That is not my Job

I'm an English major and for my World English course I had to write an informal essay about my thoughts on the story of Job from the Hebrew Bible. I just finished writing it. I haven't even edited it yet. But I'm going to post it here. You can read it if you want or you can just wait until I post my thoughts on Zoom, but for now just click the keep reading to see my thought on some religious text. Also any advice you may be able to give on it would be welcomed.

I’m not going to lie. This was fairly hard to get through. My problem really comes from how long winded it all seems. To abridge Anton Chekhov, if it doesn’t have a point in the story then it shouldn’t be there. What really happens in Job? God and Satan make a bet. Bad things happen to Job. Job still doesn’t hate God. The same thing happens again. Job talks with his friends then God. Job becomes the victor at the end because he believed, and his friends get no benefit from God because they do not. That is not a story that takes over twenty pages to tell. It’s not helped that a large majority of it is just people talking. It almost seems like everyone in the world except for Job is a strawman but there is never a real reason why Job isn’t siding with his friends. That actually leads into my next problem.

At the end of the day the story of Job is not about him as a person. It’s a story about belief no matter what. If there was no divine wager then this story would have been more character driven. It would have been the story of a man’s undying devotion to his LORD even at the worst of times. But with their being a very literal Deus ex Machina controlling the plot it loses the personal touch that makes the characters and situation seem more tragic. It becomes just about how all humans need to follow and believe in the LORD no matter what situation you end up with in life. Then again that is the point to this text is it not? It’s not about one man’s journey and self-reflection to keep his faith alive. It’s about how people should never hate god. In that way it’s more like a textbook then an actual story. I guess if you think of it as a textbook then the idea of it being long winded makes a lot more sense.

But enough about what I didn’t like about the story. Let’s talk about what I did enjoy about the story. Funny enough what I did liked had nothing to do with the story. The way the actual page is laid out is really amazing. It starts in paragraph from because that is the actual story of the piece. That does make me a little sad though. The only real story is at the very beginning and end, but it does highlight the important aspects to understand what is happening. The rest is long formed written more like a poem or a play. The play aspect is really what I want to focus on. It has really large margarine space so notes can be made to whoever is reading it aloud so they can know when to take breaks or pause for dramatic effected. The new style is really for the benefit of whoever is reading it aloud. If everything was in paragraph form then it would be extremely easy to get confused and lose their place, and when the objective of the story is to reinforce the fear of God then it would be best to not stubble over yourself to find your place.

Looking over it again I am really amazed that the most fun I had out of this assignment was writing this. Like I said this was hard for me to get through, so it was more fun just to write about it. I think I may have found it easier if I would have listened to it because like a play it wasn’t written to be read. It was written to be listened to. It was written to be heard by a crowd in order to convince them that you should never be angry at god.

One final note. I have a Simpsons comic that is parodying a lot of religious text and the story of Job is one of them. I have to say I enjoyed the Simpsons’ adaptation a lot more then I like the original work.