Main news for 26 January 2025

Job is well read in the books of the sages and can offer many quotations. But these quotations do not solve Job's main problem. The issue is not that God is higher than a human being and unquestionably more righteous. The issue is that God is the foundation of all righteousness, and this is exactly what Tradition testifies to with complete clarity.

It is He who decides who is righteous and who is not. But who, in that case, establishes the rules? And who serves as arbiter? At the foundation of Tradition lies the idea of righteousness as a correlation between God and the human person, a correlation not of essence but, as a modern philosopher might say, of existence. Righteousness is not inherent in a person; it is not his property or quality, even an acquired one, but his state. And it is God who evaluates how far a person's state corresponds to the criteria of righteousness.

But what criteria? By the time the Book of Job was written, no one had long imagined God's judgment the way the Egyptians, for example, imagined the judgment of Osiris, weighing the soul on scales. Scales presuppose something that exists objectively and separately both from the one who weighs and from the one being weighed. In Yahwism, however, already since the time of the prophet Amos, the idea of God's judgment had been established as a person's meeting with God face to face, as a moment of truth that would put everything and everyone in their places. Figuratively speaking, it turns out that the scales are not an objective instrument of measurement, but that same hand of God: God Himself is both player and arbiter at once.

If He, as arbiter, does not favor Himself as player, then everything is all right. But what if He does? Who then can stop Him? Who can act as that impartial third party who could evaluate how right God is in His judgment? And Job doubts precisely God's impartiality with regard to Himself. He does not understand why God is punishing him, a righteous man. Of course, for us as readers, a dim guess is already beginning to appear: God and Job do not understand righteousness in the same way.

Job, it seems, has no suspicion of anything of the sort yet. He is a deeply religious man, and he knows only one measure of righteousness: the measure of the righteousness of a religious person. In this, he has nothing to reproach himself for. So he says: I am righteous, I am ready to stand before God, but He does not want that. He hides and strikes from ambush for reasons I cannot understand. He strikes as if I were not a righteous man, but the worst sinner. So why does He strike me?