Job
About this date: Dates are broad scholarly estimates of composition or final editing, not dates of the events narrated. Traditional attributions and scholarly assessments can differ.
Job places an innocent sufferer's protest against friends who insist on a simple connection between conduct and fortune. Prose framing, poetic debate, divine speeches, and the closing judgment must be read together rather than reduced to a formula for explaining another person's pain.
Historical context
The ancestral-looking setting does not establish Job's composition date or identify the poet. Hebrew and Greek Job also differ in length and wording, a difference already discussed by Origen.
Key points
- The reader knows about the opening heavenly scene while Job does not.
- The friends' confident explanations are not all the book's own teaching.
- The divine speeches enlarge the horizon without giving Job a simple causal explanation of his losses.
Scripture
- Job 1:1-2:13 — The prose frame establishes Job's integrity and the limits of what he knows.
- Job 19:23-27 — Job's appeal for a vindicator has a complex textual and interpretive history; later resurrection readings do not exhaust its setting.
- Job 38:1-18 — The divine response questions Job about creation rather than endorsing the friends' diagnosis.
- James 5:7-11 — James appeals to Job's endurance in an exhortation about patience and mercy.
Primary sources
First Clement 17 introduces its example:
First Clement uses Job as an example of humility. This shows early Christian reception, not a solution to every question raised by Job's poetry.
Job was a righteous man, and blameless, truthful, God-fearing, and one that kept himself from all evil.
Passage context and translation
The letter cites Job among examples of humility, moving from his integrity to words about human frailty. The excerpt is the letter's biblical quotation, not an independent biography of Job or an explanation of every speech in the book.
Sources and further reading
- Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles: canonical books and Apocrypha
- Catholic Catechism §120: canon and book list
- First Clement 17: Job among examples of humility
- Job: complete public-domain WEB text
- Origen, Letter to Africanus 3-4: Greek and Hebrew Job
- Orthodox Church in America: canon of Scripture
- Orthodox Church in America: Old Testament historical books
- USCCB Bible introductions: historical and literary notes