What Job Saw from the Dunghill

Note: Here I offer one final preview of my new book, Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees (Orbis). It will be out in about three weeks. I will be personally mailing a signed copy of this book to my Founding Friends here on Substack.

In chapter 8, we looked at how Job’s unmerited suffering was having one salutary effect—he was now noticing the misery of the wretched of the earth in a way that seemed likely to be new for him. Having his privilege shattered, moving from the penthouse to the dunghill outside of town, Job was now viewing life from below rather than above. Things look different from the city dump, where the destitute gather, than from the city gate, where the leaders rule.

In Job 24, Job again demonstrates in a profound way his empathetic engagement with the suffering of the most destitute and powerless of this world. His lament over their misery is mixed with condemnation of the unjust actions of those who create such misery.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, in On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, describes the text of Job 24 as “the most radical and cruel description of the wretchedness of the poor that is to be found in the Bible. . . . The description is full of detail and shows careful attention to the concrete situation of the poor.”

Carol Newsom strongly concurs, adding, “There is no stronger indictment of God in the book of Job than the depiction in chap. 24 of divine indifference in the face of the pervasive misery, abuse, and injustice endured by the most vulnerable people.”

Job 24 begins with a kind of topic sentence (24:1): “Why are times for judgment not reserved by Shaddai?” He then spends most of the rest of the chapter describing so many human actions worthy of negative divine judgment, along with so many miserable human sufferers worthy of divine justice-making.