R' Eisemann / ArtScroll Tanach Series
The Intricacies of Job
R' Eisemann states: The one, mauor and unforgiveable error that Job - and indeed his three friends had made, was to trivialize God, to create Him, as it were, in their own image.
We are challenged by our own limitations by the events in this book. There is a world that surrounds us that is not apparent through our senses. Job had nothing physical to work with in understanding the problems that occurred.
If we could really grasp the message of Job, nothing would ever truly bother us again. This is a quest.
Job 1:1 There was a man....
This is not very descriptive. At least when we first hear of Abraham, we get his geneology. So we begin not knowing anything about the man. Was he a Jew? Was he a gentile? Besides this, we have chronology to tell us exactly when Avraham was born, 1948 years after the creation of Adam HaRishon.
Perhaps this cryptic beginning keeps the focus on Job alone? Bava Basra 15a tries to place Job in an historical context, but it doesn't resolve any maklokis. Rambam Moreh Nevuchim 22 discusses particular time-frames from Avraham to the return from Babylon.
Is it factual, is it a parable?
Rabbi Eisemann: Even though there seems much to commend the opinion that the book is a parable, such an assumption is not without difficulties. Chief among these is the argument that if indeed it is a tale with no basis in actual events, we would have expected the author (whom Bava Basra 14b amd 15a identifies as Moses) to have chosen Jews as Protagonists, and the Torah as the thought-world within which the ideas of Job and his friends are formed.
The main idea that place it preTorah is that nowhere is halacha, or Torah Instruction noted in the possible trangression that could have created the effects Job was realizing.
I've run out of time.
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