Problem of Job

The Book of Job is one of the best-known of the Bible.This paper brings an Eastern perspective to bear on it by exploring what might be the cen tral focus of the book.By adopting a comparative perspective and exam ining Job in relation to various Hindu and Buddhist texts, we argue that a koan-like theme of the "relevance of irrelevance" is at the root of Job's experience.Any attempt at a comparative exegesis of Job runs the risk of foun dering in two ways: textually and hermeneutically.The book has been subjected to textual criticism and some scholars have suggested that it is a composite work rather than an integral whole (Pope 1965; Dhorme 1967: VII; Westermann 1981).There is also a wide diversity of opinion regarding the hermeneutical issues involved in this famous work.There are, in other words, different interpretations about the nature of the problem in Job (Glatzer 1969; Ricoeur 1967:321; Jung 1958:358; Polzin and Robertson 1977, etc.) We propose to solve these difficulties in the following way.There is an increasing tendency to treat the Book of Job as a single document, at least in the context of literary and philosophical research as distinguished from strictly philological studies (Frye 1957: 189; Glatzer 1969:4).This first approach is adopted here in the absence of a consensus on Job's composite parts, even if its composite character is generally accepted among textual scholars (Andersen 1976:55).At the hermeneutical level, this paper focuses on the following four possible

Computer Science · Human Resource Development and Performance Evaluation · Scheduling and Timetabling Solutions · Socioeconomic Development in MENA

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