For Nothing

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Job, Book of,” “Satan,” “Council, Heavenly,” “Sons of God,” “Uz,” “Leviathan,” “Retribution,” “Lament.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (IVP) — the single most useful volume for this shelf: “Job 1–2,” “Satan,” “Suffering,” “Theodicy,” “Lament,” “Retribution,” “Ancient Near Eastern Background.”
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — שָׂטָן (śāṭān), תָּם (tām) and תֻּמָּה (tummāh), חִנָּם (ḥinnām), בָּרַךְ (bāraḵ), סוּת (sûṯ, incite).
• On the Greek — the NETS introduction to Iob, which is unusually important here: it sets out that the Old Greek was roughly one-sixth shorter than the Hebrew and that our printed text is the filled-out one. See the caution below.

• David J. A. Clines, Job 1–20 (WBC) — the fullest philological treatment in English.
• Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations — the best account of why the book sets genres against each other rather than resolving them.
• C. L. Seow, Job 1–21 (Illuminations) — exhaustive on text and reception history.
• John E. Hartley, The Book of Job (NICOT); Norman Habel, The Book of Job (OTL).

Mesopotamia had been writing about righteous sufferers for centuries. Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (“I will praise the lord of wisdom”) has a sufferer abandoned by his god, struck with disease, and eventually restored by Marduk. The Babylonian Theodicy is an acrostic dialogue between a sufferer and a friend who defends divine justice — formally very close to Job. The older Sumerian “Man and his God” is shorter and ends in confession.

The differences are the instructive part. In the Mesopotamian texts the sufferer generally concludes that he must have offended unknowingly — the gods’ standards are inscrutable, so guilt is assumed and the remedy is ritual. Job refuses that move for thirty-nine chapters, and the book’s narrator has already told us he is right to. And in none of them does the deity certify the sufferer’s innocence beforehand, which is precisely what makes the biblical book unbearable.

The heavenly court is a standing biblical picture, not a peculiarity here. 1 Kings 22:19–23 shows YHWH enthroned with the host of heaven and a spirit volunteering to entice Ahab; Psalm 82 has God judging in the divine assembly; Zechariah 3:1–2 has haśśāṭān standing to accuse the high priest and being rebuked. Reading Job 1–2 as unique — or as demonology — misses that it is a courtroom scene in a familiar genre.

The setting is deliberately archaic and deliberately foreign. Wealth in livestock; a patriarch offering his own sacrifices with no priest; a lifespan of 140 further years (42:16); the qəśîṭāh as a unit of value (42:11), a word otherwise found only in Genesis 33:19 and Joshua 24:32. The book reads as though set in the patriarchal age, whatever date it was written — and the date is disputed across most of a millennium, with no consensus this page will pretend to.

• Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the Babylonian Theodicy (Akkadian — witnesses, not Scripture) — in Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, or COS I. Read the primary texts before any summary of “the Babylonian Job”; the label oversells the resemblance.
• 1 Kings 22:19–23; Psalm 82; Zechariah 3:1–2 — not external witnesses but the biblical divine-council scenes that make Job 1:6 legible.
• The Testament of Job (Second-Temple Greek, pseudepigrapha — a witness, not Scripture) — a very different Job: patient, victorious, with an expanded role for his wife, who is named Sitis and given a grief and a death of her own. Its portrait runs parallel to the expanded speech in the Greek at 2:9. Whether they share a tradition or one depends on the other is unsettled.
• 11QtgJob (Qumran — material evidence) — an Aramaic Targum of Job, and one of the very few Targums attested that early. It preserves parts of chapters 17–42; chapters 1–3 are not among the surviving portions, so it cannot be cited for this passage.
• Ezekiel 14:14, 20 — Noah, Daniel and Job named together as proverbially righteous, which implies Job was a known figure independent of this book.

• Verse counts. Job 1 = 22, Job 2 = 13, Job 3 = 26 in the Masoretic text as printed in these editions and in Rahlfs. No offset in this passage.
• Fourteen occurrences of haśśāṭān, all articular, all between 1:6 and 2:7. Zero in chapter 3; zero in chapters 4–42. The Greek has ὁ διάβολος thirteen times — the missing one is 1:8, where the Greek drops the noun and keeps only the pronoun.
• Four identical escape-lines. And I alone have escaped to tell you occurs at 1:15, 1:16, 1:17 and 1:19 — identical in Hebrew letter for letter and accent for accent. The Greek does not preserve the fixity, using three different wordings across the four places — so a reader of the Greek alone cannot hear the hammering repetition the Hebrew builds.
• The two verdicts differ, and in both directions. 1:22 — “in all this Job did not sin and did not charge God with wrong”; 2:10 — “in all this Job did not sin with his lips.” The second drops a clause and adds a word. The formula never occurs again after 2:10.
• Two things chapter 3 does not contain. The word šəʾōl does not occur in Job 3 — the text says only šām, “there” (3:17, 3:19); “Sheol” is the commentator’s label. And the verb bāraḵ does not occur in chapter 3 at all: the only similar-looking word is birḵāyim, “knees,” at 3:12. Job curses his day, and does so with three different roots — qālal (3:1), nāqaḇ and ʾārar (both 3:8) — none of them the euphemism of the wager.

• 1 Kings 22:19–23; Psalm 82; Zechariah 3:1–2 → Job 1:6; 2:1 — the divine council. Zechariah is the closest: haśśāṭān standing at the right hand to accuse, and rebuked. Same office, same article.
• Jeremiah 20:14–18 beside Job 3 — “Cursed be the day on which I was born… Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow?” A prophet says almost exactly what Job says, and the canon preserves both without apology. Compare also Psalm 88, which ends in darkness with no resolution.
• Job 1:21 and Ecclesiastes 5:15; 1 Timothy 6:7 — naked from the womb, naked in return. Job’s line is quoted at funerals more than any other sentence in the book; note that the Greek adds a clause the Hebrew has no counterpart for — ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ ἔδοξεν οὕτως καὶ ἐγένετο, “as it seemed good to the Lord, so it came to pass.”
• Ezekiel 14:14, 20 — Noah, Daniel and Job as a proverbial trio of the righteous, and even they “would deliver but their own lives.” Evidence that Job was a known figure outside this book.
• James 5:11 — the only mention of Job in the New Testament. Verified: the name occurs exactly once in the Greek New Testament. And the word is ὑπομονή, endurance — not μακροθυμία, patience, which James has just used three times in the previous four verses. The traditional phrase “the patience of Job” renders the wrong word, and the right one — staying under a weight — fits a man who argues for thirty-nine chapters far better than placidity does.
• Job 1:6 and Genesis 6:2; Job 38:7 — bənê hāʾəlōhîm. Job 1:6 and 2:1 are the only two places in the Hebrew Bible where the phrase carries the article. Rahlfs renders it “the angels of God” in both — an interpretation, and the page reports it as one rather than adopting it.
• Job 2:13 and the practice of sitting shiva — seven days and nights on the ground without a word. The friends’ first act is the only thing they do that Job never criticises.

• David J. A. Clines, Job 1–20 (WBC) — the philological standard; exhaustive bibliographies and unusually frank about what cannot be decided.
• Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations — argues the book deliberately sets incompatible genres against one another rather than resolving them. The best account of why the prose/poetry seam is a feature.
• C. L. Seow, Job 1–21 (Illuminations) — especially strong on reception history, including how the wife has been read across two millennia.
• On the Greek: Homer Heater, A Septuagint Translation Technique in the Book of Job; and the long-running Gard/Gerleman vs. Orlinsky argument over whether the Greek Job systematically “theologises” or is simply free.

• Whether the prose frame is older than the poem. The style, vocabulary and divine-name usage all shift at 3:1. Many hold the poet took up an existing folk tale; others defend a unified composition. The seam is observable; the explanation is not. Date proposals span most of a millennium.
• The wager — and why the usual defences do not quite work. Two moves are commonly made: that God permits rather than causes, and that ḥinnām means only “Job did not deserve it.” Both have real support — 1:12 and 2:6 do distribute agency, and ḥinnām is used that way elsewhere. But 2:3 puts a first-person object on “incited,” and no distribution of agency in 1:12 reaches backwards over that. The page states the difficulty and leaves it standing — noting that the ancient Greek translator, who removed the clause, evidently found it difficult too.
• Whether 2:10’s “with his lips” is a hint. An old argument. b. Bava Batra 16a (a rabbinic witness, not Scripture) has Rava infer that Job did not sin with his lips but sinned in his heart — and Abaye disputing it on the same page. Many modern commentators instead tie the phrase to the second test, where the pressure was to speak. Both readings are reported; neither is adopted.
• What 3:25 means. “For the thing that I feared has come upon me.” Whether Job is saying he was anxious all along, or stating a general truth, is genuinely open. It should certainly not be used to suggest Job’s fear ‘opened a door’ to his suffering — the text gives the cause in chapter 1, and it is not that.

• The question is whether love of God can be disinterested — and it cannot be settled by argument. Does Job fear God for nothing? No answer given in a heavenly courtroom would prove anything. The only demonstration available is a man who has lost everything and does not let go, which is why the book is a story rather than a treatise.
• Chapter 3 is in the Bible, and it is spoken by the man God calls blameless. The most unrestrained lament in Scripture is not put in the mouth of a rebel. Whatever else it is, it is not presented as sin — and the friends who treat it as sin are the ones rebuked at the end.
• “The patience of Job” is a mistranslation, and it has done damage. James says endurance — staying under the weight — not placidity. Job complains for thirty-nine chapters and is commended anyway. Anyone who has been told to suffer quietly on the authority of that phrase has been told something the Greek does not say.
• One concrete response. The friends’ best act is their first: seven days on the ground, saying nothing, because they saw the grief was very great. Everything after that made it worse. Go and sit with someone, and do not explain anything.