The people of Israel lived in Egypt for a long time: perhaps 430 years, as suggested by Exodus 12:40-41. They were not slaves for that entire period: they began as honored guests (Genesis 47.5-6), but eventually were enslaved by one of the Pharoahs, not named in the biblical text (Exodus 1:8-14).

The book of Exodus devotes only 15 verses to this span of four centuries. This is quite a difference from Genesis, which takes 39 chapters to record four generations: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his four wives, and Joseph and all his brothers. Many stories are told about major and minor characters within these four generations. But for the four centuries in Egypt, only two names are recorded: the midwives Shiphrah and Puah. There are no miracles, no appearances of God, no stories of brave leaders, no prayers cited. Just hard forced labor, year after year, decade after decade.

I find it astonishing that they managed to keep faith alive throughout these bitter years. A mother teaches her young children to pray to the Lord, to set their hearts in faithfulness to the Lord, for the day will come when the Lord will set our people free. The children grow up and have children and grandchildren of their own, and they explain to their grandchildren, “The Lord is our God, and we will be faithful to him always, because some day our Lord will indeed set us free.”

“But when will this happen?” each little one wonders. Some of those children who heard the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from their great-grandparents are now passing those stories along to their great-grandchildren, and this promised freedom and restoration still has not happened. It would be so easy for this religious identity to fade away. And yet somehow, in the midst of deep suffering, the children of Israel continued to believe in the faithfulness of Yahweh: through all their days they believed in God’s promises, and never saw them fulfilled.

It was in this situation, I believe, that the story of Job was created. The overall theme of the book is this: if God is good, if God loves us, why do our people continue to experience this deep tragic suffering? Many people suppose that God is always just and fair in giving everyone what they deserve in this life: God pours out blessings for the good people, and pours out punishments for the bad people. We all have seen many many exceptions to that principle: mean and cruel people living happy lives, while kind and gracious people face crippling tragedies. It is a wonder that this God-blesses-the-good-and-punishes-the-bad theory survives, in the face of all this counter evidence.

We should note the following items.

1. The book of Exodus is the beginning of the narrative of leaving slavery in Egypt and journeying to the Promised Land. It includes the story of Moses, the presentation of the Covenant with God we call the Ten Commandments, and all kinds of regulations. It’s hard to see evidence of any awareness of this material in the book of Job, suggesting that Job comes before Exodus.

2. The sacrificial system of the Old Testament depends on priests, all of them directly descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses and Miriam. Job offers sacrifices on behalf of his children, with no indication that he is authentically a priest descended from Aaron, or any indication that he should have been, if the sacrifices were to be legitimate. This again suggests that the Job narrative predates the story of the Exodus.

These character names and relationships sound pretty obscure to most people today: but if the narrative of Genesis was the main source of your knowledge of “where our family came from,” then you would recognize these names, and you would picture the Job narrative as a story about people related to you, but distantly. This suggests, then, that the narrative of Job comes after the book of Genesis.

The majority of Old Testament scholars propose that Job was written some time between the 7th and 4th centuries BC, offering some reasons that seem cogent and some that seem less so. Early rabbis suggested that the book might come from the time of Abraham, or at least the time of the patriarchs Abraham – Isaac – Jacob. The fourth-century AD church historian Eusebius proposed that Job was written before the time of Moses (ca 1350 BC); the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus proposed the book came from the time of King Solomon (ca 900 BC). There are similar stories of suffering and restoration in Canaanite, Babylonian, and Sumerian literature. It is, all in all, a complex question, too large to cover in depth here.

When we are discussing chronology, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the distinction between “when the story takes place” and “when the story gets written down.” Let us propose two historians. Historian A writes a history of the American Civil War in 1870; Historian B writes one a century later in 1970. How will we shelve the two books in our home library, if we want to keep them in chronological order? We could consider them by subject: we will group together all books about the Civil War. Or we could consider them by date of writing, which would place books from the 1870s several shelves away from books from the 1970s. An argument could be made either way that one method was “more chronological” than the other. But within this year’s reading of the Bible, I will endeavor to keep to “when the story takes place” as the basis for the chronology. In that regard, we can leave for another time the question of “when the story gets written down.”

In summary, then: the book of Job includes evidence of names of descendants of the family of Abraham, which suggests a date later than the narrative of Genesis; it also shows no evidence of any awareness of either the narrative or the priestly system given in Exodus, suggesting a date earlier than the time of Moses. The theme of suffering unbearable hardships is quite appropriate to the centuries of slavery in Egypt. So I propose that, in chronological sequence, Job most likely belongs between Genesis and Exodus.

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