The stories that have been with us the longest are probably the ones that have helped us adapt, then thrive better in the world. They truly fit us for survival. Aesop’s Fables direct us toward moral responsibility. The Odyssey and The Iliad steer us away from hubris and teach us the value of hearth and home. And finally the Book of Job, written some 2,000 years ago, pre-dating even Genesis, helps us reconcile ourselves to human suffering. The compelling utility of each of these texts is why we keep coming back to them. It’s why they’re conserved. They’re written in a special dialect we might call Deeply Human.
You know Job and his story. At the beginning of the first chapter of the book, he’s healthy, wealthy, and wise—blameless before God. However, by its chilling end, Job has lost everything. His animals. His crops. His servants. His home. Then his ten children. His health goes next. Covered with boils, he’s reduced to scraping his wounds with shards of pottery. His wife tells him to curse God and die. His friends urge him to repent of the hidden sin they’re convinced has caused his calamity. Job denies their simple-minded diagnosis as false, and looks instead to God for an explanation. As Joseph Campbell puts it in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Job proves himself “capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends.” And soon, he receives one.
Part of what makes Job so resonant is that while the degree of his suffering may be beyond what we might face, in terms of its nature, we recognize his plight as our own. There are no easy answers to the experience of undue suffering and no off-the-shelf formulas to make sense of so much pain.
By the time God shows up to speak to Job from the whirlwind, as we lean in for a satisfying “unified field” sort of answer, God’s voice instead simply brings us, as it did Job, to our knees:
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?...Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?...Wilt thou also disannul My judgment?”
While it’s impossible to relish such a divine rebuke, the riveting encounter between Man and God at once expands our souls internally and our field of vision externally. Job, again like us, falls silent before managing to say, “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore, I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
The book is layered, difficult, and 40 chapters long, but somehow, without offering any a specific Gordian knot-untangling solution to our pain and suffering, Job bestows a peculiar kind of faith and courage for us to face it.
And this is why Job’s story not only persists but continues to be retold by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights (Archibald McLeish’s J.B.), Oscar-winning filmmakers (Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man), and through performances offered by an organization called Theater of War, which presents dramatic readings of the Book of Job, as well as ancient Greek plays like Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ The Trojan Women to those who have survived catastrophes or live in the midst of tragedy by virtue of their vocations. The project’s founder Bryan Doerries and actors such as Adam Driver, Bill Murray, David Strathairn, and Paul Giamatti have performed before storm and earthquake victims, nurses and terminally ill patients in hospice settings, mental healthcare providers and chaplains in hospitals, guards in maximum security prisons, first responders in fire houses and churches, and soldiers on military bases or at the Pentagon upon returning from war. In one interview, Giamatti said that after performing the Book of Job to an audience of storm survivors, it took him two weeks to recover from its power.
In the introduction to his book All That You See Here is God, which is a line from another play the group performs: Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Doerries wrote, “When people who know tragedy first hand see their own private struggles reflected in poetry and words thousands of years old, something is unlocked...”
That something, written in an indelible code that only those who suffer can hear, must surely be the voice of God, spoken in the language of Humanity.
Almighty God, how is it that You know how we feel? Amen.
