Eredien's Journal

Hi there, don't have a lot of time, thought you made some valuable points here. But your interpretation of Job is different from the one I'm familiar with in a way that I found interesting: As I learned it, Job was not punished for speaking against God - if I recall correctly, he actually resisted his wife's suggestion that he "blaspheme" God - or in fact for doing anything at all. Rather, he suffered purely because God was testing him. (The back story was that God was boasting about how faithful Job was, Satan pointed out that Job had no reason to be unfaithful since he was so rich and fortunate, so God made all kinds of bad things happen to Job to see if he would lose his faith.) Until then, I gather, the premise was that good people were rewarded and bad people were punished in fairly simply, readily apparent ways - so Job's "friends" actually tell him he must have done something wrong to be punished like this - but Job suffers inexplicably, and is the first to recognize that he does not deserve what is happening to him.

I've really only studied this, to the extent I've studied it at all, using Jewish sources, so if Christians read the story differently I'd be very interested in hearing more.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with George Bush anymore, except maybe that sometimes bad things (like George Bush being elected?) happen to people (like the country?) who don't deserve them :)