Just when a new vision of God and his creation is falling into place, the epilogue seems to undo it all. It feels like we travel backwards in time to a twilight zone before all the speeches and the theological progress. Everything seems the same as before, except for Job now being twice as rich. He even has ten children again.
Weird coincidence?
Supernatural blessing?
Confirmation that God won a bet with Satan?
Or something else?
In isolation from the rest of the book, the prologue and the epilogue present a world where God tests the righteous through natural disasters. If they pass the trials, he replaces their dead children, restores their business, and doubles their wealth.
This a toxic and callous view of God that twists his character and offers false comfort to those suffering in Job’s place.
So why does the author of Job end his book this way?
The book's spiralling, contradictory interchanges wear us down, as if it were designed to force us into the depth of the struggle, to wrestle with it, examine it from many sides, only to be surprised and unbalanced again by the events in the whirlwind and epilogue.
— Kathleen M. O'Connor
Job, p.100
"Unbalanced" is a great way to describe how the epilogue makes us feel. The book's ending doesn't tie everything up neatly with a bow on top. By returning to the retributive reward/punish worldview of the prologue, it forces us to acknowledge how there are no simple answers to innocent suffering. Questions haunt us long after we've put the book of Job down, causing us to continue the debate with our own friends.
But then, correct answers are not the goal of Job. Wisdom is. During the last eight articles, Job's tragedy has been helping us identify toxic beliefs we may believe about God. The wisdom of the epilogue highlights to us that this process is a lifelong one. And an incremental one. A single moment or book can challenge our beliefs, but changing how we think and relate takes much longer.
I think this is what's being expressed through Job's epilogue. On the surface, everything is the same. But dig a little deeper, and we begin to spot the incremental changes that have taken hold.
