Most of all, I tell them not to seek advice from "
Job's Comforters," for their wisdom is false and their fables are filled with half and nonrepresentative truths whose effect is devastating.
Job's comforters tried to do it, and "J.B.," Archibald MacLeish's modern retelling of the biblical story of the righteous man who suffers unjustly, poses the problem succinctly: "If God is God, he is not good: if God is good, he is not God."
I do think that not having any kind of biblical education is unfortunate if children want to read English literature and understand the provenance of phrases like "through a glass darkly," "all flesh is as grass," "the race is not to the swift," "crying in the wilderness," "reaping the whirlwind," "amid the alien corn," Eyeless in Gaza," "
Job's comforters," and "the widow's mite."
But the book is a triumphant rebuttal of those
Job's comforters Pearsall mentions who argued (often simultaneously) that a life of Chaucer had been done, could not be done, and was not worth doing.
The poem's concluding two lines are an extra stroke of wise genius, bringing us back to our own helplessness before others' misfortunes and our almost comic efforts to help them bear it, to be
Job's comforters.
As his three companions counterfulminate (they have given the not-very-complimentary term "
Job's comforters" to posterity), Job ups the ante with the very original strategy of putting God on trial.
WE'VE probably all met
Job's Comforters - people who tell us they're trying to help, but leave us feeling worse, instead of better.
I do hope that all the "
Job's comforters" who write to the Evening Gazette as if we live in the Wild West are prepared to believe this area is not in a state of lawlessness.