Job's boils
Were they inflicted by a loving god? Or by a cruel and needy deity willing to torture a good man to win a bet with Satan?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next week: The great Hebrew prophets (7th of 7 essays on Judaism)
‘THERE WAS A MAN in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil. And seven sons and three daughters were born to him. Also, his possessions were seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred female donkeys, and a very large household, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the East.
Thus opens the Book of Job, a work of literary brilliance composed by an unknown author - not Moses or Solomon, as some Jewish scholars claim - between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE.
It tells the story of a …