The Book of Job Literary Elements

Biblical scripture

The land of Uz many centuries before the founding of Israel

Third-person point of view primarily from perspective of Job

Surprisingly direct and journalistic with a notable lack of judgmental commentary despite the events taking place creating an appropriately dark mood for such a tonal intrusion by the storyteller.

Protagonist: Job. Antagonists: the high stakes gambling duo of God and Satan.

There is only one conflict in the story: everyman Job versus an all-powerful deity willing to allow unnecessary suffering simply for the sake of proving how much He is loved.

Rather than bringing back from the dead every innocent collateral victim of the bet who suffers only because they were loved by Job, God pays off Job to square the deal.

The opening lines which outline all that Job has--seven sons, three daughters, thousands of sheep, camels, oxen, and several loyal servants—is catalogued in a way that instantly comes to seem menacing once Satan begins pushing God’s buttons about why Job is such an obedient servant.

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Multiple references are made to “Sheol” which is an allusion to what might be considered the ancient Hebrew concept of Hades. It is a place thought to be underground which Job clearly fears as the worst possible ultimate destination of his suffering.

Some of the most memorable imagery—not necessarily for the most positive of reasons—is God’s rather ostentatious, self-serving, and one might well even say pompous recitation of all the things He has done which make Him so much better than Job: “Do you fasten the bonds of the Pleiades, or loose the bonds of Orion? Do you bring out the Hyades in their season, leading the bear and its satellites? Have you appointed the laws of heaven, do you impose rules on the earth?”

The paradox of the story of Job is its fundamental foundation. Why does Job worship a God who allows him to suffer horrifically for the precise reason that he does worship that very God?

From Chapter 38: “And I set the gauge of the bounds to which it might come up / And set a bar and doors, / And said, `Hither shall you come, / And here shall the pride of your waves be broken?”

“So why did you bring me forth from the womb?” is one of the many examples of Job using “womb” as a synecdoche for not just birth but existing.

God describing Leviathan: "It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud.”