The main wisdom I found in the Book of Job is to stay faithful and hopeful in difficult times. In chapter 1 after Job lost nearly everything, it seemed like his life was over. Job’s friends even gave signs of mourning when they came to visit him: “they wept aloud and tore their robes and threw dust over their heads. They sat there on the ground beside him for seven days and seven nights. To Job they never spoke a word, for they saw how much he was suffering. Even though Job kept his faith in God, he repeatedly cursed the day of his birth and said that he wished he hadn’t been born. In the end, God gave Job twice as much as he had before. Even though Job still believed in God, he did not seem to have any hope that his life would improve. I interpreted the Book of Job as teaching that God will reward those who stay faithful, so it is important to have hope and believe that he will make things right in the end.
Personally, I am conflicted about how God’s relationship with humanity is portrayed in this book. First, I think it is unethical for God to have allowed all of Job’s children, servants, and animals to die simply for the purpose of testing Job’s faith. I think that it would’ve been better if God had simply taken away some of Job’s material possessions, but honestly I find the whole premise of allowing Satan to make an innocent person miserable just to see if they stay faithful to be wrong.
Additionally, even though God gave Job more children and twice as many material possessions as he had before, that doesn’t necessarily take away all the pain and trauma from when he lost everything. In other passages we have read, the value and importance of human life is stressed because humans are created in the image of God, but in this passage, human life is treated as expendable. After their death, Job’s children are replaced with more children, but I would imagine that Job still would have had lingering feelings of grief and guilt about his first children.
Anna Janzen 
I had similar thoughts on the story of Job and agree with you in that this book represents the importance of faithfulness to God in all parts of life. I thought that your last paragraph was very interesting and not something I had thought much about, especially in how you talked about human life being expendable. Normally, we wouldn’t think that God would so easily allow for this to happen, so it does make me wonder how this relates to other stories in the Bible where God has shown great amounts of mercy, even to people who have done much worse things than Job had done in his entire life.
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I also think the portrait of God in this book is unreasonable, which is way more different from “J” sources description, the picture of humanistic God. It seemed that in this book, God became a cold and distant figure—the payoffs of twice than before is not helpful at all. The only thing that left in Job’s heart, from my perspective, is fear, instead of appreciation or love. Conversely, maybe the disasters falling on Job is because of Satan’s commands and God was really care about his people consistently.
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It is very interesting to see that many other people thought about how the pain that Job went through will not go away just like I did. Personally, I was somehow reminded of how God forgives us for so many sins. Honestly, I believe that I would be in worse conditions compared to Job if I was punished for every one of my sins. If God forgave Job for many of his sins, can Job find the heart to move on forward with a clean heart despite what he went through?
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