Videos of Job

I have been discussing Genesis as history, or perhaps more precisely, a story which preserves much history. I haven't gone much into the theology of Genesis. I find the latter more fascinating, because even more than suggestions of historical events, Genesis encapsulates a great deal of later understanding of God into relatively few, spare stories.

The contrast deserves some attention. Archaeology is well and good - it illuminates some customs and comparisons of the Jews with their neighbors - but even extreme, exhaustive knowledge of the peoples of Persia, Egypt, and Palestine would leave important things out. I will go further: if we had a hundred years of video of Abraham's life, divvied it up and reported back on it, a lot of the most important stuff simply wouldn't be there.

To illustrate this, look at the story of Job. It is perhaps the oldest story in the Bible, in the sense of first appearance of the telling of the story in something like its present form.

Job is all folk tale. There may have been an actual person by that name and similar experience, but the crafting of the story is very once-upon-a-time. As Jesus began the parables with elements such as "there was a man who owned a vineyard," or "there was a woman who had ten silver coins," Job begins with the story of a rich man. How rich? Why, he was the richest man for miles around, son. He had (big number) donkeys, and (big number) camels. He lived a righteous life. How righteous? Well son, he was so righteous that he would offer a sacrifice on behalf of his children just on the chance they had sinned. He led a happy, comfortable life. How happy?

You get the picture. These are oral formulaic elements, setting the story in the realm of the universal. Unlike other Bible characters, Job is not tied to the reign of a particular king, or to an identifiable area, or within a clear genealogy. He is not meant to be. He is meant to stand very emphatically for all humankind in time of doubt and suffering. He asks the questions of God that humanity asks.

The framing of the story is also mythic. Satan has a conversation with God and sets Him a challenge. How would we know this? Job doesn't appear to know it. If he repeated the story of his experience to his grandchildren, that part wouldn't be there, unless God had specifically revealed it to Job at some other point. As with Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, there is no way for human beings to have this knowledge unless they are told it. Presumably Jesus told the disciples what happened during his fast, which is why we have a highly condensed version of those forty days. How long the actual temptations were which Jesus boiled down to their essences we have no way of knowing unless He tells us.

So too with Job. He doesn't know what is happening in heaven, he only knows what is happening to him. It is the storyteller who intuits what the story must mean, framing it in the structure of a conversation between God and Satan. We are given a few words, but we know that argument has been going on since before any time we know.

The ending, also is a storybook ending. Job gets back double what he lost. Sounds great in a story, but thinking about it as a human being, it doesn't sound so great. That doesn't matter in terms of this story. We just need the storyteller's wrapup that it all came out right for Job in the end.

If we had a video of Job during this experience, we would not learn anything about him worth knowing. The actual history would be worse than irrelevant, it would be a distraction. We would not know more about Job, we would know far less if we knew his history. Apply this back to Genesis. It is good to know historical and archaeological things. It is mildly gratifying when identifiable historical or prehistorical events show up in the text. But those aren't what the story is about.