SOURCE: "Job and the Modern World," in Judaism, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter, 1961, pp. 21-28.

Goodheart is an American critic and educator. In the following essay he contrasts modern interpretations of Job's suffering in several fictional works with the original intent of TheBookof Job.

Behind much of the modern literature of suffering is the greatest single work of the Bible, The Book of Job. We hear echoes of Job in books as different from one another as The Brothers Karamazov, Jude the Obscure and The Castle. If, however, we return to Job from a reading of these works, we have the strange experience that the view of life that it presents is almost as alien to the modern sensibility as the story of the sacrifice of Isaac or the gospels of Christ. The Jobean element on The Brothers Karamazov or Jude the Obscure, for instance, represents the exploitation of what...