Well, this project usually gets me hate mail, but here's more of it anyway. Before you send a complaint, do go read the original, Job Chapters 30 and 31. This is takes liberties -- big ones -- but it is an honest response to a challenging reading.
"Job's Indictment" is probably best read after reading "Job's Trial" (which isn't posted yet -- soon, I think) and "Job's Plea" (which is here). It's more or less part three of three.
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Job's Indictment
I had a hope
I would die in my bed
I thought my roots
would spread to the waters
I thought my children
would reach to the sky
Like Babel I stood
and the Lord turned to look at me
And now I am ruined
unstrung like a bow
My body is blackened
my hands crabbed like scorpions
My wealth is gone
I gnaw bitter roots
My children are dead
No human thing left to me
I am brother to jackals
companion to owls
I am friendless, defenceless
and I am innocent
If my hand has done anything
tear it out by the root
If my mouth has said anything
fill it with clay
Where will He stop
my limitless God
Ruin the land, Lord
turn wheat to bramble
Stop up the songs
unstring the harps
Dry up the rivers
strip bare the sky
Lay open the world
to fire and shadow
Stop, oh my Lord –
Oh God, my God – Stop
I have done nothing
I hold to my innocence
I demand it, God: write out my indictment
I will wear it like a paper crown
I will walk out to meet you
Like a prince of the morning
It occurs to me that I should note where my "big liberties" amount to outright theft:
"brother to jackals / companion to owls" will be familiar to many -- it appears in several different biblical translations, notable the King James. "ostriches" would be a better literal translation than "owls," but who can resist "owls."
"crown" is another traditional -- and poor -- translation. "Diadem" is an alternative. Job really offers to wear his list of sins (which he reasons must be long -- and which would have been written on cloth or hide) as a "turban." But again, "crown" is so evocative of childishness, celebration, foolishness -- I had to expand on it a bit.
I like it. You realize that Job never does provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of bad things happening to good people.
Can I read _Job: A Comedy of Justice_ for background instead?
Eric: Not only does *Job* not give a satisfactory answer to the "bad things happen to good people" question (is there one?) -- it is an explicit challenge to the accepted notions of the time.
Meg: Heinlein? Only if you take your anti-fascism shot first.
But you only have to read background if you're going to complain. I just think the people angry at me for "protraying God as power-mad bully tormenting the innocent" should possibly read the Biblical *Job* -- and make sure they don't have the same problem with that.
You'd be hard pressed to find evidence to the contrary in that
"good old book". What deserves inverstigation more is that whole concept of "innocent".
"is there one?" [Christain answer to the problem of pain] I don't know but C.S. Lewis made a good stab at it in his book "The Problem of Pain." And Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his "Prison Letters" gave the following:
"God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who makes us live in the world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him we live without God. God allows himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way in which he can be with us and help us. Matthew 8:17 makes it crystal clear that it is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and his suffering...only a suffering God can help".
Still having not read the background chapters recently, I'll have to rely on my education from when I was young.
To me, the whole point of Job was to teach perseverence in suffering. And that suffering can come from God, for no reason deemed correct to mortals. One cannot know why God does things, much less use the name of God. It's very Old Testament.
It's difficult to understand the correct nature of God's role in Job's tale from a modern perspective. However, there's one thing that remains true and hits home: The difficulties of Job's suffering, and the sheer "Why?" that comes with it. "Why me?" "Why now?" "Why more?" "Why, God, why?"