Job owns seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yokes of oxen, three daughters, seven sons, and a wife-in short, prosperity. In addition, he is a respectful and religious man who worships God and lives a chaste life. However, God chooses to test Job and sets a list of punishments for him, who undergoes these challenges throughout the book of Job. There is a certain contradiction in a deity that punishes those who obey, and the story emphasizes the omniscience of God’s unique role in Job’s life. God’s seemingly capricious nature demonstrates the usage of power by an omnipotent figure, in terms of beneficence, retributive justice, and exploitation.
One of the many roles of God is being the role of the guardian, albeit a fearful deity. The basic tenant is such that God protects those who are morally good. During the prologue, Job is “a man of perfect integrity, who feared God and avoided evil” (Mitchell 5) and is blessed for that. At the beginning of the book, God provides Job with prosperity and well mannered children because Job is his humble servant. In
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God’s seemingly capricious nature demonstrates the usage of power by an omnipotent figure, in terms of beneficence, retributive justice, and exploitation. At first, God is a benevolent guardian. However, when his more human emotions, such as doubt, take over, he becomes an arbitrary marker of justice. Throughout, God’s omnipotence is made clear in regards to Job’s negligible control over his own fate. God’s ending justice system makes it seem that if one’s property and children are literally replaced, everything is fine. The summation reinforces God’s supremacy and man’s perpetual subordination to deity figures. God’s imposed supremacy remains unchanged, as does man’s inability to control one’s own destiny, and the end of this Biblical chapter leaves Job in a similar predicament as when the reader