Serving God vs. Serving Humans?

Serving God vs. Serving Humans?

     The thesis of this paper is that the relationships between Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, and Odysseus (Homer) and between God and Job (Holy Bible, New International Version, Job 1:1-42.17) were polar opposites regarding interactions between gods and mortals.  Briefly, Athena served Odysseus’ best interests, while God used Job to serve his own interests.  The former relationship reflected ancient Greek religious attitudes about some, though not all, of the Gods, but the latter relationship did not reflect Hebrew religious beliefs that God rewarded the virtuous and punished sinners.

Unlike Job’s relationship with God, Athena and Odysseus had personal contact with each other, although Athena, at times, disguised herself so Odysseus didn’t recognize her.  Her disguises, however, were not intended to harm Odysseus.  Indeed, after he lied to her when she was disguised as a young boy (xiii 254), she again became recognizable and “smiled upon him, and stroked him with her hand” (287-288) and her scolding words (“You wretch, so devious…” 293) were spoken without rancor, essentially as one would speak to a friend or to “her mortal double” (Martin 309).

Job, on the other hand, had but one personal encounter with God and only after expressing the intensity of his demand for an explanation for his suffering (38:1-42:34).  In Messengers of God, Elie Wiesel (225-249) referred to Job as “our contemporary” (225) in the sense that he expressed the quintessential question of human existence after one has an experience that is both devastating and unexpected:  Why are those who are virtuous as likely to experience suffering as those who sin?  Answers have differed between and within religions, as well as among nonbelievers, but God’s response to Job essentially was that he was arrogant for even questioning or thinking of himself as capable of understanding the creator of the entire world.

Without knowledge of why Job was suffering, God’s response might be interpreted as merely boastful and unsympathetic, but nonetheless consistent with conclusions reached by those who have had experiences comparable to that of Job.  For example, ten years after he was liberated from Buchenwald, where he spent his fifteenth year, Elie Wiesel wrote of his perceptions that some of the Jewish inmates (though not Wiesel) accepted the explanation of God working in “mysterious ways” (42).

     In addition to there being a greater distance between God and Job than between Athena and Odysseus, Athena put Odysseus through tests, but not for the purpose of harming him.  For example, when she at first failed to help in his fight against the suitors, she “was putting to proof the strength and courage alike of Odysseus and his glorious son” (xxii, 236-238). What was most problematic in God’s response to Job was less that he admonished him for questioning his will, but that His response was deceitful in its lack of admission that He was testing Job, deliberately causing his suffering (1.12-2.6).

God wanted to demonstrate to Satan that Job’s extraordinary virtue was not attributable to the abundance he enjoyed, but to his genuine love of God.  For this reason, God said to Satan, “everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger” ((1.12).  After the deaths of his oxen, his sheep, his camels, his servants – and all ten of his children – Job’s response was, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (1.21), and when he was in severe pain from the sores inflicted on his entire body, “Job did not sin in what he said” (2.10).

Clearly, Job did not receive justice in his relationship with God. (God’s relationship with Moses, Exodus, was as close as He came to fostering the development of a human, as Athena did with Odysseus and others.)  However, in providing guidance to Odysseus and even using her magical powers to help him not only defeat the more than one hundred suitors, but also to kill them, was Athena just in her relationships with other mortals?  Of course she was not – but the ancient Greeks had no expectations that the Gods would treat mortals or even each other equally or even fairly.  Were the Odyssey a movie, most of us probably would have cheered as she saw to it that the suitors, those swine who had usurped Odysseus’ home, were wiped out.

Zeus was the God of the Gods, so to speak, who controlled many lesser Gods, including, though not limited to, his siblings, their children, and his own prodigious number of children, with Athena his favorite, who was partial to heroic mortals, such as Odysseus (Titans and Olympians 69-70).  She did not choose him because of his virtue, but probably “she could not resist his cunning ability, his combination of wiles, caution, and curiosity” (Martin 309).  Throughout The Odyssey, he is referred to as “resourceful Odysseus” and he chose Athena as much as she chose him.  Before the end of his ten years in captivity by the beautiful Goddess Kalypso, she “was no longer pleasing to him” (v 153-154), implying that there had been a time when she indeed was pleasing.

After Kalypso had agreed to follow Zeus’ orders to set Odysseus free, she “found him sitting on the seashore, and his eyes were never wiped dry of tears” (v 151-152).  Despite her prior resentment about being forced to follow Zeus’ instructions, when Kalypso saw that “the sweet lifetime was draining out of him” (152), she promised to provide him with the best materials for building a raft and to stow on it good food and drink for his trip home (161-169).  That evening, he apparently again found her pleasing, since they “enjoyed themselves in love and stayed all night by each other” (227).  Indeed, Odysseus’ tears of sorrow elicited the sympathy and comfort of a beautiful Goddess.  In contrast, when after seven days of stoic suffering, Job’s expression of justifiable anger brought him not sympathy, but false accusations against him by his so-called friends.

     Unlike Job’s God, the Gods of ancient Greece mingled freely and shared characteristics with mortals.  These Gods fought and made love with each other and with mortals.  As virtuous as Job was, if one of the Greek Gods merely found him annoying, he could have been made to suffer as he did at the hands of the biblical God.  Indeed, Job’s virtue clearly exceeded the virtue of Odysseus, but in a more human-like setting, it shouldn’t be surprising that Odysseus’ heroism in battle and disarming élan would have been greater assets than virtue.  However, injustice in The Odyssey was not disturbing because there was no reason to expect to find the theme of justice in Homer’s epic based on Greek mythology.

However, the Book of Job was deeply disturbing because it raised questions not only about injustice on the part of the God of the Old Testament or even about finding justice in any “higher” deity, but because we already know that throughout recorded history, the human record of justice towards other humans has been dismal.  God’s injustice reached an extreme that “may be the reason why more has been written about Job than about any other biblical book except psalms, and why the interpretations are remarkably diverse” (Reiss 257).  Indeed, the acts of injustice in this book contradict each other to the point that one wonders whether Job doesn’t defy interpretation.  After inviting Satan to condemn Job to a life of utter misery, and then finally responding to Job’s demand of an explanation, God doesn’t even address Job’s questions: “It is as if He has belatedly stepped into a drama without having consulted the script…He does not remember Satan’s mischief.  He does not remember Job’s calamities.  He does not remember Job’s righteousness” (Ozick 22).  His long tirade consisted essentially of an account of how His own greatness made it unfitting even to ask Him about human suffering.  Then, after Job immediately withdrew his protests, agreeing he was asking about what he “did not understand” (23), God apparently changed His mind because He restored Job’s former good fortune – and Job himself seemed to forget even his own “bitter grief over the loss of…[his] sons and daughters” (24).

In addition to returning Job’s good fortune, God also condemned the “friends” who believed they were being loyal to God when they defended Him when Job had accused Him of injustice.  Job then was the one God called on to pray for them.  These were the ones who had made Job into a “scapegoat,” showing an “animosity” that Reiss found “surprising” (259-260).  Yet their behavior was consistent with research demonstrating that blaming the victim for his or her own misfortune frequently occurs because people have a need to believe in a “just world” (Lerner, 1980).  If the friends acknowledged that Job was a “just” man who nonetheless was punished, they would have to acknowledge that behaving piously did not protect them from the same fate as Job’s.  Indeed, Christianity allows people to preserve their belief in a just world by delaying rewards and punishments until the virtuous go to heaven and the sinners go to hell and some Eastern religions explain misfortune as a chance to get rid of “bad” Karma accumulated in a previous life, so their next incarnations will be better. But it should be clear that in this life, if people want to live in a “just world,” they are the ones who will have to create one.

Perhaps we can learn something from Greek mythology by using a version of the relationship between Athena and Odysseus to create human relationships based on sharing whatever wisdom one has with others, rather than using power to manipulate others, as God did with Job.

Works Cited

Holy Bible, New International Version.  Grand Rapids, MI:

     Zondervan, 2001.

Homer.  The Odyssey of Homer.  Trans. Richard Lattimore. New

     York: Harper Torchbook, 1968.

Lerner, Melvin J. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental

     Delusion.  New York: Plenum.

Martin, Richard P. Myths of the Ancient Greeks. New York:

     New American Library, 2003.

Ozick, Cynthia. “The Impious Impatience of Job.” American

     Scholar, 67 (1998): 15-24.

Reiss, Moshe.  “The Fall and Rise of Job the Dissenter.”

     Jewish Bible Quarterly, 33 (2005): 257-266.

Titans and Olympians: Greek and Roman Myth.  Amsterdam: Time-

     Life Books BV, 1997.

Wiesel, Elie. Messengers of God. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New

     York: Pocket Books, 1977.

_____________ Night. Trans. Stella Rodway, 1958.  New York:

     Bantam Books, 1982.