THERE IS GOOD REASON why Christian theologians consider theodicy the unsolvable theological issue. The reason is this: It is unsolvable. Yet this does not stop generation after generation of theological scholars from trying to solve it. And the biblical text they most often reference in this Sysiphian task is the book of Job.
John Walton, author of this NIVAC commentary on Job, breaks the mold of these kinds of Job commentaries. To ask why God blesses, or doesn’t bless, the righteous, or why God punishes, or doesn’t punish, the wicked is to ask the wrong question when trying to understand this classic work. God’s justice is ultimately unfathomable to us. God is just—we know that by faith—but we can’t know how God is just. Thus, the book of Job does not answer that question, Walton avers; rather, it answers another question. Our task in reading Job is to read it as the answer to an unspoken question and then from the answer infer the correct question.
This approach seems to make superfluous a lot of folk theological wisdom we have learned about Job over the years. We learn a lot about Middle Eastern approaches to theodicy—all futile, of course. We have all gained some solace in knowing that undeserved suffering is not ours alone to bear—others experience it too. But the genius of Walton’s exposition is that once we get the core question right, all of this other wisdom we have learned about Job remains just as meaningful to us, but with a slightly different twist and a more satisfying context—the context set by the right question.
I know. You probably want to know what the right question is. Patience. Have patience because in addition to Walton’s groundbreaking insights regarding the right question, he tells us all we need to know about this somewhat enigmatic book. Unlike many books of the Bible, we don’t know the author of Job or its date of composition. We do not really know whether it is based on historical events (and a historical person named Job) or whether it is a purely literary construction—a “thought experiment,” as Walton labels it. We don’t really know why the Hebrew language used in it is so complex. We recognize its genre as wisdom literature, but this is of little help because it is head and shoulders above other Near Eastern wisdom literature of this sort in terms of quality and sophistication. All of this Walton discusses expertly, and the reader comes away feeling informed.
Please notice that this is the only one of the forty volumes of the NIV Application Commentary published thus far that has a second author on the title page. Part of Professor Walton’s convictions about this book is that even if it is a “thought experiment,” it cannot be fully understood without relating it to real life—not just the legendary Job, but someone we know, here and now, in the twenty-first century. Enter Kelly Lemon Vizcaino. Kelly’s relating of the lessons of Job to her own personal experiences of suffering appear throughout the book. “She has added an element of reality that is necessary for a work like this.” Suffering is not, in the end, a philosophical, or even a theological problem, but a human problem. We all suffer, some more than others, but the quantity really doesn’t matter. What matters is what suffering teaches us about God. But there I am getting dangerously close to telling you what the real question is, the one that Job answers.
So what’s the right question that the book of Job answers? What is the right question we should be asking? Read the book—first the book of Job, and then this commentary.