Read Job twice: once in the King James Version (1611) for the thunder of the poetry, once in Robert Alter's translation, first published in The Wisdom Books (2010), for what the Hebrew is actually doing. Expect a prose frame around thirty-nine chapters of verse — an argument about innocent suffering that Scripture lets end without a verdict we can hold.
How Is the Book of Job Put Together?
Chapters 1–2 and 42 are old prose: a wager, in effect, between God and “the satan” — in this book a member of the divine court, an accuser, not yet the devil of later theology. Chapters 3–31 are verse: three rounds of speeches between Job and three friends, with chapter 28 standing apart as a poem in praise of inaccessible Wisdom. Chapters 32–37 bring the young Elihu; chapters 38–41 bring God, out of the whirlwind.
The frame's Job is the famous patient one; the poem's Job curses the day of his birth in chapter 3 and spends thirty chapters demanding a hearing. The friends — Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar — defend the arithmetic of retribution: suffering follows sin, so search your conscience. Job knows the arithmetic is false in his case and says so, at volume. The book's energy is the collision.
Where Do Readers Usually Stumble?
At chapter 38. God answers out of the whirlwind with questions, not explanations — “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2, King James Version) — then describes Behemoth and Leviathan at leisure, and never once mentions the wager. Readers who wanted justice get a tour of creation's wildness instead, and the epilogue's restored fortunes read like an affront after the poetry.
Three particular snags. The satan of the prologue has the article in Hebrew — the accuser, a functionary, nothing like the later devil; reading later demonology back in blurs the book. The epilogue restores Job's fortunes and gives him new children, which readers since antiquity have found either tender or intolerable, since children are not replaceable. And Elihu's late speeches (chapters 32–37) read like an insertion; many critical scholars treat them as a later addition, and the reader who skips them on a first pass loses little.
Which Translation of Job Should You Read?
Three good answers, in ascending order of strangeness: the King James Version (1611), whose Job carries some of the finest verse in English — “For I know that my redeemer liveth” (Job 19:25); the New Revised Standard Version (1989, revised 2021), clear and classroom-standard; and Robert Alter's translation in The Wisdom Books (2010) or his complete Hebrew Bible (2018), with an introduction that treats the poet as a poet.
Alter's argument is that Job's Hebrew is the most abrasive in the Bible — coinages, wild images, grammar pushed to its limits — and that the King James's grandeur smooths the abrasion into sublimity. Reading both versions is not indecision; it is the shortest course in what translation does to extremity.
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How Should a First Reading Go?
- Chapters 1–3, slowly: the wager, then the first curse. The book's terms are all set here.
- The speech cycles, one round at a sitting. Trust the poem's repetitions; they escalate rather than stall.
- Chapter 28 alone — the poem on Wisdom — then Elihu, skimmed or skipped without guilt.
- Chapters 38–42 aloud, in the King James Version first. The whirlwind is a soundscape.
- A second pass in Alter, with his notes, to see what the sounds were carrying.
What Should You Read Alongside Job?
- William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826) — twenty-one engravings that read the book's whole architecture in pictures.
- Archibald MacLeish's J.B. (1958), the argument restaged as modern verse drama; it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1959.
- Gustavo Gutiérrez's On Job (English 1987), a liberation-theologian's reading that takes the poor man's friends to task.
- C. G. Jung's Answer to Job (1952) — psychology's quarrel with God's answer; read with interest and suspicion, in that order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote the Book of Job?
Nobody knows. Most scholars read an old folktale — the prose frame — expanded by a much later poet of extraordinary power; the dates proposed for the poem range widely, and honesty consists in saying so.
Is the satan the devil?
Not in this book. Here “the satan” is an accredited member of the heavenly court whose job is accusation; the devil of later theology is a later development. Job's translator matters most exactly here.
Does God answer Job's question?
He answers, but not the question. The whirlwind speeches confront Job with creation's scale and wildness rather than explaining his suffering; whether that is an answer, a refusal, or a reframing is the book's live wound, and readers have taken all three positions.
Why does Job get everything back?
The epilogue returns to the folktale's own logic, where restoration balances loss. Most readers of the poem find the ending insufficient on purpose — the frame closes, the argument stays open, and the book seems to know the difference.