Ahmed Alramly

Suffering

Job is the vessel of calamity on earth, in a human, and the Book of Job
formally serves to reinforce and unravel the way suffering manifests itself on
humanity, and what problems it may pose, both in the visible world, and what it might
reveal about the unseen. Job becomes the canvas on which these issues are drawn –
Job is the popular emblem of patience, of the mark of man’s ability to withstand
suffering, but it is the idea of patience that is demonstrated, through the manner in
which the story is told, which is a uniquely different idea rather than popular belief
would have it be known. As Newsom says, “The ‘patience of Job’ has become a
cliché that obscures the much more complex figure who appears in the biblical book.”
How is this both structurally, and formally addressed?
We are introduced to Job as a man of wealth, and of righteousness. Following
that, we are introduced to God, and the Angels, and Satan. God asks Satan, “Have you
considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a pure and upright
man, one who fears God and turns away from evil.” And Satan, responds, “Is it for
nothing that Job fears God?” The boundaries of Good and Evil are expressed; the
game is revealed. The question of what God gives to man, in its metaphorical
abundance – wealth, children, power – is what Job possesses, and it is Satan, the very
coalescence of Evil, that serves to prove to God that man worships because of earthly
pleasures, and whether the absence of such could prove a man still loyal. Here each
role is both physically, and metaphorically, presented; God as judge, Satan as tempter,
and man as the body in which cosmic forces will come to be tested – through Job. The
story, in its initial verses, set the dimensions of all forces.
Then Job loses everything, after losing his wealth, he says, “Naked I came
from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return there.” And Satan asks God for
permission to let him lose his health. Now Job is stripped bare. The dimensions of the
test are physically manifested on Job, but each part serves as a metaphor.
Immediately, once Job loses all, his wife tells him, “to curse God and die!” Why does
his wife tell him so? Because it is his wife, the physical expression of what is closest
to a man, what is closest to a human (their partner), that in the test of patience, and
faith that you would have to overcome. Job’s patience, Job’s struggle is often limited
to the idea that Job’s loss is simply his loss of land, wealth, health, and his children,
but it is the things that the text does not make explicit that Job is battling. He has to
overcome love, primarily, in the form of his relationship to his wife, as a testament to
his faith. There is an Islamic Sufi text, by Abdul Qadr Jilani, which describes, in his
text, Revelations of the Unseen, what happens to a man in the grip of trial. “When the
servant of God is in the grip of trial he first tries to escape from it with his own
efforts, and when he fails in this, he seeks the help of others from among men such as
kings and men of authority, people of the world, men of wealth, and in the case of
illness and suffering, from physicians and doctors; but if the escape is not secured by
these, he then turns towards his Creator and Lord, the Great and Mighty, and applies
to Him with humility and praise.” If you notice, Job does not do any of this, he does
not seek help, he does not do what a man in the grip of trial would do, and as such, it
demonstrates that it is not what we see Job lose, it is not what we see of Job’s
struggles that reveals the test of patience, it is what we do not see. What the biblical
text makes explicit of Job’s loss, and what it overlooks, formally serves to reinforce
the very nature of man’s struggle – that it is what is hidden that is the battle.
After this, we see Job confronted by his three friends. He has already
overcome the love of his partner in his faith for God. Now, his three friends represent
something else, they’re men of religion, who believe in God, but it is from their faith
that produces an evil he must overcome. His sincerity in his suffering, speaking out
against the three friends who, in their confusion about Job’s condition, demand that it
is Job who must have sinned to deserve the downfall. Their very act of knowing is
sinful, whilst Job’s cries and wishes for death remain sincere. This is a strange, and
complex dimension of faith that Job, once again, becomes the vessel for which they
are to be spoken through. Whilst the three friends act as if they know, and believe Job
to have had to sin to beckon what had befell him, Job remains human. Job does not
pretend to know. And, his cries do not break his patience, but rather his cries are the
result of patience. Patience, then, if the text might suggest, is perseverance. In Job’s
questions of suffering, we see all the ranges of what a human might ask in the grip of
trial. Does that discount him from his faith? No, because of his sincerity in his
questions, and also, he never falls into disbelief; he cries to God, maintaining belief in
Him, and this demonstrates something about the nature of suffering, and of humanity
– it is man’s question of justice that actually renders him pure. If Job were to simply
quietly succumb, where would his humanity be?
The formal structure of the text unravels despair. It follows the nature of how
suffering manifests itself. At first, a man is able to withstand it, and then, slowly, it
breaks him, and then, in that break, they become perplexed, and ask ineffable
questions about the nature of this world and of justice. It is actually in this that man
finds reality, and when God returns things to Job, the physical return of land, wealth
and children is not merely a physical return of blessings to Job, but that Job has now
experienced the full brevity of life, and in that way, has experienced a part of God.