I just read the Book of Job -- a very confusing book. Probably, textually, very mangled, because sometimes passages stray off-topic and it feels like their are extracts from the psalms and various other material (possibly prophetic?) jumbled in. But the overarching structure is somewhat troubling -- Job keeps asking for a hearing from God, charging God of injustice, contending that the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Meanwhile his friends can only answer that God is just, putting forth all the usual arguments -- that the wealth of the wicked amounts to nothing, that they lose everything by God's hand, that suffering is visited upon their children. Job rebuts them -- what is it to the wicked if their children suffer? Death visits everyone, both wicked and righteous, and life seems in some ways to be the result of the arbitrary visitations of fortune. At this his friends can only accuse Job of iniquity and Job can do nothing more than defend himself -- the battle becomes one of words, but wisdom is lost, wisdom is that man must "fear God"...and the book leaves off there. God and his boisterous young supporter are alternately mystic and bully; God created the immense and flesh-rending behemoth, but is he just or merely all powerful? God created the luminaries, the heavens, and the earth, but what is this order if the world of human affairs is possessed by moral uncertainty and chaos? What piqued me most was this notion of wisdom -- something men cannot know, something God himself has measured and plumbed -- but beyond God, existing independently of him. God's contention that he creates order resolves into chaos, wisdom is unknowable, and although Job's fortunes are restored twofold for his suffering, we are left in desolation.

What do you think? Who wins?