Theodicy & the Righteous Sufferer
Centuries before Job: a righteous man broken by suffering, asking gods whose justice he cannot fathom.
Why does a faithful person suffer? Mesopotamian thinkers wrestled with this hard question centuries before the book of Job. A Sumerian poem, 'A man and his god,' has a sufferer lament his abandonment and finally be restored. The Akkadian Ludlul bel nemeqi ('I will praise the lord of wisdom') tells of a righteous man struck by every misery, baffled because the gods' standards are inscrutable, until Marduk at last delivers him. The Babylonian Theodicy stages a debate between a sufferer and a friend over divine justice. None offers an easy answer; their shared insight is that the gods' ways exceed human understanding — and that one must keep faith even so.