Dialogue: So Job wasn't such a wimpy nerd after all

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

During my mother's occasional and happily brief attacks of religiosity, I did time at Sunday School and served a brief sentence at a Bible-study group.

I was a restless child but, fortunately, hyperactivity hadn't been invented then - and I can remember her taking me to church a number of times.

Before we entered, she would grab my hand, look me in the eye and say: "All I want out of you today is for you to shut up and keep still."

When I was 13, during one of these periods of fervour, I was christened at a private ceremony in the local Anglican church in preparation for the ceremony known as confirmation.

When it came to the part in the Book of Common Prayer where the water was to be splashed about, it noted (in parenthesis) that the vicar should pick up the object of the ceremony and hold him over the font.

As the vicar was very tiny, shorter even than I was at the time, my mother - whose piety never stood a chance against her bizarre sense of humour - was overcome by the absurdity of it all.

I could feel her shaking against me with the kind of rumble that usually preceded volcanic laughter.

She didn't laugh aloud then but did so in retrospect for the rest of her life. The incident ended her flirtations with organised religion.

But during those early spars with Christianity, I formed a number of biblical heroes. I thought of Jesus as a kind of super Gandhi, but Job, I decided, was the ultimate wimp - nerd of the Word, sook of the Book.

You'll all know the story of the Book of Job, as it has been told in simplistic, synoptic form by generations of Bible-obsessives to impress youngsters that faith should be blind and behaviour before God should be abject.

Job was a man of means with lots of kids, camels, goats, tents and other worldly goods.

He was a good man to boot - and God, at Satan's bidding, decided to, indeed, put the boot in.

Job's kids were all killed, he lost everything he possessed and was given a loathsome and painful skin disease. But he survived all these travails, his faith never wavering, hence the cliche, "The patience of Job," and God restored him to kids, camels, goats, tents and so on.

Over the Christmas break - because I find John Grisham too hard to follow - I read the Book of Job in a new translation by an American Hebrew scholar, Raymond P. Scheindlin.

I then read it again in the Folio Society's literary version of the Authorised Version.

In a few hours of reading, Job the Nerd - patient, boring, servile - was transformed into Job the Magnificent, impatient with the pious, stroppy with God and, in the end (in my opinion) a realist, a fatalist, who decides to go with the flow.

The story is a kind of verse drama, like Socratic dialogue without the cool rationality. In the beginning, Satan has a point: it's easy to be good and loyal to your benefactor when you are rich and powerful.

After Job is struck down, friends come to console him but gradually they reveal they're secretly glad about his fate because it makes them feel superior and pious.

So they lecture him, telling him ominously that he must have been a bad man or else God would not have punished him. They preach and he spiritedly rebuts.

Far from being the submissive, patient, travesty of a Job with whom we are so often presented, he defies their arguments and calls on God to front up and tell him why he, a reasonably good bloke, has been so put upon.

When God does show up, Job realises the ways of the world are beyond his full understanding, that he can't win and, anyway, God makes it clear that he prefers Job's stroppiness and honesty to his self-satisfied, pious, erstwhile mates.

That's an oversimplification of a beautiful, subtle moral tale that I will read again several times over the next few weeks and wonder at.

The Book of Job is about power, vanity, injustice, innocence. It asks eternal questions - Why do bad people prosper? Why do the innocent suffer? - and because that's the way life is, leaves most of them hanging in the air for us to consider.

Those who blame the poor for their poverty and the disadvantaged for their folly should read and consider. The poem never mentions heaven or an afterlife but concerns itself with humanity on Earth.

Scholars seem to agree that the story goes back beyond Israel to the very earliest days of monotheism and, in the same way Homer took his stories from earlier oral versions, some magnificent poet wrote down the Book of Job about 2500 years ago.

Because of the story's long-ago origins and because Satan carries too heavy an emotional baggage, Scheindlin decided to call the bad guy The Accuser.

I like that. In other ways, too, he restores the story, rescuing it from the preachers.

He says also that the poem in classical Hebrew is supremely beautiful, up there with Shakespeare.

I can believe that.