Job is a fascinating book – and one we would do to consider far more deeply. With respect to your questions … I think that job is a story, much like the parables Jesus told, not history. This analogy carries over even to the intent of the book. The point of the book is not to relate history – it is to communicate a truth about God and his relationship with his creation.

I believe it narrates a real person and that the conversations were real. If it is more parable than narrative, then I have the feeling of loss of intimacy, of immediacy with this character. If there were good evidence that it must have been shaped over the years I would accept that, and maybe there is. Haven’t looked deeply into this one. But I admit I would feel a sense of loss if I had to let go of an actual historical hero for this tale, even if it was shaped and stylized a bit. I suppose the speeches at the end work either way – the Lord created and knows the “circle of life” and all the details of nature going about its business, and this is true regardless of whether Job was one man or everyman.
What difference does it make? It seems to me that it moves the effect a step back: instead of experiencing the intended affect, the reader/hearer is more likely to intellectually asses the intended affect.

I preached on Job for 8 months once. Had a man in my church who had bone cancer. He came out of worship one day and said: “Preacher. I hope I live long enough to hear the end of this!” He did.
I think it’s scripture.

I follow the lectionary in preaching so we spent the month of October covering the story of Job. The 4 selections served to tell the story well: Job loses everything, Job at his lowest point, God “answers”, Job has an epiphany (and epilogue).

A former pastor started on an exposition of Job and was grappling with the apparent contradiction of Satan presenting himself before God with the belief that Satan had been cast out of heaven. He was really struggling with the paradox and I finally asked him, “Do you believe this is a literal account of historical events that actually took place?” He looked at me like I was asking a trick question.
I explained that the book is written in poetic form with very stylized expressions. To say Job is history is to deny the form of literature it is, akin to ranking Shakespeare’s history with Gibbon on Julius Caesar. He refused to give up the idea that instead of Satan being a literary device to set a historical event in a cosmic context, that had someone been up in heaven they could have taped the audio exchange written in the Bible.
For some reason, small-minded literalists think it somehow does violence to the inspiration of the scripture to say Job is poetry. I don’t get it. I was going to say that they don’t insist the same for the Psalms, but on reflection, yes, they do take a lot of those verses literally instead of poetically.
It seems clear that Job is a dramatization of historical events that were so tremendous they had to be committed to poetry, much along the line of Gordon Lightfoot singing about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or Walt Whitman writing O Captain, My Captain.

Rick Presley-
I don’t disagree with much of what you said, especially in the last paragraph, but are you saying Satan is a literary device in this setting, or as used in all of Scripture?

Rick,
Rick Presley can speak for himself – but this is an interesting question. I wouldn’t say that Satan is a literary device in all of scripture. But it certainly seems to be true that it is hard to reconcile the way Satan is spoken of in many parts of scripture with ideas about the nature of God and his interaction with the world. This is a struggle.

What I tend to do with Job is read the first few chapters, skim the middle and then read the last few. I’ve found the book to be incomparable in the face of suffering. For me, the Psalms don’t come close.
As to whether or not it’s a historical narrative or a parable, it reads like a parable, but I read this post to my husband, who has theological training, and he asked, “Is Job quoted in the New Testament?”
We found him mentioned once, in the book of James, here:
James 5:10-11: “My brethren take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord as an example of suffering and patience. Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord….”
In verse 16-17, James mentions Elijah as an example of another prophet whose prayers were answered. So it seems that James thought Job was a historical figure, not a parable.
Additionally in Ezekiel 14:14 & 20, the prophet quotes God speaking of Job as if he is a real person: “Even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job …”
Is he speaking metaphorically? If so, he would have to be doing so regarding all three figures, wouldn’t he? Likewise, if James was referring to Job as a literary figure, wouldn’t the context then imply that Elijah is also a literary figure?
This might be a stretch, but James mentions Abraham and Rahab earlier in the book in similar terms. Are we then prepared to say they too are literary figures rather than historical ones? If so, what does that do to the historicity of Jesus, since Rahab is named in his geneology?

Was there really a righteous man who suffered through a tragedy that called into question the idea of retributive justice? Yes, I’m sure of it. Did he and his friends sit down and dialogue through it in 30+ chapters of exquisite poetic language? That’s harder to imagine.
It seems that most of my research on Job, there is a lot of interpretive ambiguity when it comes to the scenes set in the heavenly court. The Hebrew text calls the character “the Satan”, not “Satan”. Or, “the Accuser”. Take this into consideration and compare the portrayal and it seems pretty clear to me that this character is not the same as the one we know as the devil in the New Testament. All this is to say that if one holds a literalistic view of the text in Job, it can really force certain interpretations and encumber our exegesis.

(Note: This is a re-post because even after going through multiple acts of refreshing & assurance from Beliefnet that it’s there, I still don’t see my comment. If it magically appears, forgive the redundancy.)
What I tend to do with Job is read the first few chapters, skim the middle and then read the last few. I’ve found the book to be incomparable in the face of suffering. For me, the Psalms don’t come close.
As to whether or not it’s a historical narrative or a parable, it reads like a parable, but I read this post to my husband, who has theological training, and he asked, “Is Job quoted in the New Testament?”
We found him mentioned once, in the book of James, here:
James 5:10-11: “My brethren take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord as an example of suffering and patience. Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord….”
In verse 16-17, James mentions Elijah as an example of another prophet whose prayers were answered. So it seems that James thought Job was a historical figure, not a parable.
Additionally in Ezekiel 14:14 & 20, the prophet quotes God speaking of Job as if he is a real person: “Even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job …”
Is he speaking metaphorically? If so, he would have to be doing so regarding all three figures, wouldn’t he? Likewise, if James was referring to Job as a literary figure, wouldn’t the context then imply that Elijah is also a literary figure?
This might be a stretch, but James mentions Abraham and Rahab earlier in the book in similar terms. Are we then prepared to say they too are literary figures rather than historical ones? If so, what does that do to the historicity of Jesus, since Rahab is named in his genealogy?

The comparison between Shakespeare and Caesar nails it. Even if Job is a historical account, nobody anywhere in all history has talked in poetry like that, certainly not after such disasters and while in such pain.

Yes, the Shakespeare/Caesar analogy is apt, but I disagree Bob that nobody ever talked like that while in pain or in response to tragedy. Having carefully followed a few writers in the past year or so as they’ve navigated tragedy, I’d say exactly the opposite is true. Words are so inadequate that it inspires melodrama rather than blunts it.

If Job is a historical person, it seems obvious to me that the book of Job is not a “transcript” of the events of his life, but rather is a story / poem / narrative / play that is dramatically and theologically shaped. As Bob (#11) notes, nobody literally talks in Shakespearian dramaturgical fashion in real life.
What does the Zondervan set say about it Scot? (I ordered my set as a birthday present for myself, can’t wait for them to arrive!)

David, it has good stuff on verse by verse historical context but not enough on this “fiction or not” question in the introduction.

If it’s not real, it is fiction, then that opens up the door to pick what other characters in the Bible are real, historical, or fiction for a meaningful story. I mean – Abraham can become fiction, Moses can become fiction, Jeremiah, Isaiah. Just to get across a point in a story.
It’s not grace filled words to call a group of people “small minded literalists.” small minded, shudder, none of us want to be that.

In addition to what Your Name #15 mentioned, the overall meta-narrative of Scripture indicates a God who has, does, and will continue to work in real history/time.
If just a fictional tale, would this book then be the exception to that rule?

Job is truth, not fiction. It’s just not historical man truth, but rather deeper God truth. It is Truth, not autobiography. It is much deeper, more powerful, more God-breathed than any literal experience.
I worry that anyone who believes that the Bible must be accurate in every historical and scientific detail for it to be revelatory Truth is setting themselves up for spiritual crisis. The Bible itself does not make that claim.
The Bible tells me about Christ, but I believe in Him because of something far deeper… because he is alive and working in our lives today. He cannot be bound into a book; if every copy of the Bible were to disappear tomorrow, Christ would be unaffected. He’d still be here with us and his message of salvation would not change one iota. He’d just find a different way to tell us about it.
I do wish he would intervene and not show me a Taco Sauce advertisement when I refresh my captcha.

I have never understood why some people get so uptight about insisting that Job and Jonah be historic individuals. At a minimum, these are clearly of a different genre than the Biblical accounts of Abraham or Moses.
It makes no sense to say that God would not use fictional stories to communicate truth, since Jesus taught that way much of the time.

The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”‘
But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
Is the preceding story true? Was there really a rich man who had this attitude and who God judged? Isn’t getting bogged down in answering this question almost guaranteed to cause us to miss the point of the story?

Perhaps the problem is not merely the practical one, that Job is too long for some people to read, but the substantive problem that Job’s message is too unsettling for an orthodox Christian view of God?
This article suggests that Job is the Bible’s most anti-Christian text. Is this the real reason that Job is not read, or that, when it is read, it is misread as a lesson in “patience” or something?

There may or may not have been a real dude named Job, but the book of Job we have now is first and foremost an amazing work of theo-philosophical literature. Historicity is less interesting to me than authorship. Particularly since it appears that possibly the prose (the beginning and end) and poetry sections (the middle chunk we tend to skim over) may have been written by different people. It’s possible that there was originally the nice pious story of Job, who lost his family and possessions, didn’t complain, and got it all back. And then someone else used this story as a springboard into a profound discussion of loss, blame, suffering, and hope. It’s obviously about the God of Israel (nobody else needs theodicy) and yet it’s universal in scope. It is criminally under-read.

“nobody else needs theodicy”
Sure they do. Witness the Babylonian theodicy. Any thinking follower of any god who has not behaved according to expectations is bound to ask some questions at some point.

If Job had come to us in any other way than in the Bible, would we hesitate to call it fiction or a drama? Certainly it may be based on some known figure, but the book as it has come to us bears no indication of a journalistic kind of history. Does someone really believe a secretary recorded verbatim conversations and it came out like this? I like the analogy to Shakespeare. Truth comes in many forms, and I find it hard to believe that anyone would want to limit God to prose reporting.
As for the book’s message, one of its great teachings involves the LIMITS OF WISDOM. All of the wisdom books, in fact, have this emphasis. Job’s friends all represent common wisdom teaching in Israel that righteousness leads to blessing. In fact many of them seem to be quoting proverbs and wisdom sayings to convince Job to ‘fess up. Job himself can’t quite shake the conventional teaching he has lived by either.
In the end, however, God blows away the notion that the wisdom we gain in this life is sufficient to explain all the mysteries of God, or to question his ways with radical skepticism.

What about me?
Some people insist that faith is endangered unless we insist that Job is a 100% historical person and the biblical book is a word per word transcript.
Others (like me) lose faith when this insistence is made central.

You might be interested in this online commentary “Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job” (http://www.bookofjob.org) as supplementary or background material for the Book of Job. It is not a sin to question God, to demand answers from God. There is a time and a place for such things. It is written by a Canadian criminal defense lawyer, now a Crown prosecutor, and it explores the legal and moral dynamics of the Book of Job with particular emphasis on the distinction between causal responsibility and moral blameworthiness embedded in Job?s Oath of Innocence. It is highly praised by Job scholars (Clines, Janzen, Habel) and the Review of Biblical Literature, all of whose reviews are on the website. It is also taught in 262 US high schools in 40 states through Chapter 17 in The Bible and Its Influence. The author is an evangelical Christian, denominationally Anglican. He is also the Canadian Director for the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Study of the Great Ideas, a Chicago-based think tank.

I wrote a sermon on the book of Job and John 9 recently.
http://www.nathancolquhoun.com/2010/05/02/lets-not-rewrite-history-a-sermon-on-jobs-friends-and-john-9
One of my favourite texts for Job is “On Job” by Gustavo Gutierrez