Title: Have you considered my servant Job? : understanding the biblical archetype of patience /
Authors: Balentine, Samuel E. 1950-
Year: 2015
Subjects: Job; Bible. Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Patience Biblical teaching.
Abstract: The question that launches Job's story is posed by God at the outset of the story: "Have you considered my servant Job?" (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God's providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians--religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe--have added their own distinctive readings. In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story--Job, God, the Satan figure, Job's wife, and Job's friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant.
Contents: Prologue: "There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job" -- Part I. Introduction to the characters in the didactic tale (Job 1-2 + Job 42:7-17). The Job(s) of the didactic tale : a saint in the making -- God and Satan : "Have you considered my servant Job?" -- There was once a woman in the land of Uz : Job's wife -- Part II. Center stage: the wisdom dialogue (Job 3-42:6) -- Job's words from the ash heap : the scandalous voice of defiance -- God on trial : "Who ever challenged him and came out whole?" (Job 9:4) -- Job's comforters : "Do not despise the discipline of the Almighty" (Job 5:17) -- "The the Lord answered out of the whirwind..." (Job 38:1, 3) -- Epilogue: Job's children (Job 42:7-17).