Vince
1 min readOct 24, 2021

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As made evident in your previous reply, you have a way of taking things a bit too literally. The Book of Job is a parable, and it is based on God's dialogue with the Devil, and it is about an existential quandary.

The devil believes that wealth and personal gain is ultimately what defines human worth, that we live for nothing but ourselves. So he believes that by stripping Job of all that he has in terms of personal and egoistic happiness, then Job will renounce God.

God on the other hand has more faith in humans, and believes that we can exist for others, that we are not merely self-serving automatons, that we have purpose and value beyond the status we accrue, and that even people who are in poverty and who are suffering are still no less part of humanity than men of means.

The story of Job was written to humanise the downtrodden, to somehow explain the value of humanity to people in a society that traded slaves and waged imperial wars upon others. It's not a history book, it's a dialectical text.

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Vince
Vince

Written by Vince

International man of mystery.

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