The suffering of job: He is every person and no-one

Abstract

The importance of the Book of Job in the Jewish canon is not that it tells the tale of one man; it lies in lessons that this story teaches about the place of suffering in human experience. The answer it offers is that God is responsible for suffering. Suffering is an integral part of the divine plan for creation and provides the contrast and the context for all that is positive in human existence. The current chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, describes Job as the most dissident book ever to be included in the canon of sacred scriptures. This essay explores the various understandings of the causes of suffering in the Jewish tradition and how the Book of Job provides a radical denial of theories that explain suffering as the result of human action. It compares the suffering of Job to the pivotal story in the Jewish narrative, the Akeidah or Sacrifice of Isaac. There are lessons to be learnt from suffering but those lessons are related to the human response to suffering not to the cause of suffering, which remains in the realm of divine knowledge, outside the grasp of human understanding.