Literature and history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 20 The Problem of Evil.

In this show we're going to talk about the Book of Job.

The Book of Job is the first freestanding story in Christian Bibles, a self-enclosed narrative

42 chapters in length that ends the gigantic saga of the historical books.

Job is a book that readers tend to remember.

My generation of literary critics were trained to be cautious relativists.

We don't talk anymore about timeless truths.

We don't hold authors up anymore and say they are quote, not of an age but for all time.

Close quote as Ben Johnson once said of Shakespeare.

We don't build hierarchies of superiority and talk about great works or masters these mythic

heroic figures who stand outside of time and illuminate the unchanging realities of the human

condition.

We understand that one person's dog girl is another person's James Joyce and vice versa.

We understand that something like Macbeth is only intelligible within the register of a very specific culture.

And we're all the better for it and I wouldn't have it any other way.

But occasionally, something like the Book of Job walks into the room.

And for the cultures that grew out of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, the Book of

Job asks questions that were central to human culture 2,500 years ago, and questions

that are still central to our culture today.

As scholar David Klein observes, quote, the book of Job is perhaps the most sustained piece of theological

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