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The book at a glance
Job opens and closes with a short prose story (chapters 1–2 and 42:7–17): a blameless man of the land of Uz, tested in a scene set in the heavenly court, then restored. Between them stands a long poem, the debate of Job with his three friends, the speeches of Elihu, and the LORD's answer from the storm (3:1–42:6). The author is unknown. The story is set in the age of the patriarchs, and most scholars date the book's writing after the exile, perhaps between the sixth and fourth centuries before Christ. The Church receives it, whatever its date and stages, as inspired Scripture, and has always read it as a book about faith tested by suffering. The Catechism says that no quick answer suffices to the question of evil; only the Christian faith as a whole is the answer (CCC 309).
Job is poetry and wisdom, not prediction, and almost none of it is prophecy in the strict sense. It looks forward in three ways: through a promise spoken in the dark (19:25–27), through images Revelation takes up again (the accuser in the court of heaven, Leviathan the monster of the sea), and through Job himself, whom the Fathers read as a type of Christ, the just one who suffers. Each card below names which, and says plainly where a reading is the Church's spiritual sense rather than the text's first meaning.
Key to the labels
How a passage stands
Fulfilled Accomplished in history, above all in Christ.
Unfolding Being worked out now in the life of the Church.
Future Clearly still to come at Christ's return.
Mystery Its meaning or moment is not yet settled.
What kind of passage it is
Prophecy God's word through a prophet, or Christ, about what will come.
Promise A pledge God makes, kept over generations.
Type A person or event that foreshadows Christ or the Church.
Image A picture Scripture returns to and completes at the end.
Apocalypse A vision unveiling history from heaven's side, in symbols.
More on the labels
| Passage | Subject | Standing |
|---|
| 1–2 | The satan in the heavenly court | Fulfilled Unfolding |
| 19:25–27 | “I know that my vindicator lives” | Fulfilled Future Mystery |
| 38–39 | God answers from the storm | Fulfilled Future |
| 40:15–41:26 | Behemoth and Leviathan | Unfolding Future |
| 42:7–17 | Job prays for his friends and is restored | Fulfilled Future |
| Job | Job, a type of the suffering just one | Fulfilled |
The passages
“One day, when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, the satan also came among them.” (1:6)
- Reading
- The NABRE writes “the satan” with a small letter and the article, because in Hebrew it is a title, not yet a name: its note explains that the word means “adversary.” He is a member of the heavenly court who questions Job's goodness: “Is it for nothing that Job is God-fearing?” (1:9). Job's faith holds: “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD!” (1:21). The later books of Scripture make clearer what Job only sketches; the Church sees in Satan, the devil, a fallen angel (CCC 391).
- Fulfilled
- Revelation shows the end of the accuser's place in heaven. After the dragon is thrown down, a voice cries: “For the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who accuses them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10). Jesus says, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky” (Luke 10:18). By the Cross and Resurrection the accuser has lost his case.
- Unfolding
- He still tests the faithful on earth, as he tested Job, and they conquer him “by the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:11). The scene in Job is also a comfort: the adversary can do nothing without God's permission, and the limits are God's (1:12; 2:6).
- See also
- Zechariah 3:1–2, where the satan accuses the high priest Joshua and is rebuked; Prophecy in Zechariah.
“As for me, I know that my vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust.”
- Reading
- Abandoned by friends and family, Job reaches past them all to a go'el, the kinsman who in Israel's law redeems a relative and defends his cause. He goes on: “from my flesh I will see God: I will see for myself, my own eyes, not another's, will behold him” (19:26–27). Older Bibles translate “my Redeemer.”
- Fulfilled
- Christians have heard in these words the risen Christ, the Redeemer who lives. The Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome rendered the passage as a confession of resurrection on the last day, and the Church long prayed it in that form in the Office of the Dead. St. Gregory the Great, in his Moralia on Job (book 14), reads verse 26 as a witness to the resurrection of the body in the same flesh.
- Future
- The hope to see God “from my flesh” waits for the resurrection of the dead, when the redeemed “will look upon his face” (Revelation 22:4).
- Why mystery
- The NABRE's own note is frank: the meaning of the passage is obscure because the Hebrew text has been poorly preserved, and the ancient versions differ. Job says three times that he will see his vindicator but never says when or how; the Vulgate suggests resurrection after death, while the Hebrew and other versions are less specific. The Christian reading is ancient and is held in the Church's prayer, but it reads the words in the full light of Easter, more clearly than Job himself could. This page marks it so.
“Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm and said: Who is this who darkens counsel with words of ignorance?” (38:1–2)
- Reading
- Older translations say “out of the whirlwind.” God does not explain Job's suffering. He shows him creation: “Where were you when I founded the earth?” (38:4), when “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (38:7). He is the one who shut in the sea and said, “Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves stop” (38:11). The answer is not a reason but a presence: the Creator himself has come to speak with Job.
- Fulfilled
- The Gospels show the same mastery of the sea in Jesus. He rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” and the disciples ask, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” (Mark 4:39, 41). The voice that spoke to Job from the storm speaks in the boat.
- Future
- In the new creation, “the sea was no more” (Revelation 21:1): the waters of chaos God held back in Job are gone for good.
“Look at Behemoth, whom I made along with you” (40:15) … “Can you lead Leviathan about with a hook, or tie down his tongue with a rope?” (40:25)
- Reading
- Some scholars identify Behemoth with the hippopotamus and Leviathan with the crocodile, but the NABRE's notes call Behemoth a primeval monster of chaos and Leviathan another chaos monster, and say the point is that only the Lord, not Job, can control the cosmic evil these forces symbolize. Leviathan is “king over all proud beasts” (41:26). The NABRE numbers these verses 40:25–41:26; many other Bibles number them 41:1–34.
- Unfolding
- Isaiah promises that “on that day” the LORD will punish “Leviathan the fleeing serpent” and “slay the dragon in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1). Revelation gathers the old monsters into one picture: the huge dragon, “the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9), and “a beast come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads” (13:1), with a second beast from the earth (13:11). St. Gregory the Great, in the last books of his Moralia on Job, reads Behemoth and Leviathan as figures of the devil. The struggle is still going on.
- Future
- What Job could not tame, God will. The beast and the dragon are finally overthrown (Revelation 19:20; 20:10). God's speech to Job is already a promise that the monster is his creature, not his rival.
- See also
- The Lamb's Victory, chapter 13; Psalm 74:14; Psalm 104:26.
“The LORD also restored the prosperity of Job, after he had prayed for his friends; the LORD even gave to Job twice as much as he had before.” (42:10)
- Reading
- Job confesses, “By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you” (42:5). God then rebukes the friends, who “have not spoken rightly concerning me, as has my servant Job” (42:7), and sends them to Job to offer sacrifice: “let my servant Job pray for you” (42:8). The one they condemned becomes their intercessor.
- Fulfilled
- The Fathers saw here a figure of Christ, the innocent one rejected by his own, who offers sacrifice and prays for those who wronged him (Luke 23:34), and who lives forever to intercede for us (Hebrews 7:25).
- Future
- “Thus the LORD blessed the later days of Job more than his earlier ones” (42:12). The restoration is an image of the end, when God will wipe every tear from their eyes and say, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:4–5). It is not a promise that every sufferer will be repaid in this life; the book itself has refused that easy answer.
“You have heard of the perseverance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, because ‘the Lord is compassionate and merciful.’” (James 5:11)
- Reading
- James holds up Job as the model of those who persevere, and points to how his story ended: in the Lord's mercy. God himself says that Job “still holds fast to his innocence” although he was ruined “for nothing” (2:3). Job is the great Old Testament figure of the just one who suffers without cause and does not let go of God.
- Fulfilled
- St. Gregory the Great, in the preface to his Moralia on Job, reads blessed Job as a figure of the Redeemer and of his body, the Church. Christ is the innocent sufferer in full: rejected, stripped and tested, yet trusting the Father to the end. In him the question Job asked receives its answer, for God revealed his almighty power in the voluntary humiliation and Resurrection of his Son (CCC 272).
- See also
- Isaiah 53, the suffering servant; Psalm 22; Hebrews 5:7–9.
Job and Revelation
The book that asks why the just suffer finds its answer at the end of the Bible, where the Lamb who was slain reigns.
| Job | Revelation |
|---|
| The satan stands among the sons of God (1:6) | The accuser is cast out of heaven (12:10) |
| God sets bounds to the proud waves (38:11) | “The sea was no more” (21:1) |
| Leviathan, king over all proud beasts (41:26) | The dragon and the beast from the sea (12:9; 13:1) |
| “From my flesh I will see God” (19:26) | “They will look upon his face” (22:4) |
| Job's later days blessed more than the first (42:12) | “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5) |
Still to come on this pageFurther passages to add: Job's longing for an arbiter between God and man (9:32–35; compare
1 Timothy 2:5), the question whether the dead will live again (14:13–15), the witness in heaven (16:19–21), the hymn to hidden wisdom (28), and Elihu's angel who ransoms the dying (33:23–28).
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