| Summary: | Job's encounter with God (38:1-42:6) has long been understood as the crux of the Book of Job, leading readers to seek the book's meaning in these cryptic chapters. Based on formal discrepancies in the text and evidence from two Babylonian parallels, the existence of a "dialogue of Job" (chaps. 3-27; 29-31) is proposed, which was composed independently not only from the prose tale (chaps. 1-2; 42:7-17) but also from the theophany. As this original poetic composition made no appeal to a divine epiphany, its depiction of a suffering and persuasive protagonist served provocatively to challenge traditional answers to the question of theodicy, rather than offer a solution of its own.
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