Oh, God.

I'm thinking about my seminar essay a lot, which means I'm thinking about Job and Jonah a lot. They both fascinate me, and I think I'm beginning to figure out why.

One of the common threads between the two books, in my opinion, is that on some level they're about obedience to god. They give entirely different messages about it: Job is all sorts of pious, and gets temporarily screwed over for it. Jonah is (presumably, as he's a prophet) pious at one point, but then disobeys god, and we don't know how his life ends up. I think he at least survives, but there's not really anything in the text to say so. It just ends, like that, and we don't get any closure. Whether or not that's significant - that Jonah doesn't get closure while Job does - I can't say. Is it supposed to tell us something about how we should act towards disobeying God? A warning? I don't know.

I think I'm going to write about Job only, though, and I think my main premise is going to be that it's a cheap cop-out and doesn't tell us crap about anything but the nature of God. God, for his part, has pretty much given up on us by Job's time. Job suffers. There's no logical reason for it, there's no explanation, and the text tells us this. There's nothing rational about it: we get a big long spiel in which God says, "Hey, I kick ass, so shut up, Job, and stop bitching at me. I can do whatever I want."

I don't know - maybe that's an explanation there? That god does whatever he wants to and the well-being of humans doesn't really matter to him? I can see how that would kind of depress a lot of people who are theists, since I understand the appeal of telling yourself that there's a god. On the other hand, maybe it's the best explanation there is.