I love the Book of Job. Job is the place in the Bible for cranks. You may know the story, but perhaps a quick review is in order: the Book of Job imagines a little wager between God and Satan, where Satan bets God that if the fortunate and pious Job were deprived of his fortunes long enough, if he were made to really suffer, he would abandon his loyalty to God and curse God. God puts his money on Job, and the wager is on, as God allows Satan to inflict Job’s family, his financial circumstances, and his physical health with trial after trial. When Job responds, he is not the “patient Job” we are taught to expect in the story. He endures his sufferings without abandoning God, but he does not do so quietly. He complains. Job is a crank, as he goes on and on about the unfortunate, undeserved circumstances he is enduring. And God is a crank, when God finally responds to all of Job’s laments and accusations with the perfectly parental, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, little man.” The whole book is a contest of crankiness (and a fitting reflection of my disposition much of the time, which might explain my affinity for it).

Of course, I also love the Book of Job because of its substance, its preoccupation. The Book is trying to take seriously something with which we all struggle, the reality that bad things happen to good people, and the fact that it can be hard to locate God in all of that bad stuff. Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? How is this fair or good? What I love about the Book of Job is that it refuses to answer the question easily—you could argue that it refuses to answer the question at all. Job asks God for a justification of his misfortune and gets from God in return a lesson in the grandness of the cosmos and the smallness of human knowledge and experience. And Job’s response is to acknowledge that yes, he is guilty of speaking “things too wonderful for me.” (Job 42:3)

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