Looking at Job: Trouble Starts at Home
This is post is the third in my ongoing series on Job. I highly recommend being familiar with the overview before getting too deep into the weeds – the first two posts on the book will help you see where I am coming from in talking about the book and the story (HERE and HERE). If you are caught up already, let’s plow ahead.
The first two chapters of Job cover a lot of ground. At the opening of chapter 1, Job is happy, healthy, and wealthy. At the start of chapter 3, Job wishes he had never been born. We know Job isn’t a moody teenager, which means an excruciatingly long look at the first two chapters is worthwhile. We’ve already covered the broadest overview of the story, we need to spend some time to get from point A to point B.
We tend to dramatically under-appreciate how much destruction happens because of Satan’s little gamble with God that Job will crack under pressure and curse God. There’s a reason Chapter 1 gives us explicit numbers for what Job owns – it’s not like he’s a middle class suburbanite, the dude is essentially a Sheik. In our terms, Job has more in common with Bill Gates than he does with Sister Susie in the third row of your local church. Ten children, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 1000 oxen, 500 donkeys and “a large number of servants”. To give you a better idea of what we are talking about, beef cows need about 2 acres per cow in order have enough food to sustain themselves… which means Job had to have a minimum of 2000 acres of land available just to feed the oxen. Job’s “clan” (children and servants) is probably the only people living within days of him.
When Satan leaves the presence of the Lord after verse 12, Satan doesn’t pull any punches with Job. The first thing we learn about Job’s destruction in verse 13 is that Job’s children were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house on his birthday (v4). It’s on that day that the servant runs up to Job and informs him that the Sabeans have stolen Job’s oxen and donkeys and stolen them before murdering the servants, leaving only the one who is standing before Job.
Oxen and donkeys are beasts of burden. They plow fields. They pull carts. They carry heavy stuff. The oxen and the donkeys aren’t just unfortunate losses, you are talking about Job’s ability to farm, thresh grain, transport goods and conduct commerce. Yeah, you can “get by” without them, but when we are talking about this level of wealth, this becomes a major roadblock. Going back to the Bill Gates’ analogy, imagine if Bill Gates is suddenly unable to use the financial system outside of physical cash transactions – no stocks, no EFT’s, no credit/debit cards. And lest we forget, Job begins the book with “a large number of servants.” How many? We don’t know… but we know that 7000 isn’t a big enough number to be written off as “a large number”. Everybody who was watching the oxen and donkeys get killed except one – Satan can’t kill Job, but nobody ever said anything about the servants.
“While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, ‘The fire of God fell from the heavens and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” This one is particularly diabolical… fire falling from the sky and the servant blames God (understandably). Remember, Satan’s goal is to get Job to curse God, not merely to get Job depressed or cause him to lose faith – which means the theatrics are specifically calculated to get God blamed for Job’s misfortune, and the servant becomes the mouthpiece of Satan in Job’s ear. Again, all but one of the servants are collateral damage in Satan’s attempt to turn Job on God. So, 8500(ish) animals and somewhere between a couple dozen and a couple hundred people have died or been stolen, and we’re just getting warmed up.
The next servant informs Job about the Chaldeans making off with the camels and killing all the servants. This is the second people group/country/tribe to attack Job’s house, underlining the fact that Job wasn’t just some dude with a house and a bunch of animals, but he was of a “warlord” status in his own right. The camels are animals that would be used in long journeys and carrying the goods of the house along for the trip. The camels getting taken means Job can’t even leave the area with what is left of his stuff. The home he has built with his wealth has just become his own prison. 11,000+ animals and who knows how many servants. But the worst is the last one.
As we said earlier, Job’s children would be feasting on one of the birthdays. We also know that Job was moderately paranoid about what his children get up to at these feasts – hence the decision to “purify” them and offer burnt sacrifices as an insurance policy against them having cursed God while drunk. Satan preys on Job’s biggest fear – no invading army, no murderers, just a freak wind from the desert causes the house to collapse on the party and kills everyone inside. We don’t even get the benefit of hearing whether or not Job’s children had done anything at the party to deserve what happened to them; and Job finds out that he has been not just impoverished, but left virtually alone in the space of five minutes. Job’s entire world has been reduced to him, his wife (more on her later), and the four nerds standing with him who barely escaped death themselves – if you remember the way Saruman is in Return of the King (the book… not the Peter Jackson fan fic) after getting kicked out of Isengard… that’s essentially where Job finds himself. The fact that he humbles himself, grieves and worships God is already baffling – but it echoes what happens with King David and the first child he has with Bathsheba; the servants thought David was going to snap when the child finally died… only to see David get up, get cleaned up, have dinner, and go into the sanctuary. Hearkening back to our big ideas in Job, while humans suck at handling suffering, Job does so here with otherworldly aplomb by keeping the big picture solidly in view: he was born with nothing, he will take nothing with him when he dies and, more importantly, he had wealth and possessions because God gave it to him.
Job’s wealth and possessions were because of God’s benevolence, and he knew that in chapter 1.
We aren’t told how much time passes between the first incident and the second, but we know it wasn’t immediate. “On another day”, Satan shows up at the heavenly congregation and he has his double-down conversation with God. Job has had at least a day to sleep on the fact that he is now poor and childless when the illnesses start. To begin the exercise of people saying the exact wrong thing at the very wrong time, Job’s wife has clearly had enough of this bit. The thing is, I’m not sure I can say that I blame her. She was probably sick with grief about her children and servants dying and now her husband is sick with some kind of illness you haven’t seen before, assuming the worst possible outcome is understandable and wanting to just get it over with is something we should all have a ton of empathy for, even while cringing at the suggested method.
Remembering the sheer amount of land that would have been needed to feed all of Job’s animals, the fact that his friends have time to (1) hear about all the troubles that have befallen job, (2) meet up somewhere and (3) ride to Job’s side together, means Job will have already been “in the fire” for some time before they arrive on the scene. Again, we don’t know exactly how long, but given the descriptions of Job given in chapter 2, his misery is absolutely off the charts by the time they show up. Job’s illness has left him unrecognizable, he is in constant pain, and has been scraping himself with broken pottery to find anything similar to relief from his misery for days – and when his friends show up, they are so horrified that they can’t even find words for a week. Mere mortals get irritated when people show up to visit them in the hospital and can’t find the right words for hours. Personally, I feel like I’m in Hell when I get an itch in the middle of my back that I can’t scratch for a couple minutes… and Job did it after having lost all his material wealth, almost all of his servants, ten adult children and having a wife who gave him a slightly more dignified, “KYS, simp!” I think we can start to understand Job’s mindset a bit more for why his complaint is so intense… he isn’t just “not feeling very well”, his entire world has literally come unglued and there is nobody helping him carry the burden of his struggle – oh, and his wife was actively leaning on the burden and making it heavier. Job was destroyed and, in the process, was left truly and utterly alone.
In the next post, we’ll take a look at the first scene of the debate: Job vs. Eliphaz.
–A
The Beat Down 