Have you heard of Job, the good man who suffered a terrible series of calamities that provoked a severe trial of his faith in God? In a single day he lost most of his financial assets to marauding brigands, and his grown-up children all died when a cyclone destroyed the house where they had come together for a family celebration.
At this stage, observers could have remarked, ‘At least you’ve got your health.’ But before much longer he was covered in painful boils from head to foot, itching so badly that he scraped at his skin with a fragment of pottery. He faced the agonising possibility that God had repaid his faithful service with random cruelty.
A question nagged at him, ‘If this is how God treats his friends, is he worth serving?’ The fascination of the book is to see the way that Job came through to renewed confidence and trust in God. Now, however, I want to look at an aspect of his life before all the disasters came upon him.
Who was Job?
Job was probably not a Jewish man. There is no genealogy linking him with the covenant people. He is called in the Bible ‘the greatest of all the people of the East’, which suggests that he lived in the lands east of the River Jordan. At the same time, this title suggests that he was a very prominent man among his own people. In a society of pastoral farmers, the vast number of animals that he owned meant that he was very wealthy.
