Episode 258: Marc Brettler & Alan Lenzi – The Problem of Evil (Part 1)

Intro

You’re listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas. 

Intro  

Jared  

Before we get started today, we want to let you know that this is the last call for our October class “The Importance of Womanist Biblical Interpretation,” that’s taught by Reverend Dr. Angela Parker, one of our nerds in residence.

Pete  

And it’s happening October 25th from 8-9:30pm, Eastern time.

Jared  

Dr. Parker is going to cover the foundations, the fundamentals, and the future of womanist biblical interpretation.

Pete  

And when you sign up, you’ll get the one-night live class, live Q&A session, link to class recording, and downloadable class slides.

Jared  

As always, it’s pay-what-you-can until the class ends, and then it’s going to cost 25 bucks to download.

Pete  

Now, as always, if you want access to all of our classes—and who wouldn’t?—just $12 a month will do it. You can become a member of the Society of Normal People.

Jared  

But to sign up for the class, just go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/WomanistInterpretation.

Pete  

We have something special for you! We are often asked about the problem of evil, where does suffering come from, and what does the Bible have to say about all of this? So we’re going to do a two-part series on these questions.

Jared  

First, today’s episode here is on The Bible for Normal People. And we’re going to do a deep dive with two brilliant scholars on what the Bible has to say about all of it. So we have two people on this episode. But then we’re going to continue the conversation next week on Faith for Normal People with Tom Oord, where we’re going to talk about the same topics but from a theological framework. It’ll be fun to highlight how biblical studies and theology might approach these questions differently. But it also gives us a chance to do a deeper dive on the topic as a whole. So don’t miss out on today’s episode and next week.

Pete  

For today, part one on the Bible for Normal People, we’re talking with Marc Brettler and Alan Lenzi.

Jared  

And Marc is a professor in Judaic Studies at Duke University and co-editor of the award winning “Jewish Study Bible” that we’ve talked about on this podcast many times.

Pete  

Can’t hail that enough.

Jared  

We’ve had Marc on the podcast twice before and he’s going to have to start getting a punch card here. 

Pete  

I know.

Jared  

For frequent flier miles here. We’re really excited—

Pete  

Or a W-2 or something…

Jared  

Pete  

Right. And Alan Lenzi, who, by the way, is one of my favorite students, back in my days when I was teaching seminary, but he’s professor in the history department—

Jared  

You never said that about me. 

Pete  

I didn’t because well, and we’ll talk later, in therapy—we keep this stuff for therapy, Jared, come on, you know that. 

Pete & Jared  

Pete  

But Alan is in the history department at the University of the Pacific and professor of religious studies. And he specializes in the study of first millennium Ancient Near Eastern religious and literary traditions, which is a mouthful, and it’s a huge topic. And that’s perfect for what we’re talking about.

Jared  

Yeah, and if you don’t know what any of that means, just listen to what Alan says at the beginning of the episode. And you’ll say, “oh, that’s what he does.”

Pete  

“That’s what he does.” Yeah.

Jared  

Alright, let’s get into the episode.

Alan  

“So there’s an assumption that when humans are suffering, there is some kind of flaw in the human.”

Marc  

“What most people will think is the traditional view; it’s the idea that if a person feels that he or she has sinned, then that is why they are being punished. And vice versa. If they are being punished, or they are suffering from some sort of affliction, it’s clearly because they have sinned.”

Jared  

Welcome, Marc, and Alan to the podcast, it’s great to have both of you on here. It’s going to be a lively conversation.

Marc  

It’s great to be here. 

Alan  

Yeah, it’s good to be here. Thank you.

Jared  

Absolutely. We have a big topic to talk about today, this idea of suffering, and God’s justice. And we really want to start from kind of the beginning in the ancient context, the Israelites, and what they were thinking about it as we find it in the biblical texts that we have, you know, we have things like the book of Job, and there’s probably a lot of other texts, and there is a context in which these were written in ancient Mesopotamia. So let’s start with the context. Can you give us an overview of some of the ways that the ancient might have thought given some of the other texts, maybe even outside the Bible that we have? And kinda just walk us through that context.

Alan  

So in the ancient Mesopotamian context, we have a number of texts that are related to the question of human suffering. And in all of the texts that we have, it’s essentially humans are experiencing something bad, they’re wondering why this is happening and they lament, essentially, to a deity, or they lament to a fellow individual. So one of the texts that we have is called “A Man and His God,” there’s a Sumerian version that’s even more ancient than the Akkadian version, but I thought I’d start us off with the Akkadian version. Comes from the Old Babylonian period. So we’re talking about the first half of the second millennium BCE. So let’s say 1900 to 550, thereabouts. We don’t really know when it was written exactly except the Old Babylonian period. It’s only available on one tablet, and that tablet is damaged. [Chuckles] So, like so many texts from ancient Mesopotamia, it is filled with holes and gaps and so our understanding is not very good. But it’s a really powerful lament, essentially. A man calls out to his personal God, to this deity that’s supposed to be his protector, and says, “I’m suffering and I don’t know why, what did I do wrong?” And that question, “what did I do wrong?” is really central. 

He goes on to talk about what he’s experiencing, the deity then speaks to him and says, “you’re going to be all better, it’s going to be okay.” And then, there’s essentially an ending to this text that it’s really kind of interesting how he says, “I’m going to make a place for you, don’t worry about it, your way is cleared, all the obstacles you’ve been experiencing are now out of your way, I’m going to heal you, your diseases are blocked,” he says. And then he gives him an exhortation to go and be a good person. There are these things that he’s supposed to do with feeding the hungry or giving water to the thirsty. And it sort of ends this way. And so this is one of our oldest reflections. But you know, you can already see that the person is asking, “What did I do wrong?” So there’s an assumption there, that when humans are suffering, there is some kind of flaw in the human. So that’s one of our older texts, Old Babylonian.

Pete  

Alan, can I ask you a question there?

Alan  

Sure.

Pete  

Just for clarification. So, to say that there’s something flawed, right—is that the word used—in humanity?

Alan  

Well, yeah, I avoided the word sin. But I mean, oftentimes we’re thinking sin. 

Pete  

Well, I think, I mean, that’s a buzzword, I think, too, that might obscure us from, you know, trying to understand these things, but…

Alan  

It can be an act of negligence. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Alan  

“I forgot to give you these offerings.” That’s not something that we would normally think of as sin, forgetting to do something.

Pete  

So the suffering is caused by the deity?

Alan  

Well, from one perspective, right?

Pete  

Okay. 

Alan  

It also, from another perspective, I think from the supplicant’s perspective, it’s caused by the supplicant himself or herself, because they’re saying, “What did I do?” [Chuckling] They understand that when they’re experiencing suffering, there is an assumption that somewhere among humanity’s various causes of it’s then…if it’s not a personal sin, or an act of negligence, it could be a sin of the father, you know, because we have intergenerational kind of situations where if the father sins then the son will, or the daughter, or the children, will be punished. There are other etiologies. But anytime there’s suffering, I think in the Mesopotamian sphere, the human being looks to themself, and sometimes they will say, “I didn’t do anything!” But this is really a confession of ignorance. And there’s an assumption that probably somewhere I did do something, but I don’t know what it is. So we see this really pretty clearly in that Old Babylonian text “The Man and His God,” and there’s really a lot to say here, but there are two other very important texts that we can talk about. 

Alan  

One is the so called “Babylonian Theodicy,” and the other has a Babylonian name “Ludlul bēl nēmeqi” which simply means “I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom,” and the Lord of wisdom in that text is Marduk, the high god of Babylon. The “Babylonian Theodicy” is the one I don’t know quite as much about. “Ludlul” is the one that I spent most of my career thinking about. The “Theodicy” was written, very likely in the 11th century, we think it may have been written by a guy named Saggil-kīnam-ubbib, not something you probably want to name your kid. 

Pete  

Alan  

We know this because the poem, as we’ve reconstructed it from about a dozen manuscripts, has 27 poetic stanzas and each of these 27 stanzas has 11 lines, and each of the 11 lines in each stanza begins with the same cuneiform sign. And so, if you string together all the first signs from the 27 stanzas, you get a sentence that means something like, translates something like, “I am Saggil-kīnam-ubbib, the [? mušḫuššu] priest who blesses God and King,” and for many, this exhortation, this acrostic that’s built into the “Babylonian Theodicy” is, or can be, interpreted as the author, Saggil-kīnam-ubbib is the author. Probably that means because we know about this guy from other texts, he probably lived in the 11th century. 

So this is at least a half a millennium away from “A Man and His God.” So this text is actually not directed to a deity, it’s directed to a friend of the sufferer, who is not named in a text himself. It’s just two guys talking. The sufferer begins by saying, “I’m an orphan. I’m poor, it’s not fair. The gods have not smiled upon me,” and the friend—so each stanza goes back and forth between the sufferer and the friend. The friend responds and says, “Well, you should honor the gods. You’re poor because you should honor the gods,” and they go back and forth. And the sufferer complains about a number of things, especially injustice at the hands of the wealthy. He complains that the gods don’t pay attention to his piety, which the friend comes back and says, “yes, they do, you’re just not good enough,” kind of thing. The friend defends that the rituals are effective, whereas the sufferer complains to the point where he says, “I’m gonna go rogue, forget all about this, I’m just gonna go do whatever I want.” And the friend, of course, is very upset by this and continues to beat the traditional drum that “the righteous are blessed, the evil will be punished, and you’re experiencing misfortune because it’s you. It’s not the gods.” 

And the ending is a little bit controversial. Several different scholars more or less said that the ending is incoherent. I think that the more reasonable interpretation comes from Takayoshi Oshima’s more recent edition from 2014 and translation where he essentially says that the ending is that the friend tells him, “You got to do the traditional thing, man, and your suffering will go away.” And I think that’s the right idea, that the sufferer has the last word and sort of comes around to the understanding that “Yes, you’re right, I need to honor the gods.” That’s the “Babylonian Theodicy” in a nutshell, we could talk for a very long time about this text. 

But the other text, the one that I like the most, is “Ludlul bēl nēmeqi,” “I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom,” which is a really complicated and sophisticated literary text, probably from the late second millennium BCE, perhaps a little bit older than the “Theodicy.” We don’t really know when it was written, it names a king Nazi-Maruttaš who ruled in the 13th century, so it could have been written as early as the 13th century. We have Neo-Assyrian manuscripts in the ninth century BCE, so it had to have been written before that time. And that leaves, that leaves a lot of hundreds of years, like 600 years. So it’s a big window. 

In any case, this text is essentially a retrospective, where the person who is suffering is actually named in the text eventually, Šubši-mašrâ-Šakkan, another one that you’re not going to see in the telephone book. And he’s praising Marduk for his anger, and his mercy. So there’s this opening hymn, and by line 41 of the text, the man then begins this long retrospective about how his life fell apart in terms of his social standing and reputation, how his body fell apart with diseases that are inspired by demonic oppression and attacks. He has a series of dreams, and Marduk sends these ritual officials into his dreams, and they cure him. And it’s interesting that after they cure him, he, in a very broken passage, seems to confess his sin and then he goes to Babylon and he seems to do—again under broken passage—something called a “shigu” or “shigu prayer” which is a penitential prayer, he undergoes the river ordeal, which likely is another way for him to show his innocence and that he’s been forgiven. And then he goes to temple and he’s reintegrated into society through a number of gates where at each gate, he is given something by, we assume, the deities. And at the end he’s happy again, he’s praising the deity. It literally ends as it began with praise. 

And this description can’t really do justice to this text. I mean, I spent 15 years thinking about this text [Chuckles] and writing stuff about it. But what’s interesting is this text is often called the “Babylonian Job,” or “A Story of the Righteous Sufferer.” But we know now that he confesses his sin. So, again, we have a text where the suffering that the person experiences is—the problem is with people. It’s not with the deity. In fact, the person suffering praises the deity for his anger. And I think that this is really important. We do not understand this as 21st century individuals. If you’re a theist, you think of God as benevolent. But Marduk is angry, easily. And he, just as easily, will turn to mercy, but—and they’re successive in the poem, anger first, mercy second—but it also was pretty clear that it doesn’t matter what you do. Marduk does what he wants, and he will punish you and eventually he’ll come around and probably forgive you. But I mean, this guy has taken—Šubši-mašrâ-Šakkan, has taken to the very edge of the grave. I had an undergrad professor, he used to say, “He’s so old, he has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” And that was Šubši-mašrâ-Šakkan. 

Pete  

Alan

So in this text, because it’s called the Babylonian Job, has been influenced by scholars’ understanding of Job. And what I’ve tried to do in my own interpretive work is to show that we’ve messed up there. This text, this “Ludlul bēl nēmeq,” as well as the “Babylonian Theodicy” are highly learned scholarly texts that are very much interested in drawing in the various kinds of scholarship and the various kinds of esoteric rituals, the various learned methodologies of using rare words and poetic structures that are complicated, and incorporating rituals. There are commentaries, ancient commentaries on both the “Babylonian Theodicy” and “Ludlul.” So even maybe a millennia, millennium, after these texts were written, people were still trying to figure out what they mean. And they were doing so in a way that scholars do today, say on the Bible, by writing commentary,

Jared  

Alan  

Capricious isn’t too far.

Jared  

Okay!

Alan  

I don’t think it is.

Ad Break  

Jared  

So within that, let’s turn our attention to the Bible. What does the Bible have to say about God’s relationship to evil and to suffering? And how is it similar or different from that context?

Marc  

Well, of course, there is no such thing as “The Bible.” So aside from the fact that different religious groups have different Bibles, the Bible is fundamentally an anthology. And that means the Bible is going to have a whole bunch of different views on all of these issues. So maybe it’s best to begin at the beginning and I’ll actually pick up on some of the points that Alan made. A lot of the Bible—to use his expression—beats the “traditional” drum. The world is good, and if you’re seeing some flaw in the world, then that really means that there is a flaw in you. So biblical scholars for the last few centuries, have disentangled two different creation stories. In Genesis 1-3—we might as well start with the very beginning—and certainly the point of the first story, which runs from the very beginning, through the middle of verse 4 of the second chapter, is that the world is told the world is good and after the creation of people, quite remarkably, that the totality of creation is told the old is very good. And that is the mainstream biblical view. 

But there are many other biblical views. So I would just point out—and here in some ways this picks up on Alan’s understanding of the “Babylonian Theodicy,” where he noted that the text suggests that man was created in a duplicitous fashion. When you look at the second story, I’d call it the garden story, rather than the “fall of man” or the original sin story, you start to see some of that duplicitous nature. But certainly when you look at the part of the flood story, which continues that story, at the very end of the flood story, after God smells the, “pleasing odor,” the re’ach n’yoh’o’ah of the sacrifice that Noah offers, he says, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, for the inclination of the human heart is evil.” The Hebrew word there is raˤ, exactly the opposite of “just” or tov, good. “Is evil from youth, nor will I ever again destroy every living being as I have done.” 

So this is worth thinking about a little, I’m not going to unpack it a lot here. But what does it mean that, at least according to this view, and again, this is not the only biblical view, God created people with this evil inclination, which becomes very developed, especially in the rabbinic literature, with the notion that every person has two inclinations in him or her a good inclination, or an evil inclination.

Pete  

And Marc, you’re saying that God created that? That evil inclination?

Marc  

I’m not saying that. I’m saying the text is saying that.

Jared  

Pete  

Well, okay. You’re saying the text says that. 

Jared  

Yeah.

Marc  

So I’m Jewish. We’re toward the end of the Jewish liturgical year in terms of reading the Torah, and we’ll complete it in about a week or so. Last week we were in the wonderful poem in Deuteronomy chapter 32, where there you have the notion of God’s perfection. There in 32, verse four, you have “haṣ·ṣūr tā·mîm pā·‘o·lōw.” “The rock, his work is perfect. All his ways are just,” and so forth. Absolutely no question about the divine justice. And indeed, again, to pick up on what Alan was saying, where I think he emphasized that one of the best ways for understanding different religions conception of God is by looking at prayers. And especially by looking at laments, or petitions, and especially by looking at petitions or laments of the individual. And here too, I would like to offer a contrast between different biblical views. What most people will think is the traditional view, is the idea that if a person feels that he or she has sinned, then that is why they are being punished. And vice versa, if they are being punished, or they are suffering for some sort of affliction, it’s clearly because they have sinned. 

So for example, in this is most famous, perhaps in Christian tradition, in Psalm 51, which is a very well known psalm, Psalm 22 as well, or for example Psalm 32, where the supplicant says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, I did not hide my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” This is very comparable—and Alan, please correct me if I’m wrong—to some of the texts that you talked about. A person is suffering, they think that they are suffering as a result of sin, they confess, and everything is going to be better. But I would like to contrast this to another type of Psalm. A fair number of these laments of the individual in the book of Psalms do not contain such confessions, and in fact, contain the notion or the statements the supplicant will say to God, “you have hidden your face from me.” He’s “tas·têr pā·ne·ḵā mim·men·nî.” A type of divine neglect. And again, you may be struck by that anthropomorphism. I may return to that a little bit later.

But again, anthropomorphism, the notion that God is depicted in human form, or anthropopathism, the notion that God’s emotions are depicted in a human way, is very, very typical in the Hebrew Bible. So I’d like to focus for a second on Psalm six. And what’s so important about this psalm, and many people don’t realize this, is what this psalm is missing. This psalm like some other laments of the individual has absolutely no confession. This person says, “Oh, Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, or discipline me in your wrath. Be gracious to me, oh Lord,” and the following word in Hebrew, is key, properly translated in most translations as “for” and this is going to be the first of several such “for”s, reflected by key or other words, you might have expected that to be followed by, you know, “be gracious to me, God, because I’m confessing my sin” as in Psalm 51, Psalm 32. “Be gracious to me, oh, Lord, for I am languishing. Oh, heal me Oh, Lord, for my bones are shaking with terror.” Or a few verses later, “Turn Oh Lord, save my life, deliver me.” 

There, the next Hebrew word is “lema’an”, “for the sake of.” And again, you might have expected it to say, “for the sake of my confession,” nope. But again, here the Hebrew says, “For the sake of your steadfast love,” God’s hesed. Here translated steadfast love, an amazingly complex term to translate. And the psalm continues with no confession. I would argue that the supplicant here is saying, “God, you’re angry with me. I did nothing wrong. Get over your temper tantrum.”

Pete  

Marc  

“And be nice to me because I deserve it.”And I think that there are cases in the Hebrew Bible, where God is depicted as having a temper tantrum. A good example is in the fourth book of the Bible, in Numbers chapter 17, of the rebellion of Korah and those who are around him. In that story, there’s a debate about who the proper priests should be, and so forth. This too, like the beginning of the book of Genesis or the flood story, is a conflation of two stories. But I’m going to focus on the one which has Korah, or in English Korah, as its main hero. 

God gets very, very angry, and says, in Numbers, actually in the English here it’s chapter 16 verse 45, “’Get away from this congregation that I may consume them in a moment.’ Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces. Moses said to Aaron, ‘Take your censer, put fire in it from the altar, lay incense on it, and carry it quickly to the congregation, and make atonement for them. For wrath has gone out from the Lord, the plague has begun.'” And that is exactly what happens. And Aaron stood between the dead and the living with his censer, and the plague was stopped.

God’s temper tantrum is being appeased by these various actions, by the incense that is being brought, that God is going to smell and God feels better. Now, before I go on to more about this idea about God, in much more human terms than we think of, let me just remind everybody, that here, I do not want anybody to understand this in terms of a contrast of an Old Testament wrathful deity, in contrast to a New Testament God of love. Please do remember that in both the New Testament and in the Hebrew Bible are Old Testaments, the way in which God is depicted is incredibly complex and multifaceted. And indeed, when you talk about the God of love in the New Testament, you know, most famously in the passage in Matthew 22:23 and following about the importance of love, of course, what you have there are two quotes from the Hebrew Bible—from Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18. 

So please, no contrasts between a wrathful God of the Old Testament and a loving God of the New Testament. Please read the New Testament to the end, and see what happens in the book of Revelation. But back to anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms, the God of the Hebrew Bible does sleep according to some people whose works are preserved in the Bible. And thus, why can terrible things sometimes happen to people? Well, God was asleep at the job. In the words of the psalmist, who wrote Psalm 44:23, “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep O, Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever.” So that too helps to explain why evil can exist in a world which God has created.

Pete  

You have something similar in the wisdom tradition too then, right Marc?

Marc  

You certainly do. And I’m glad you got me to the wisdom tradition, because the wisdom tradition—namely ideas that you have in the three wisdom books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (sometimes known by its Hebrew title, Kohelet) and Job—which in some ways are quite similar, at least in their learned-ness to this to the texts that Alan began with, have another idea of why terrible things can happen to people. 

This is found most prominently in Proverbs 3:11. But before I get there, I just have to remind all of those who are listening to this, that corporal punishment by parents was accepted as a norm in the biblical period. I am not advocating for that. Thus, the notion that you have very often even in colonial American samplers, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” which is based on Proverbs chapter 13, verse 24: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.” Proverbs in chapter three, verses 11 and 12, takes up this notion, because God, after all, in the Bible is the father with a capital F. Therefore, it says there, “My child, do not despise the Lord’s discipline, or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves the one he loves as a Father, the son in whom he delights.” This notion that if you’re being punished, or if you’re suffering, it’s not really punishment—but it’s a way of showing love—became especially common in some Jewish texts in the second century, for various historical reasons. And this idea is known by the technical term in rabbinic literature, of yisurin shel ahavah, “chastisements of love”. In other words, chastisements that show how much God, the Divine Father, loves you. And now we’ve moved closer to the book of Job. 

Marc

And I will admit that, even though I’ve been studying, and I’ve actually taught this book for more than 40 years, I do not fully understand it. But I’ll share with you some things that I think I know. Number one, it is very important not to be overly influenced by the English idiom, “the patience of Job,” which, of course, comes from the New Testament, the King James Version translation of James 5:11: “You have heard of the patience of Job.” As important as this phrase is in English, the Greek should more accurately be translated. And so it is in the new edition of the New Revised Standard Version, “You have heard of the endurance of Job,” because indeed, in much of the book of Job, Job is not terribly patient at all. Though in some ways in the first two chapters, and in the very last section at the end of chapter 42 in the prose there, he is rather patient. 

In other words, what I am saying is Job is not a unified book. The narrative frame of Job tells a very different story than the poetic center. And one of the reasons that most scholars distinguish between the two is very much as in the Torah, there are different divine names which are used of God in different sections. The middle does not recognize the beginning at all. “Ha-satan,” the adversary, translated by some as “the satan,”—we’ll get to that guy in a moment—is never mentioned in the middle of the book. And as you all know, in the beginning of the book of Job, all of Job’s children are killed. Yet in the middle of the book in 19:17, Job says, “My odor is repulsive to my wife, I am loathsome to my children.” 

And thus in this prose section you have a simple (although not at all simple), and terribly theologically problematic notion that because of some goings-on in heaven, there’s some sort of wager between God and the satan. And the satan really gets the better of God. The satan says, “Oh, why don’t you do all these terrible things to Job,” God exceeds in doing them, and ultimately, Job still remains steadfast in his faith. And as the book concludes, Job is ultimately rewarded, he gets double the wealth, he gets a new set of 10 children to replace the 10 children who are killed at the beginning—I shudder even as I say those words. He sees four generations, and it is really a lovely fairy tale ending of his living happily ever after. 

And all of this happens—as I said a moment ago—because ha-satan, the satan, gets the better of God in some way, goads God on to do this. So let me just say here, that even though in many English translations, you will see there satan with a capital S—S-A-T-A-N, in Hebrew personal names, such as satan, Alan, Marc, or Jared—not that I’m calling you guys satan-like…

Pete  

Marc

…can never have a definite article, the word “the” in front of them. In the Hebrew, at the beginning of Job, this character is called “ha-satan” which really means the adversary. And what is being imagined here, and this happens in quite a few biblical texts, is that there is a divine court with all sorts of individuals, some might want to call these angels or messengers. And in this particular depiction of the divine court, the adversary is one of the people who lives up there, who can sometimes cause certain problems.

So that’s the prose framework of the book of Job, there can be—and again a shudder as I paraphrase it in this way—you know, there can be certain blips in life, or your property can be destroyed, all of your family is destroyed. The only one who is left in your family is your wife, who, at least as depicted in the book of Job, is not the most supportive character. You’re sitting there scratching yourself with a potsherd and don’t worry, eventually everything will be okay. And Job hardly has any word of complaint. He says, “yə·hî šêm adoni mə·ḇō·rāḵ,” “The name of the Lord be blessed.” And the text is very clear that he did not curse God. 

However, the middle of the book is very, very different. In the middle of the book, the friends have the traditional theology. The friends say very clearly, to Job—I’m sorry, I want to just say that the middle is structured more or less as three cycles of dialogue between Job and his friends. And this has some parallels in the Mesopotamian literature, some of which is also presented as a dialogue, where the first of Job’s three “friends”—and I hope you can hear the scare quotes around the word friends—says to Job, “You know your wickedness is great, that your iniquities have no limits.” And Job says, “Give me a break. You weren’t there. I know what I did.” 

And Job did what any person in antiquity can do in such a case, he curses himself. There is a long, what is called a self-imprecation in Job chapter 31. And I’ll just read two verses of those because this is the only way in which Job can really protest his innocence: “If I have raised my hands against the orphan, because I saw I had supporters at the gates, let my shoulder blade fall from a shoulder, let my arm be broken from its sockets,” an incredible Measure for Measure self-imprecation. I’ve done something with my arm, may I need a sling in a cast for my arm, essentially. 

And thus, the friends and Job have two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. Job’s friends are incredibly traditional. They believe and they say in different ways “you’re suffering, it must be because of something wrong that you have done.” Job says, “Yeah, you’re right, I’m suffering. But I know I haven’t done anything wrong, certainly nothing wrong that merits this extent of suffering.” And thus the only entity who can resolve this particular issue is God. And this is where the book of Job becomes both fabulous and frustrating. 

Pete  

Marc  

God appears twice in a whirlwind to Job in speeches, which are beautiful, but their purpose is nearly unintelligible. One set of speeches, I think has the longest set of rhetorical questions that I have ever encountered. “Job, where have you been? Were you there when I set up the world?” And so forth. And I do not know the meaning of these speeches. And scholars have been debating them for centuries. But Job has the last word, and Job’s last words are in chapter 42, verse six, “‘al- ’em·’as wə·ni·ḥam·tî ‘al- ‘ā·p̄ār wā·’ê·p̄er.” 

And here, I’ll offer you three different translations of these seven words. One, in the New Revised Standard Version. “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” So Job repents. 

Robert Alter’s New Translation: “Therefore, do I recant,” That’s even stronger than the New Revised Standard Version. Job takes back all of that beautiful poetry that he said, complaining against God. And Alter continues, “and I repent in dust and ashes.” 

A wonderful and brilliant translator, not as well known, Stephen Mitchell, offers a third very different translation. “Therefore, I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” Huh! Does Job repent or not? Is Job saying that God is right? Or is Job still insisting that he is standing by his integrity? I do not know. 

Is this ambiguity intentional as a way of saying this problem cannot be resolved? That’s certainly one possibility. Or is it that even though it is for many of us “our Bible”, we really do have to recognize that we are more than two thousand years distant from this text. And as hard as we might try, we cannot really understand what the original author or authors or editors meant by putting these words in Job’s mouth. And thus, we can read and re-read this book, in different times of our lives, and understand this answers about human suffering in very, very different ways.

Pete  

Well, first of all, both Alan and Marc, thank you for, this is a rarity in a podcast, I think, [Chuckles] to get such a sweeping look at a very complex problem with very complex literature. And I think this has been fantastic. What I’d like to do in the little time that we have remaining, I would like if both of you would want to chime in briefly on [Sighs] I don’t want to be simplistic about this. But how does maybe Job the character—depending on which part of Job you’re reading—what are some similarities or differences between this one biblical book of Job and what we’re seeing elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the Mesopotamian literature, Alan?

Alan  

So yeah, I think that “Ludlul”, for example, has often been read in the light of Job, and I think that they can be compared and contrasted. I think the contrast is pretty stark, because Šubši-mašrâ-Šakkan and does, we think, I think it’s pretty clear even though the passage is broken, that he admits that he has sinned. The thing that’s similar in my view, is the depiction of the deity as all powerful and unquestioning. You can’t, I mean, you can question all you want, but he’s going to do exactly what he wants, whether it’s Yahweh or Marduk. So the sovereignty and the omnipotence and the ability to do whatever the deity wants, the absolute rule, is similar in both books in my view. 

What else is similar is that the lament language in Job participates in the same kind of cultural ethos, I mean, you could say genre—I don’t know if I want to say genre—but the lament tradition in the Psalms, those individual laments, like Marc was talking about in Psalm six. I mean, decades ago Claus Westermann talked about the laments in Job and that’s exactly the same in “Ludlul.” One of the things that I’ve learned and I’ve written about this is that “Ludlul” is just chock full of the same kind of language, vocabulary, tropes as the Akkadian prayers. And so it seems to me that these are very learned literary texts, whether it’s a Job and say “Ludlul,” even though they are these learned literary texts, they’re at the same time incorporating the very real prayer tradition, the lament traditions, whether Israelite or Babylonian, and so they’re taking expressions of human suffering that people use to speak to the deities, and they’ve built them into these learned texts, almost as if to say Job and Ludlul are reflections on humans suffering and lamenting to their deities. And so from both angles, the divine and the human, these texts Job and “Ludlul” specifically have broad similarities. The deity can do what he wants, the humans can lament all they want. And I think in the end, although humans suffer something, in the end of return the status quo happens, maybe? That depends on, you know, Job 42:6.

Alan  

The other thing I just want to mention—and this is a little bit off what you asked—in Mesopotamia, there is a very long reflection in a text called Erra and Ishum on the capriciousness of an angry God who starts breaking things. And ultimately, I think Andrew George is the one who’s developed this interpretation quite nicely, it’s a reflection on the savagery of war, and the Mesopotamians lay this at the feet of a capricious deity. And we could likewise reflect on the flood tradition, both in the Bible and in Mesopotamia, that sometimes the punishment doesn’t quite fit the crime. You know, wiping out an entire species, almost…

Pete  

Seems a bit extreme. 

Alan  

…It’s savaging an entire, yeah, savaging an entire area with war. And so I think broadly speaking, what’s going on in ancient Israel and what’s going on in ancient Babylonia, people are trying to figure out why bad stuff happens. And they turn to the deities with lament and questioning, and it’s okay. And even anger, I think Marc, you pointed out very clearly that Job says some stuff that very few 21st century Christians would ever say, because they’re worried that [Chuckles] you can’t really call God a criminal and still call yourself a, you know, an upstanding member of the local parish. But they could in the ancient world, they were fine with that. And it seems like the gods put up with it.

Jared  

I think that’s really important. I just want to highlight that, because that’s what I’m picking up on here. Is that in the Hebrew Bible, and in the ancient world, in general, there’s not really a problem with God doing whatever God wants, having temper tantrums, and doing these things. 

Pete  

Sleeping [Chuckles].

Jared  

Yeah. That’s an accepted thing. And so to ask these questions, “why am I suffering?” is more of this embodied, practical lament. It’s not conceptual, philosophical, wondering how do these concepts cohere together into a unified understanding or worldview, but there was an assumption that God’s going to do whatever God wants. And so I just think those different assumptions lead to different expressions. And I think that’s important.

Marc  

I agree with that. Let me pick up on some of what Alan said, and also some of what he implied and what might have been implied in your questions. And Alan, you may very well differ from me in this. I do not think that the author of Job knew any of the compositions that Alan referred to, or knew them in a significant way.

Alan  

Oh, I’d agree with you. I don’t think they know each other.

Marc  

I think it’s important going back to Alan’s opening words, some of these compositions exist only in a single copy. These were not extremely well known. These are an incredibly—some of them are—incredibly difficult, sophisticated Akkadian, that even learned scribes in ancient Israel, who may have known some Akkadian and for example, may have had some contact with what is sometimes called the Babylonian creation story better just called by its title, the Enuma Elish, they may have known that, but it’s doubtful that they knew any of this material. 

Might there have been some discussion as different people are buying onions from one another, or buying wheat from one for another? Yes, in the most general way. And thus, is it possible that the notion of a dialog that you have in the book of Job is based on some Mesopotamian models? That is possible. The lament tradition, which both Alan and I have emphasized, really does stand at the basis of a lot of what we are talking about. And again, coming back to the last points that you made in your question. This type of lament that you have in both of these traditions is really very different than what you have in contemporary prayer. And would be considered rude or improper. 

In the Bible, when you lament, you are allowed to be angry, quite strikingly, and this does not come through clearly enough in the translations in the Bible in the laments when you speak to God, you can speak to God in the imperative. You’re allowed to boss God around. Readers these days tend not to do that. I think a place where both of the traditions do agree, and this is the second thing that I’m going to say—is what differentiates us from the ancient world, you know. Both agree about divine strength and sovereignty. But the second point, both do allow protests despite, or perhaps better to say, within that recognition. And one of the places where you see this, since we’ve talked about laments so much, is in the last chapter, chapter five of the book of Lamentations. And I’ll just read the fourth and third from last verses: “But you, oh Lord, are enthroned forever. Your throne endures through the ages, an acknowledgment of divine sovereignty.” But note what that’s followed by, an incredible protest. “Why have you forgotten us utterly, forsaken us for all time?” And this type of protest literature is very important throughout the Bible as well, especially in biblical prayer. And yeah, I think it’s theologically very meaningful, and worth considering in contemporary contexts as well.

Jared  

Excellent. Well, thank you guys both so much for jumping on. And having this again, it’s one of the things that I really appreciate is, as Pete said, this is a broad and sweeping conversation. And you can tell we’ve barely even scratched the surface of the texts and understanding the context and understanding the nuances that are going on in both the text and in the theological tradition. So thank you so much for coming and scratching the surface with us. We really appreciate it.

Marc  

This was lots of fun. Thank you.

Alan  

Thank you very much.

Outro  

Jared  

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Pete  

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Jared  

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Outro  

You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Prescott, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Jessica Shao, and Lauren O’Connell.