“Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?...God understand the way to it, and he knows its place.” Job 28:12, 23

This year marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of my attempt to be rid of this part of the Bible. Yes, although I am a preacher, I'm like you--there are parts of the Bible I like and parts which I like not. Usually, the verses I like are those that elicit from me the exclamation—“That's what I've always thought!”

The Book of Job is not one of them. I first met Job back in 1965, my sophomore year. One meets the strangest people in undergraduate religion courses. The story begins by introducing Job, “A man in the land of Uz,...blameless and upright, who feared God, and turned away from evil” (1:1). This is the Bible's way of saying that Job was a good ma…