Suffering in the Book of job

Appreciation from a Hindu Approach

The expositions on the Book of Job usually speak of the Problem of Suffering in the Book of Job. How could it be a “problem” when God chooses to use Satan to inflict it on him? The Hindus have regarded suffering as the easiest means of having a direct Vision of Him. A devotee in the Maha Bhagavata says: May calamities he ours, O World Teacher! Through them alone we have a vision of Thee.

Is it not through unprecedented calamities that Job has the vision of the Lord ultimately? The question may be raised if Job was not described in the opening verses of the Book as being perfect and blameless. Does not the Lord Himself describe Job in identical terms with Satan? Does not Job “fear God and eschew evil”, according to the traditional Wisdom of the Hebrews as presented in. “The Hymn to Wisdom” (Chapter 28)?

Certainly. But we see that the traditional Wisdom and the perfection do not help Job to have a direct Vision of the Lord. It is only after undergoing physical pain and psychological agony he is able to say to the Lord.

I have heard about Thee by hearing of the ear. Now mine own eye seeth Thee.

It appears as though God observing that Job has attained a kind of perfection that traditional wisdom can give seeks to raise him to a state when he could see the Lord directly. The perfection that Job has attained is moral and religious as the accompanying word blameless or upright indicates. To have a direct vision of God one must rise higher and go deeper into one’s consciousness.

The point becomes clear when we compare Job with Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita. Job resembles Arjuna not in the situation he is placed but in the nature of his character at the start of the work and his further development till he has the Vision of the Lord, Visvarupa Darshana. The term literally means the Vision of the Universal Form but actually the Lord’s Infinity. To Job also the Lord reveals his Infinity making him say

Mine own eye seeth Thee

Sri Aurobindo describes Arjuna as we see him at the commencement of the Gita in the following words.

Arjuna, in the language of the Gita, is a man subject to the action of the three Gunas or modes of Nature-Force and habituated to move unquestionably in the field like the generality of me. He justifies his name (Arjuna = white = pure) is bring so far pure and Sattwic as to be governed by the noblest law he knows. He has been trained to a high calm and self-­control, to an unswering performance of his duties and obedience to the best principles of the time and society in which he lived, religion and ethics to which he has been brought up. He is egoistic like all other men, but with the purer or Sattwic egoism which regards the moral and social and the claims of the others and not only or predominantly his own desires and passions ... The thought that preoccupies him, the standard he obeys, is dharma, the collective Indian conception of the religious, social and moral rule or conduct.

Before we see how the description of Arjuna fits Job mutatis mutandis we have tounderstand the Indian psychological terms as used by Sri Aurobindo. The ancient Indians distinguished between the generality of men who were governed by the Gunas or modes of Nature-Force and the realized souls who transcended them. In the passage quoted above Sri Aurobindo does not mention all the Gunas and even the one he mentions he does so in the adjectival form, Sattwic. Sattwa is used both as noun and an adjective. We speak of Sattwa or Sattwa Guna. Rajas is the noun form, we speak of Rajo Guna. Tamas is the third Guna, Tamo Guna, Rajasic and Tamasic are also used as adjectives. Those who transcend these Gunas are called Gunatitas (Guna + atitas), realised souls who could have a direct Vision ofthe Lord. Abraham, for example, who “could walk and talk” with God was a Gunatita.

Tamas is a dark or un-illumined state of consciousness. It is characterized by ignorance, delusion, despondency, pessimism, crudeness ofintelligence and inertia. Rajas is a state of dynamism and force. While it is an inspirer of great action and achievement it is normally used bydesire, an anger to attack and fight. Sattwa is the very opposite of Tamas. If Tamas is darkness, Sattwa is light. Light of the Mind, and therefore limited and finite. But it is great and aligned with it Rajas can do wonderful things even as when aligned with Tamas it could be dangerous and destructive.

Job, like Arjuna, is perfect and blameless in the sense of representing the best ideals of the race. But in that state one could know only about God and not God. One could be perfectly moral and devoutly religious, pure and full of mental poise but all this does not enable one to have a Darshan (Vision) of the Lord. The Taittiriya Upanishad declares that the Lord who cannot be captured bywords is unattainable bythe Mind. Job demonstrates the truth vividly.

We saw Job and Arjuna start as Sattwic personalities, Job as Prince of the Tribe towhich he belongs, a Shaikh, and Arjuna, a hero-warrior, both had enough Rajas to carry out their work.

When Job faced calamity after calamity, though not immediately as we will see, and when Arjuna realizes the enormity of the slaughter he had tomake of his kinsfolk and preceptors, sink into a state of despondency, Vishada, which is one manifestation of Tamas. In different ways they rise from the Tamas – in the case of Job he moves through the three Gunas forward and ward and reaches Sattwa finally only to go beyond it and have the Vision of Lord. Theophany is the culmination of the Book of Job but it is not so in the Gita. But the Satwic man sinking into a state of Tamas and rising to Sattwic and beyond to have the Darshan of the Lord is common to both the works. (A Research Scholar could very well make a detailed comparative study of both the work, with pleasure and profit).

To return to job, “the greatest man of the East”, in the sense of the richest man of what we call the Near East, the region east of the river Jordan, he was also the greatest man in the sense of embodying the highest ideals of the race, fearing God and eschewing evil. We have mentioned Abraham and it may be useful to contrast Job and Abraham to see clearly the difference between a moral and religious man and a spiritual personality. But the Talmud contrasts them differently:

Greater is that which is said of Job than which is said of Abraham. For of Abraham it is said that he only feared God, but of Job that he feared God and eschewed evil. Does the Talmud want us to believe that Abraham indulged in evil? Did not God give frequent Darshans to Abraham? Would He do so if he was not without evil? What we tend to forget is that a man who has realized God has no evil to eschew. Our mental notions of good and evil do not enter into the life of one who has a direct contact with the Lord.

We saw it was God who afflicted Job with calamities through Satan, knowing that Job who had reached the highest rung of human perfection could be made to take a leap from the ladder to the realm of the Spirit when he can be face to face with him.

To achieve it he enacts a Drama of which he is the chief Actor as well as the Sutradhara, the Stage-Manager. God is called among other names, Jagan-Nataka-­Sutradhara, the Stage-Manager of the Turning World.

The central action of the Book of Job happens to be the play enacted by the Lord with Himself as the Chief-Actor to evolve Job’s consciousness. Not only Satan who is purely a functional character but even the three friends, if they could be called friends who torment him, are used by the Lord to churn Job’s consciousness and to lift it aloft to enable him to see Him and his work which are far beyond all our limited notions of Him.

The first five verses of the First Chapter of the Book of Job describing him, his riches, his family and his piety constitute a little Prologue in themselves, to the Drama the Lord enacts. The Drama begins when Satan comes before the Lord along with the Sons of God who meet Him occasionally. The Lord, with his etza, the large plan of action of evolving Job draws the attention of the cynic, that Satan is, to Job and his goodness. Satan responds with an apparently profound question.

Does Job fear God for naught?

Exegetes make it appear that Satan is asking if Job’s devotion to God is disinterested, or in Indian parlance, if it is ahituki bhakti, (devotion without an expectation of a return). But Satan means no such high philosophical idea. The cynic that he is he believes that Job or anybody, for that matter, would care for God or anybody as long as everything is alright with him. God expects nothing better from Satan, God wants him to afflict Joband through the affliction evolve his character. Incidentally God wants to prove Satan wrong. When he deprives Jobof all his belongings including his ten children - seven sons and three daughters - Job remains Sattwic and tells himself that God gave and God took away. He only blesses God and does not curse him as Satan said he would.

When next time he meets God. God shows him Job’s being unaffected by the affliction. Satan once again utters a seemingly profound statement.

Skin for Skin meaning, perhaps, Touch his skin instead the outer cover of belongings, he will curse you.

God permits him to afflict his body without taking away his life. Job’s life is precious for God, rather his soul that could evolve. Affliction is only a means. Satan hurries to Joband make’s him suffer from a dreadful skin from head to foot. Job’s wife deeply affected by her husband’s fate asks him to curse God and die because all his religion and morality could not protect him. Job asks her not to talk like foolish women. One must accept from God evil as well as good. Satan is proved wrong for a second time.

But God knows the Sattwic state is precarious because it depends upon the mental control and will power. Quite some time passes before three friends from distant places come to console Job. When they see him none talks for a whole week. Gradually Job loses his self control and that makes him shriek out in sheer agony.

This is what Arjuna does in his Vishada (despondency) at the moment of crisis. And that Vishada is called Yoga in the Bhagavad Gita. Whatever helps an individual to attain the realization of God is Yoga. As in the case of Arjuna the very despondency with which he shrieks out becomes the starting point of a discussion with the friends during which Job is able to rise from Tamas to Rajas and even to Sattwa and move and forward from one Guna to another till at last he passes beyond the Gunas when he falls silent at the time when Elihu, a fourth speaker, tries to put Job wise after the friends, “fail”. The Lord speaks through the whirlwind when Job is ready to have the, “Darshan”. As God intends Job’s very fall to Tamas becomes a means of his rise. His fall indeed is a Felix culpa, even like Arjuna’s.

Job curses the hour of his birth and conception, wishes he were not born at all or had died immediately after his birth. He wonders that he still lives and cannot die because death is a felicity and life is a harsh pain.

On hearing the cry, friends who have come to comfort him are shocked, forget their purpose and begin to admonish him. First Eliphaz, perhaps the oldest of the, “Wise Men” points out how Job consoled others in distress in the past cannot remember the “fear or God” at the moment of his own suffering. None suffers without committing sins. Referring to a vision of a Spirit he had the other night, quotes the Spirit as saying that nobody can do more just than God. Job responding to Eliphaz’s speech says that he had done nothing to deserve his suffering. Bildad, who is the next to speak, replies on the authority of the Fathers that there cannot be suffering without sin. When Job rebuts the charge the third friend Zophar, beginning with a picture of a God who is beyond the understanding of a human mind soon claims to speak for him and says he knows Job’s guilt. But all the friends tell Job that if he repents, God will restore him to his old position. But Job does not agree. He has not done anything to deserve his suffering. That leads each speaker to attack again with more vehemence. Each attack evokes a reply and we have three cycles of the debate. In the third cycle, however, we have some dislocation of speeches and we are not sure Zophar speaks at all. Even Bildad’s speeches become unusually brief. The fact of the matter is that friends run out of ammunition. But exegetes reallocate the speeches and according to one arrangement Zophar speaks twice! The debate concludes in Job’s avowal of integrity.

There are two points on which we have to be very clear. What is the issue in the debate? How does Job evolve during the discussion?

Inspite of their apparent differences the three friends belong to a school of “wisdom” which believes in retributive justice. If you sin, you suffer; if you are righteous, you prosper. Job, from his own experience and that of theirs sees the doctrine to be wrong. The wicked prosper as often as the good suffer. The friends are sure Job has sinned gravely. He must be a hypocrite. Job knows himself to be absolutely innocent.

In Job’s speeches there are apparently two opposite attitudes. They are presented most sharply in a verse often emended by experts:

Though He slay me. I will trust in Him, but I will maintain my own ways before Him.

Till the end he repeatedly speaks of his trust and faith. But he also maintains that God does not play fair. Job is at once aware ofa God “beyond our theological entrapments” in the words of Clines and a God who is not just.

Also, if only for self-vindication. Job’s longing to see God becomes more and more intense and at the end he speaks of moving to the Lord crowned with the very document of God’s final judgment like a prince.

Though the debate closes with Chapter 27, there is along confessional speech of his after a break. Chapter 28 happens to be the “Wisdom Hymn” referred to at the start. The Hymn presents two kinds of Wisdom, ­one accessible only to God, the other meant for men. According to the tradition, to fear God is wisdom, to eschew evil is understanding. We have commented on the nature of that wisdom.

Job’s last speech has three movements, each movement presented in a chapter. Here, too, we see Job moving from Tamas to Sattwa. First we see the days when he was blessed by His Grace in every way. We know “Sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering happier things”. It is a lamentation in disguise. Then he moves on a direct lament for the present suffering. He is tortured and humiliated by the very people who feared and respected him once. But soon he rises to the highest Sattwic state in which he not only re-avows his integrity but looks for all answer from the Lord. Even if the answer were but an indictment he would wear it as a crown and move towards Him, as we saw, as a Prince to his Sovereign. With that Job’s words are ended.

The friends cease to speak. The different ways in which Job and his friends fall silent are contrasted in two ways. End means complete. Cease means stop which implies that it could have continued but for a particular reason. The reason is that they think Job is irredeemable. He thinks himself righteous. Job’s completing all he has to say is presented in Verse. In the next chapter which begins in Prose we are told the friends cease to speak.

The sudden change from verse to prose is to show the nature of Job’s falling silent. He had exhausted all that he had to say. He had returned to his original Sattwic state. The next stage would be to take a sudden leap to the state when he would hear and see the Lord. It is a well known psychological experience that when one exercises all of one’s faculties and falls silent he rises to a state of Vision.

It is when Job falls silent the fourth speaker, Elihu makes his sudden appearance. It is sometimes said that Elihu’s speeches are not part of the Book of Job but later introduced into the Book by an inferior writer. His speeches are an integral part of the Book and serve as a transition to the Theophany.

While Elihu is certainly inspired he is “made of clay” as he himself confesses. His youth that makes him to be near, “the vision splendid”, it incapacitates him to understand what he insuits. On the one hand he speaks of the pedagogical value of suffering, on the other he implies that Job is not wholly good. God’s own verdict will be different.

But what is the nature and value of the Lord’s speeches? The very rhythm and tone are exalted and they rise above our common ideas. The Lord does not “answer” Job in one sense. But he does say Job is right and the friends wrong. The Lord’s intention is to bring before Job the limitlessness and the supremacy of God’s creation and his government of the world which transcends our sense of justice and injustice. Job sees the Lord in all His Infinity. That is why, Kathleen Raine equates it with the Visvarupa Darshan of the Gita. We have seen how Job himself says, he sees the Lord with his own eyes.

It may be noted that in his submission to the Lord Job never says what he has spoken is wrong. We saw God himself does not say it.

God restores Job to his original state because he has achieved his purpose, of raising Job to the state of a Gunatita. If Job had remained only “perfect and blameless” he should not have attained the state. That is “the mystery and marvel of pain” to use the words of Sri Aurobindo.