testament, and a God of love in the New Testament, but nah, it's all the same. He's all the same in his representation. And certainly we're gonna see in the book of Job that that isn't so at all.

Well, it's hard enough for 1 author in a big book to maintain 3 unities of whatever kind. The Bible was written by a group of perhaps 30 people over a course of well over a thousand years. Some people say 1300, some people take other numbers of years, but it's over a thousand years. So this is a bunch of people who never met. There's an old joke that says a camel is a horse put together by a committee.

Well, the Bible is no camel. It's a unified horse, and no offense against camels, if there are any camel lovers out there, but This is a committee that took place over well over a thousand years and never met and yet you have a thoroughbred racehorse that comes out of this thing. The Bible is miraculous in its unity and that makes it head and shoulders above every other book on the planet. And there's something else. If we look just at the book of Job, we're going to find that from the beginning it is far more profound than anything the Greeks had, certainly anything that Homer wrote.

At the start of the Odyssey, the goddess Athena asks her father Zeus, Why are you afflicting Odysseus? He's a good man. He's loyal to the gods. He's pious. He's a noble, honorable, courageous man and yet you are afflicting him.

That of course is the great question of the ages. Why do good people suffer? Every culture has noticed that that's true. And so here's a wonderful beginning of the Odyssey. Here is Homer addressing this issue.

But Homer has Zeus say, wait a minute, how could you say that I've forgotten Odysseus, what sentence has passed the barrier of your teeth, he says. He denies entirely that Odysseus has been afflicted, yet the victimization of Odysseus has gone on for 10 years. How do you answer that? Well, Homer's Zeus doesn't know how to answer that. And so he doesn't.

He just says, oh no, we're gonna have to get, we're gonna have to restore Odysseus and get him out of there, get him off Calypso's island and all that. But he dodges the question of why the affliction has happened in the first place. And nothing else I know of refers to that. The books of the East, particularly the Bhagavad Gita, for example, say that now there's no such thing as evil and so it's all an illusion and nobody gets it. They dodge it that way.

But anybody who believes that evil is real has a problem. Well the book of Job grabs that issue like Jacob wrestling with God and gives the only blessed answer that's ever come up in the history of the world. Job is therefore, the book of Job, is therefore more profound than anything in the Greeks, anything anywhere else, it's the basement epic of the Bible, and it's well worth reading. So, Come along with us on our journey in ancient classics to find out the Book of Job.

Part 1 of 7

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature: Introduction