Job – Unsatisfied

“Why did I not die ^[f]at birth, come out of the womb and pass away?  Job 3:11 NASB

Pass away – We’ll have to add another verse in order to understand the implications of this one.  That other verse is Job 3:13: “For now I would have lain down and been quiet; I would have slept then, I would have been at rest.”  In the midst of suffering, Job wishes for permanent relief.  But he doesn’t wish for heaven.  He wishes for unconsciousness—extinction, the sleep of death.  There is no hint of another life—blissful, peaceful, removed from the vicissitudes of this world.  There is only this life and the end of this life.  And the end of this life is escape from all this tragedy.  No resurrection.  No heavenly abode.  No life everlasting.  Just here and not here.  No wonder humanity invented the idea of another chance at tranquility.

“Wait!” you say.  “This isn’t the end of the story.  There is another life.  There is resurrection.  There is the promise of heaven.  It’s right here—in the Bible.”  Yes, that’s true—but it isn’t in the Tanach.  The Hebrew Bible—the text of the Tanach—leaves us without a solution to the problem of undeserved evil.  It doesn’t provide compelling evidence of another life after death in this world.  There are hints, perhaps because we already have an idea of another life.  But there is nothing so clear that we are absolutely convinced of this reality.  There is she’ol but exactly what she’ol is isn’t clear.  Certainly it does not seem to be a place where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished.  In fact, precisely because reward and punishment don’t seem to be justly applied in this world or in she’ol, another stage in religious development had to occur.

If evil men seem to get away with it in this world, then there are only two ways to resolve this injustice.  The first is that the offspring of evil men must bear the punishment such men deserve.  Retribution for the sins of the fathers is passed to the children.  Hindsight reading of the Hebrew text finds support for this idea in that infamous verse, “to the third and fourth generation,” but as we now know, such an interpretation of that verse is unwarranted.  Furthermore, the prophets soundly rejected the idea that someone else would pay the price for another’s sins.  The Greeks offered the Judeo-Christian solution.  The second Greek solution is reward and punishment in an afterlife.   It’s not a new idea.  Many ancient cultures embraced the idea of a second life.  Egyptian religion is a classic example.  But, strikingly, such a concept doesn’t show up in the Hebrew Bible.  That’s why the Sadducees could argue against the idea of the resurrection.  There is no heaven in Moses’ works, but there certainly is by the time we get to Second Temple Judaism.  How that occurred is another study.  What we find in Job is the more ancient Hebraic idea.  This life is all there is—and that fails to answer some crucial questions.  Reading Job by itself leaves us unsatisfied.

Perhaps this is the time to remember that Job may was written during or after the Captivity.  That period is a time of questioning, a time of unsatisfying incompleteness.  Perhaps Job’s lament about being alive reflects the despair of an entire people searching for an answer to the question, “Why?” and finding no relief.  Perhaps it is a time when the idea of a redemptive Messiah had to be born.

Topical Index: death, afterlife, heaven, reward, Job 3:11