Extract

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return.

A righteous man loses everything, his children, his livestock, his health, and sits in ashes scraping his sores with a potsherd while his friends arrive to explain that he must have deserved it. The Book of Job, composed perhaps in the sixth or fifth century before the common era, is the most radical text in the Hebrew Bible, the one that dares to put God on trial and refuses every easy theodicy. Job's comforters speak in the polished cadences of conventional piety, and they are wrong. When God finally answers from the whirlwind, the answer is not an explanation but an overwhelming vision of creation's strangeness and scale. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? The question does not resolve suffering. It transfigures it.