Many people see the story of Job in the Bible as really weird. Some parts of the story paints a picture of a God who just gets a kick out of toying with people’s lives unprovoked. I’ve seen even theologians twisting themselevs into a pretzel to figure this one.
Here’s another angle. Because Bible stories are polysemous (i.e., they can be understood at multiple levels because they are compressed narratives), it is easy to overlook Job’s default outlook on life and how this might have contributed to his situation.
Every morning, as the story goes, Job would wake up and the first thing he would do is offer sacrifices to atone for the sins of his children.
Like, it’s not even 8 am yet, what sins could his kids have possibly committed that early in the day?
And to make matters worse, Job wasn’t atoning for things like lying, anger, selfishness, or lust – you know, regular human foibles. No, he went super hard:
“Perhaps my children have…cursed God in their hearts.” Wow. Just wow.
The consensus among Bible scholars is that the story of Job is set around the same time as the era of the patriarchs (i.e., Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). I’ve read through the entire Bible quite a few times and, as far as I can tell, there’s not even one record of these guys offering sacrifice for sin. If anything, they often sacrificed as a commemorative act of worship.
Not Job though. His default outlook towards life was one that only saw the worst case scenario. He even says that much later in the story when a series of misfortune hits him back-to-back:
“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.”
At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with being prepared, but I feel there’s an energy you attract when you’re always fixated on the negative and everything that could go wrong. And maybe that’s what the story of Job is getting at if you read it at a psychological level.
