Was it unfair for God to allow Job to suffer over what was basically an argument between God and Satan?

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To me the real ethical question posed by Job’s story isn’t that God made Job suffer. That’s kiddie stuff. People make each other suffer all the time. They make all kinds of justifications for it and some of them are better justifications than others. Justify God’s actions, or don’t and call him evil, however you want.

Buddhism and other traditions hold that nobody should hold on to their position or station in life, these things are not yours, so if they’re taken away you’ve lost nothing. If God took everything away from me, I’d mourn for a bit but whatevs you know? It wasn’t mine to begin with.

No the real question of ethics in the Bible is what happens after God’s little game with Satan is concluded. God gives Job a new wife, seven sons, and three daughters, said to be the most beautiful in the land, I’m sure that’s relevant somehow, and more wealth than he’d had before this little journey. This sort of reward/punishment math is all over the place in the Bible, it seems to be a necessary part of the covenant, God may taketh away, but despaireth not, he’ll just make up for it later!

No Christian would accept this as an even or better trade. Nobody wants to think of the second wife they had after their first dies in an accident as a reward from God. “Oh sorry that Janet died, she was the love of my life, but Mindy has bigger tits so thanks God for that! Score one for you buddy!” But this seems to have tacitly happened back then all the time, enough all over the various books of the Bible that I really started to wonder what the heck is going on.

I’m not all that sure we can blame God for this either. It may not be a two-way street as far as who gets punished, who gets rewarded and how much, but at the same time, a deal between two entities isn’t just governed by the terms. God’s justice may look weird and crazy to us now, but every deal made by every person or group of people throughout history, despite the seeming one-sidedness it often appears to be, is made because both parties have something to gain. Otherwise one party just takes what they want by force.

If the Mongols show up at your door and tell you, give us 25% of your farm yield every year or we’ll burn it to the ground, that’s a one-sided arrangement, but you still have a choice in the situation. There may be more to it too. Maybe your previous rulers demanded 40%. Maybe the Mongols only show up every 5 years and only take 2 of your sons to war and 3 of your daughters to be wives to foreigners, but the other guys wanted so many it was hard to keep your farm running.

Force, even overwhelming force, does not remove free will from the equation. And in God’s case, He might have a huge stick to threaten the Israelites with, but the Israelites have an even bigger one.

What’s that you ask? Well, they can just stop believing in God. They can simply all collectively decide that still being interested in this religion business isn’t really worth it and find some other reason to explain the bad things that happen to them. Blind chance or some other religion’s conception of divine justice.

So these people decided that God took these things from Job, and they also decided that giving Job prettier daughters to make up for it balanced the books.

That’s what keeps me up at night when it comes to the Bible. That at the end of the day, moral truth really does come from God, because if you left humans up to it, we’d sell our own souls down the river for a wife with bigger tits.