SOURCE: "Job," in The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 283-303.

An American professor of the Bible and of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures, Greenberg has published works that include The Religion of Israel (1963) and Introduction to Hebrew (1964). In the following essay he offers an analysis of The Book of Job, examining problems of inconsistency within the text and considering several possible interpretations of the work's meaning.

The prophet Ezekiel mentions Job alongside Noah and Daniel as a paragon of righteousness (Ezekiel 14:12-20);

from this we know that Job was a byword among the sixth-century B.C.E. Judahite exiles whom the prophet addressed. But from Ezekiel and from the late...