“Now there was a day when the Sons of the Elohim came to present themselves before Jehovah,and Satan came also with them.” (Job I:6)
The Book of Job is supposed to be one of the oldest parts of the Old Testament and it is certainly one of the weirdest. Jehovah, one of the Elohim, a Divine Potter responsible for creating the Golem-Adam is giving an audience to the sons of the Elohim. Satan seems to be one of them, a kind of a roving ambassador, whose job seems to be to examine the loyalty of human beings to Jehovah. He is a challenger and examiner of men’s free will. Jehovah provokes Satan to tempt a perfect human worshipper, Job of Uz, a rich and pious man, who “feared the Elohim and avoided evil”. From then on it seems that Satan and Jehovah are taking bets on Job’s losing or winning his fierce battle against Satan’s authorized assaults on him. Satan has a low opinion of human beings in general and bets on Job’s greed (financial ruin), pride in his family (death of all members permitted by loving Jehovah) and physical suffering (nasty boils and no pharmaceutical companies to offer drugs with side-effects). The ethical and moral aspects of Jehovah’s experiments on Job seem a bit questionable though, as in the standard Bollywood movies, the happy ending is duly provided to make us feel good. If Jehovah was the all-knowing God, then he would have known the outcome of Job’s trial in advance and, therefore, the whole “betting shop” exercise was unfair to Satan, whose naivety appears awesome. On the other hand, if human free will is the great unknown, then both Jehovah and Satan were simply trying to find out how much a man can suffer before he turns nasty and starts snarling at God.
