The book of Job is paradoxical regarding its historicity as well as its meaning. Although Job is clearly presented as a real, historical person (he lived from 1710 to 1500 near Bozra in Idumea), rabbis and bishops preferred to see it as a moral tale. Despite the main question all over the book being: "why evil prevails?" the answer would be: "please, look at the hippopotamus and the crocodile" (Job 40:1-42:6), which is poetic but quite absurd. However, as Maimonides had already understood a long time ago the Book of Job includes profound ideas and great mysteries and reveals the most important truths. Indeed, Job received a deep and detailed answer in order to know when and how the evil angel, Leviathan a.k.a. Satan, would be defeated by Behemoth the first creature of God (Job 40:19). In a surprising manner, archaeology has shown that all the geographical and historical details in the Book of Job are accurate and reliable.

The purpose of this writing is to journey through this book verse by verse and to demonstrate God’s sovereignty and to understand by example of a man named Job, the meaning of true faith.

Fokkelman presents the Hebrew and the English text of Job in its original contours and proportions, weighs the poet's precision and redraws the portrait of the hero: integrity vindicated.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

Despite its general absence from the Jewish liturgical cycle and its limited place in Jewish practice, the Book of Job has permeated Jewish culture over the last 2,000 years. Job has not only had to endure the suffering described in the biblical book, but the efforts of countless commentators, interpreters, and creative rewriters whose explanations more often than not challenged the protagonist's righteousness in order to preserve Divine justice. Beginning with five critical essays on the specific efforts of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish writers to make sense of the biblical book, this volume concludes with a detailed survey of the place of Job in the Talmud and Midrashic corpus, in medieval biblical commentary, in ethical, mystical, and philosophical tracts, as well as in poetry and creative writing in a wide variety of Jewish languages from around the world from the second to sixteenth centuries.

Internationally-known astrophysicist and Christian apologist explores the book of Job through the lens of science, offering time-transcending, apologetic answers to present-day issues of science and faith.