The Man Who Asked God Why

This happened a very long time ago. There was a man in the land of Ausis whose name was Job. He was honest and blameless and righteous, and he served God and kept away from everything evil. He had seven sons and three daughters, and enormous flocks and herds, and he was the greatest man in the whole east. And he was a good father. His grown-up children used to take turns holding feasts in each other’s houses, and every time a round of feasting was over, Job would get up early in the morning and bring an offering for each one of them — just in case one of his children had done something wrong without meaning to. That is the sort of man he was.

And in heaven, where nobody on earth can see, there came a day when the messengers of God came to stand before the Lord — and the Accuser came with them. And God said to him: have you seen my servant Job? There is nobody on earth like him — honest, blameless, keeping away from every evil thing. And the Accuser said, “Does Job serve God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him, and around his house, and around everything he owns? You bless everything he does. Of course he loves you. But stretch out your hand and touch what he has — and he will curse you to your face.” That is the question, and it is a real one. Does anybody love God for himself, or only for what he gives them? And God allowed it. Not because he did not care about Job. It is a terrible thing, and nothing explains it away — Job never finds out about this conversation. He never knows. He goes through everything that follows without ever being told why.

It happened in one afternoon. A man came running to Job and said: the oxen were plowing and the donkeys were feeding beside them, and raiders came and drove them off and killed the farmhands. I am the only one who got away. And while he was still speaking, another came, and said fire had fallen and burned up the sheep and the shepherds; I am the only one who got away. And while he was still speaking, another came: raiders had taken the camels and killed the servants; I am the only one who got away. And while he was still speaking, the last one came, and this is what he said: “Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking together at your eldest son’s house — and a great wind came in off the desert and caught the four corners of the house, and the house fell on your children, and they are dead. I alone was saved, and I have come to tell you.” All ten of them. In one day. And Job stood up and tore his clothes and cut off his hair, and fell down on the ground — and worshiped. And he said: “I came out of my mother naked, and naked I shall go back. The Lord gave; the Lord has taken away. As it seemed good to the Lord, so it has happened. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And in all of it he did not sin, and he did not blame God for anything.

Then he lost his health too. He was covered from the soles of his feet to the top of his head with terrible sores, and he went and sat down in the ashes outside the town and scraped himself with a piece of broken pot. And after a long time his wife — who had lost the same ten children, and who nobody has any business laughing at — said to him, “How long are you going to hold on? Say a word against God, and die.” And Job said, “You are talking like a foolish woman. If we took the good things from God’s hand, shall we not put up with the bad ones too?” And then his three friends heard what had happened, and came from their own countries to be with him — Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar. And when they saw him from a distance they did not know him. And they cried out loud, and tore their clothes, and sat down on the ground beside him for seven days and seven nights, and not one of them said a single word, because they saw that his pain was terrible. That week of silence is the best thing they ever did.

Then they started talking, and they talked on and on, and this is what they said, over and over, in beautiful words: God is fair. God does not punish people for nothing. So if you are suffering like this, Job, then you must have done something. Admit it, and it will stop. And Job said: I did not. And they said: you must have. And Job said: I did not — and I want to say so to God himself. And that is the strange, brave thing about Job. He never stops believing in God, and he never stops arguing with him either. He says God is treating him unfairly. He says he wants his case heard. He wishes there were somebody who could stand between them and put a hand on them both. He says terrible, honest things — the sort of things people are usually told they must not say — and he says them to God’s face instead of behind his back. And underneath it all he says this, in the middle of everything: “I know that the one who is going to set me free is alive, and that at the last he will stand on the earth.”

And at the end of it, God answered him. Not out of a quiet breath, this time. Out of a whirlwind. And what God says is not an explanation. He never once tells Job about the Accuser, or why any of it happened. Instead he asks Job questions — dozens of them, one after another: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Who shut the sea in behind gates when it burst out — when I made the clouds its clothing and wrapped it in thick darkness, and said: this far you may come, and no further, and here your proud waves must stop? Have you ever in your life given orders to the morning, and shown the dawn its place? Have you walked in the deep places of the sea? Have you seen the storehouses where I keep the snow? Have you tied up the chain of the Pleiades, or loosened the belt of Orion? Do you send out the lightning bolts, and do they come back and say to you, here we are? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Did you give the horse his strength, and clothe his neck with a mane? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk takes off, and stretches out her wings toward the south? And who feeds the raven, when its young ones cry out to God?” On and on, all through the wild world: the lion, the wild donkey, the ostrich that leaves her eggs in the sand, the rain that falls in a desert where nobody lives at all — as though God were saying: look at how big this is. Look how much of it has nothing to do with you, and how carefully I do it anyway. You cannot see the whole of it. I can. And Job — who had wanted so badly to speak — said, “I know that you can do all things, and that nothing is impossible for you. I have been talking about things I did not understand, things too great for me, which I did not know. I had heard about you with my ears — but now my eye has seen you. And I take back what I said, and I am sorry, in dust and ashes.” He never got his answer. He got God himself, which turned out to be the thing he actually wanted.

And then God turned to the three friends and said: “I am angry with you and with your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has. So take seven calves and seven rams and go to my servant Job, and he will make an offering for you — and Job my servant will pray for you, and I will listen to him.” The men who had defended God had got him wrong. The man who had shouted at him had got him right. And then Job prayed for the three people who had spent the worst week of his life telling him it was his own fault. And when Job prayed for his friends, the Lord let go of their wrong; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. His brothers and sisters and everybody who had known him before came and ate with him in his house, and comforted him, and each of them brought him a gift. And he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand pairs of oxen. And he had seven sons and three daughters again — and there were no women anywhere under heaven as lovely as Job’s daughters, and their father gave them a share of the inheritance along with their brothers, which almost nobody did in those days. And Job lived a hundred and seventy years after the trouble came, and saw his sons and his sons’ sons, to the fourth generation. And he died, an old man, and full of days. Ten new children are not the ten he lost. But the last part of his life was even more blessed than the first, and he was never once told why — and he found God anyway, in the middle of the whirlwind, and it was enough.