>>18409522
Job 38:4 "Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth?" Asking Job were he was?
Job 38:7 " When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy".

>>18409522
Love of torturing a guy?

>>18409641
Love for God.

>>18409646
Sounds like an abusive relationship desu

>>18409648
It's about God's unconditional love for mankind, and man's utter inability to reciprocate that love.

>>18409652
Where the book is about 4 guys arguing in the desert

>>18409663
Notice that none of them correctly understand why Job is suffering, they all assume that he's being punished for something rather than Job's love for God being put to the test.

>>18409666
But you said it was about God's love

>>18409676
It's about love. God loves mankind unconditionally, despite all of the atrocities that we've committed, He continues to love us no matter what, His love for us is unperishable, but the same is not true for Man's love for God. Job is supposed to be God's perfect servant, so He put him to the test, to see if he could love God no matter what, even if his life was ruined in the process, and he failed.

>>18409684
>God loves mankind unconditionally, despite all of the atrocities that we've committed, He continues to love us no matter what, His love for us is unperishable, but the same is not true for Man's love for God.
That isn't in the book though and Job's story takes place at the same time as Abraham's so he doesn't know anything that happened later on to the Israelites

>Job is supposed to be God's perfect servant, so He put him to the test, to see if he could love God no matter what, even if his life was ruined in the process, and he failed
Isn't the moral of the story that he didn't fail

>>18409684
>God loves mankind unconditionally, despite all of the atrocities that we've committed
For god it was an atrocity when Saul didn't genocide people thoroughly enough.

>>18409700
>That isn't in the book though and Job's story
It's the entire point of the Bible.
>and Job's story takes place at the same time as Abraham's
Nowhere in Job do we get an indication of this.
>so he doesn't know anything that happened later on to the Israelites
It has nothing to do with what happened to the Israelites.
>Isn't the moral of the story that he didn't fail
He did fail. He cursed God in the end.
>For god it was an atrocity when Saul didn't genocide people thoroughly enough.
Correct. Fuck Saul.

It was written in post-exile to a population still reeling from the destruction of the Temple. If we consider that context, and what happens in the story, Job is about instructing people to never turn away from God, regardless of what happens. The suffering you are experiencing may not make sense to you, but regardless you must stay loyal to God.

>>18409711
>It's the entire point of the Bible.
>It has nothing to do with what happened to the Israelites.
So in order to get the point of Job, you need the rest of the Bible. Do you believe Job was actually a living person or a literary fiction then?

>Nowhere in Job do we get an indication of this
But there are hints that Job lived in a truly ancient time: Job offered sacrifices himself for his family, instead of relying on a priest (Job 1:5; 42:7–8), and his wealth was measured in livestock, not gold (Job 1:3). It is likely that Job lived sometime between the flood and the time of Moses. Many scholars place Job in the patriarchal period, around the same time that Abraham lived (Genesis 11:28–29).

It seems clear that Job lived prior to the giving of the law, since the book of Job makes no mention of a tabernacle or temple, priests, or the law given to Israel. If Job’s life indeed pre-dated the law, he may have lived sometime around 2200 BC, making him a contemporary of Abraham, Lot, and Isaac. Another clue that places Job in the time prior to Moses is the fact that Job gave his daughters “an inheritance among their brothers” (Job 42:15). Under the Mosaic Law, a father passed his inheritance to sons only, unless he had no sons (Numbers 27:1–11; 36:1–13). A righteous man such as Job would have followed that law in obedience to God; in Job’s case, the law had not yet been given.

>>18409711
The longevity of Job is another clue that he lived around the time of the patriarchs. At that time, it was common for people to live a couple of centuries. Lifespans gradually decreased, until, by the time of the judges, lifespans were typically under a hundred years old. By adding up the years implied by the following facts, Job probably lived to be over 200 years old:

• He lived to marry and become “one of the greatest of all the men in the east (Job 1:3).
• He lived long enough to have sired ten children (Job 1:2).
• His children were old enough to have their own homes (Job 1:4, 13).
• After his tragic loss of everything, he lived long enough to father ten more children and amass even greater wealth (Job 42:10–13).
• He lived an additional 140 years after “all these things,” seeing his children and grandchildren to four generations (Job 42:16–17).

The Alexandrian Septuagint contains an addition to Job 42:16 stating that Job died at the age of 240.
https://www.gotquestions.org/when-did-Job-live.html

>>18409827
>So in order to get the point of Job, you need the rest of the Bible.
Yeah, no shit.
Do you believe Job was actually a living person-
Yes.
>But there are hints that Job lived in a truly ancient time
My nigger, all of the Old Testament happened in ancient times.

>>18409522
The book of Job is a fiction, and a primitive one at that

>>18409522
I wonder how many people with disabilities (both mental and physical) have prayed for help for years eventually give up because they finally realise there is no god listening

>>18409522
>take story from Ancient Sumer
>retrofit it to fit in Hebrew tradition
>literally sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the old testament
>people have been confused by it for millennium

>>18409648
God is extremely worth it and blessed are those who notice it. You will see it too in the last day, when you see him in all his glory, you will wish you had done anything to spend an eternity with him. But if you wait until that day then it will be too late. Remember that every good and pleasurable thing you seek in life was created by him, and all those things will pale in comparison to the glorious new things he will give to those who worship him in the new world that he will create in which suffering and pain will be completely forgotten and nobody in this new age will even remember evil was ever a thing.

>>18409652
God does not love man unconditionally, that is exactly why Satan wanted to test him, because if he would have dared curse him then he would have become an unworthy of the love God had showered him with.

It is man's love to God what must be unconditional, because God can never so wrong, even when he makes you suffer you must accept that he is justified in doing it.

But man is prone to corruption and wicknesss, we are capable of malice and injustice, so God does not love man unconditionally but with the condition that they are righteous and obey him who is perfect in every way.

Unconditional love for men would mean God would love man even when he turns to wickesnesss and live a life of sin. God is patient and extremely merciful with wicked men and willing to forgive sins forget if they repent and humble before him, but his patience does not last forever and he is indeed capable of hating wicked men with great hatred and pour his righteous and terrifying wrath on them. Like the way he hated Amalek. For 400 years he held a grudge against them until he exterminated them from the face of the earth.


His mercy is worth more than all the gold in all the lands so seek it while you can and do not test his patience. Even Moses was punished after all that and was not allowed to enter the promised land.

The moral of Job is that you shouldn't victim-blame people like Job's friends did to him because sometimes (often) God just does stuff for his own inscrutable God-reasons that don't match up with the just world we would like to believe in, at least during this lifetime.
>After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.

>>18410020
This is all over the new testament too, so Job definitely isn't a special case. See John 9:2-3, Luke 13:1-5, or 2 Corinthians 12:6-9, for example.

>>18409684
>and he failed.
How?

>>18409711
>He did fail. He cursed God in the end.
Where?

>>18409913
Which Sumerian story?

>>18410368
The 7 tablets of the Enuma Elish was scribed onto clay tablets 4000 years before the old testament was written on,paper. The writers changed the narrative to suit their religion.

>>18410371
I've read the Enuma Elish. Job is not based off it. Have you read it?

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>>18409522
>The Book of Job is about love
It's about complete devotion and absorption (same thing). Whoever completely loves their beloved dissolves into it, is unified in, and is reborn as the beloved.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

>>18409522
>"Why do bad things happen to the best of us?"
"Fuck you, I'm god. I don't have to explain shit."

It's just "God works in mysterious ways." copium stretched across 42 chapters.

>>18410614
>>18410603
No, the reason is spelled out very clear: Jobs suffered so as to prove that man is incapable of reciprocating God's unconditional love for us. We cannot love God the way God loves us, otherwise Job would've been able to continue loving God even inspite of everything that happened to him, and just accept that loving God is an inherently good thing to do, regardless of whether or not it comes at any benefit to you.

>>18410629
Job did continue loving God despite his suffering, that's when whole point of the book, that Job did not turn away from God.

If a kid's parent locked them up in a cage, tortured them, starved them, killed their friends and broke their stuff, you would think that the parent is an abusive piece of shit. But god does it and you think that this is somehow a reason to worship god.
>This is a bad comparison because Christianity uses a different ethical system
Would it not be sinful in Christianity to do those things to another person? And is god sinful?

>>18410020
They were correct though. Job DID something wrong by presuming he was free of guilt, as if he was capable of judging that himself. He thought he could discern God's will and deem it "justified" or "not justified".

>>18409522
>4 Love is patient, love is KIND. It does not envy, it DOES NOT BOAST, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it KEEPS NO RECORD OF WRONGS. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It ALWAYS PROTECTS, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

reconcile this with the Book of Job immediately

>>18412140
I don't know if you realize that God saved Job from hell.

>>18412090
>And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
>In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.
When the only thing you can point to someone doing wrong is failing to recognize their guilt, that's some whacky kafkaesque dystopia you have going on.

And anyway Job isn't even persistently confident in his own innocence.
>How many are my iniquities and my sins? Make me know my transgression and my sin. Why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy? (Job 13:23-24)
>For then you would not number my steps; you would not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity. (Job 14:16-17)

And IIRC when God finally speaks up, he doesn't say Job was tormented for being guilty of something. He more or less just says, "Who the hell are you to complain about my decisions?"

And God himself says that Job's friends hadn't spoken rightly of God, while Job had. So you're supposed to be on Job's side, not his friends' side.

Job 42:11
>Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring.

>>18412333
>And God himself says that Job's friends hadn't spoken rightly of God, while Job had. So you're supposed to be on Job's side, not his friends' side.
I'm not on a side, in fact the friends make the same exact mistake as Job, just kind of reversed. They were looking for a sin with Job that could have been the cause of his sufferring, but in their accusations they made Job presume his innocence, which is why God says what you brought up. Who is he to question His decisions? Neither he NOR his friends can or should guess the reason for God's actions. Job's soul is not for him to judge or guess the purity of. It's a question of pure faith. Do not try to second guess or infer the intentions of God.
How else would you interpret God ultimately rebuking Job there?

>>18412370
Where in the story does God criticize Job for assuming his own innocence? To me it's clear from the beginning, at least to the reader, that Job is innocent, and God has brought harm on him unjustly, not only for reasons unrelated to his innocence, but specifically because of his innocence. Then the question is whether Job has a right to complain about God being unjust toward him or whether God has defensible reasons for being unjust in Job's case. God's rebuke of Job isn't a defense of God's justice, but only his superior power and knowledge.

https://ehrmanblog.org/suffering-in-the-two-books-of-job-two-books/
>Most people who read Job do not realize that the book as it has come down to us today is the product of different authors, and that these different authors had different, and contradictory, understandings of why it is that people suffer.

>Closer analysis shows that the names for the divine being are different in the prose (where the name Yahweh is used) and the poetry (where the divinity is named El, Eloah, and Shaddai).

My new headcanon about Job is that the god who gave Satan permission to test Job and who finally rewarded him in the end is different from the God who appears out of the whirlwind to tell Job off, with the first being only Israel's local deity and the second being the demiurge himself, the god above both Job and Israel's local deity, roused by Job's complaints.

>>18412218
this does not reconcile the two

>>18409522
The name of the book says Hated/ Persecuted so stop being a guessing boomer on the path to griftdom and get it right.

>>18412520
what is your basis for saying Job is a Gnostic work, when it was written in Hebrew by a poet who clearly spoke Aramaic as his primary language? The Gnostics wanted to see a complete break of Christianity from Hebrew tradition, and discarded the old testament entirely. They wrote exclusively in Greek.

The textual evidence also marks Job as at least 3 centuries older than the gnostic movement, and possibly more than that.

>>18412407
>God's rebuke of Job isn't a defense of God's justice, but only his superior power and knowledge.
which curiously was never something that Job questioned

Job and Ecclesiastes were both atheist texts about how life sucks and because people liked them some Abrahamics edited the texts later to force some references to God into them.

>>18409550
Where was YHWH when the universe was created? If Job were not there to see it be created, how would he know YHWH was there?

>>18409652
God loves mankind so much he gambles a man's life with his enemy and then lets his enemy kill the man's family for no reason and rewards the man by giving him a new family even though any normal person would just want their old family back.

God would never test Job because God already knows the contents of Job's heart rendering a test pointless and cruel.
And of course, free will has been experimentally disproven by scientists. Look into MKUltra and Jose Delgado.

>>18410629
But God gets angry and jealous in the Bible and curses people who do not believe in him therefore many humans love God more than God loves humans. Even in Genesis God regretted making mankind and killed almost all. That is not unconditional love.

Just FYI the message of Job is the same as all other books of the bible. They all have one message.

>Do what God (ie the book) says, no matter what, even if there is no reason, and good thing happen. If you do not, then bad thing happen. The end. Amen.

This is literally all 66 books of the Bible.

Lol.

>>18412940
I didn't say it was a gnostic work, though I guess my using the word "demiurge" instead of "creator" might've given that impression. And I said it was my new headcanon, not that I thought it was what the author(s) of Job genuinely believed.

>The Gnostics wanted to see a complete break of Christianity from Hebrew tradition, and discarded the old testament entirely.
Nope, that's only the Marcionites, and technically only allegedly since we only have the word of their opponents, not their own books.

https://ogdoas.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/gnostics-and-the-old-testament/
>The Gnostics did not view the Old Testament as flawed and contradictory as many skeptics did (including Marcion). What the Gnostics did was discard the doctrine of monotheism, and they proceeded with the notion that different theological principles were speaking in the diverse texts.

https://youtu.be/UmfORYNqAhM?si=NTjr08yHpV3voZsv

>>18413029
oh you're right, I did mix up Marcion and the Gnostics in my head there. But I just went back and checked my notes and found one particular tract from the Gnostic "Second Discourse of the Great Seth" that stuck out to me, where Jesus says:
>Adam was a joke. . .Abraham was a joke, as were Isaac and Jacob. . .David was a joke. . .Solomon was a joke. . .The twelve prophets were a joke. . .Moses was a joke. . .He did not know me, and none of those before him, from Adam to Moses and John the Baptizer knew me or my siblings. They had instruction from [Yaldabaoth’s] angels to observe food laws and submit to bitter slavery. They never knew truth and they never will, because their souls are enslaved and they can never find a mind with freedom to know, until they come to know [the immaterial Christ]. . .[Yahweh] was a joke, for he said ‘I am God, and no one is greater than I. I alone am Father and Lord, and there is no other beside me. I am a jealous god, and I bring the sins of the fathers upon the children for three and four generations’ – as though he had become stronger than I and my siblings. . .He was a joke, with his judgment and false prophecy. (483-4)

As you can see there, that text is ready to toss the Jewish roots of Christianity into the waste bin, to dismiss the entire Old Testament as a misguided and illusory fable.

>>18413084
>to dismiss the entire Old Testament as a misguided and illusory fable
It's very derisive toward the significant figures of the Old Testament, but from the whole passage it doesn't look like it's throwing the characters and the lore itself out as entirely fictional.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/2seth.html
Translates "joke" as "laughingstock" which doesn't include the possible connotation of nonexistence.

There were Gnostics like the Simonians who leaned heavily enough into interpreting the Old Testament allegorically that they might be accused of considering much of it to be fictional, but then they found a lot of value in how they interpreted it, so I wouldn't call that entirely dismissing it either.

>>18409522
>The Book of Job is about love.
"For Yahweh so loved Man, that he allowed his family to be brutally butchered to death, and for him to be strucked with every torture and disease, just to win a bet he made against Satan"
- The Bible or some shit ig