Being a very weak soul, I agreed to my friend’s request to join a test class on the book of Job.  Actually, I thought I knew everything about the Book of Job, and that would make it possible to understand the language well.  After all, I studied it in tenth grade, and my class even went to see the play together  I mean Archibald MacCleish’s play, J.B.  I even remember lines by heart – like Jonathan’s Swift quotation from Job he quoted every year on his birthday.  3:3 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.

Even the big question of Job that appears in J.B. – rattled my mind as a teenager:

I heard upon his dry dung-heap

That man cry out who cannot sleep:

“If God is God He is not good,

If God is good He is not God;

Take the even, take the odd,

I would not sleep here if I could

Except for the little green leaves in the wood

And the wind on the water.”

But in an hour and a half, we managed to ask some questions about the first two chapters about this little experiment that God and Satan conduct on the nature of man.  And I wonder whether I really want to know the answer to this question.  

And I keep thinking of the question of Catch 22 –

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”

But the first thing I learned is that the language of all the friends of Job is so complex, even Hebrew speakers find it foreign.  Now THAT I want to know about.