JOB: (Considered as a Contribution to Hebrew Theology)

Extract

It is surely in the Book of Job that the religion of the Old Testament finds its most intense and concentrated expression. For the great theme of this book is something which lies at the root of the religious life of humanity, namely, the inescapable character of man's relation to God. Its real subject is the impossibility of eluding this numinous connexion with the ultimate religious and metaphysical ground of life. Job is like some creature caught in the toils. He comes before us as the victim of the dimension of eternity in which human life stands. He knows in his innermost soul that his suffering is ‘sent’ by the living God. He feels hunted and pursued by this mysterious divine Potentate whose character and designs are inscrutable to the petty mind of man and ever baffle ‘the foiled searching of mortality’. In the apparent impossibility of finding relief from this torture of body and spirit, or a harmonious consummation of life, he longs to cut himself adrift from the metaphysical foundations of his being and to find a momentary peace upon a lower plane. One of the key-points of Job's thought, and of the Bible as a whole, is that of the supreme significance of man in God's providential purposes, the high worth with which he becomes endowed as a result of the cherishing care of his Creator. In the stress of his suffering, Job would fain elude the burdensomeness and the costingness of this uplifting relation with the divine which redeems man from final insignificance.