One breath from God and things can shrivel up, one blast of God's rage and things burn -- unlike human anger, God has control over anything and everything because He is the creator (7). Like forest fire, God's wrath, in the eyes of humanity, is unstoppable and incomprehensible. Finally, Job, after his initial and understandable sorrow and rage he enters into a kind of Zen-like state of acceptance of his fate, of the fact that as a human being, he cannot resist the nature of the world. God has created all things, unlike humans, who are simply God's creation (23). The world is full of bad as well as good. Job was not given good fortune in proportion to his goodness, although he was a good man, and so the reverse is also true. True, Job never neglected the poor, made the innocent suffer, or let the poor go hungry (67). But like all human beings, he was not perfect and things came to him by chance.

Job's friends are not better or worse than Job, either. Rather their comprehension is more ordinary and more foolish, as they assume Job or his children were evil and thus must deserve their fates (15). Job's condition has given Job, if nothing else, spiritual insight. Again, this is not a reward, rather it is what is extraordinary and instructive about Job's example, otherwise the world would be filled with Jobs, who merely find out that life is not fair and little else. Job's friends think God lives by the Golden Rule, like humans should do, and makes sure that He acts towards the good as they would act towards Him. But Job says, unlike a human...

People like to feel they have control over their lives. Sometimes the opposite is more frightening when you realize that you can do everything right but you still cannot control fate.
One of the most striking aspects of Stephen Mitchell's translation is that the figure who prompts God to tempt Job is called the Accuser. Mitchell points out that rather than Satan, as this figure is sometimes mistranslated into, in contemporary retellings of the tale, the Accuser is actually part of God, or part of the nature of divinity (xvi). When Job speaks to the cause of his fate, he speaks to God, not the accuser. This suggests that perhaps ancient people's understanding of the world was more complex than our own. They lived in a world where life was short, children frequently died, and there was no home insurance to protect you from losing everything. You could only accept fate, not rationalize or reason with the divine, like Job.

Works Cited

The Book of Job. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.