Book: Job - Man judges God
The poetic books in the Bible have enormous potential to speak to modern people, as they pose surprisingly contemporary questions. They are also brilliant literary masterpieces. The main topic of the book of Job is suffering. Its basic question: Why does someone who is good experience something that is absolutely terrible?
Job is a very pious, hard working and successful man; he‘s flying high but all of a sudden falls to the very bottom. He loses everything, his values are shaken, and his picture of God disintegrates. He wants to know the answer to this basic question and is willing to break any taboo or bring any sacrifice acceptable to find it. He accuses God for his own fate. And he calles him out on trial.
It is no question that few thousand years ago the ideas in this book were ground-breaking, if not shocking, for the readers or listeners. The text was once probably more consistent and the story was thrilling. It was also written in a sophisticated way that people in the old times would have understood well.
The goal of this poetic rewriting is to „remaster“ the qualities mentioned above. Daniel Raus worked on the paraphrase for several years. In Czech it was published in 2016 by Porta libri. The book contains illustrations by Miro Pogran, a Slovak artist living in the Czech Republic.
Illustrations
Other books of Biblical poetry:
Song of Songs – Fifty shades of love
Ecclesiastes – Solomons grail
Psalms – David and his blues
Proverbs – Wisdom and her banquet
Daniel Raus on the book of Job