Job

In The Book of Job, there is a reoccurring theme of Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, implicating that God rewards those who are good and punishes those who sin. They deviate very little, if at all, from this notion. Job’s fourth friend, Elihu, on the other hand, argues that god is quick to forgive, just, and righteous in all matters; thus not stressing that Job’s stroke of bad luck is necessarily a direct result of sin. God’s conclusion and explanation of Job’s misfortune seems to support Elihu; God essentially states that as divine creator and ruler of the earth, he can do whatever he wants, and it doesn’t have to correlate with good behavior being rewarded or sin being punished.

Job is not explicitly Jewish, though related to Abraham, yet his god parallels the god of the Israelites in many ways. First and foremost, we see here, and in Exodus, a god that can put people through turmoil without any explained reasoning. Job is never told by god that his misfortune was to prove a point. In Exodus, Moses is told that by God that Pharaoh will be made obstinate, but not why.

Additionally, god portrays this “do what I want, when I want” behavior when Moses is coming down from Mount Sinai. Upon the realization that his chose people had made a golden calf, god wanted to kill each and every one of them; had not Moses convinced him otherwise, he would have gone against his covenant with Abraham due to a purely emotionally enraged reaction, which would need no other justification because of God’s status as creator and ruler of the earth. This characteristic of a god also makes itself present in The Babylonian Theodicy and The Righteous Sufferer; the main characters never reach a conclusion explaining the cause of suffering.

On a worldly level, Job teaches us that his God’s, and therefore many other paralleling gods’, actions do not follow rational or logic, and that they can not be justified or explained according to the moral reasoning of a human.