The Book of Job

"What Job says so eloquently is that you can’t have pain without asking why, why is this happening to me. That is the question that Job keeps asking himself when he is afflicted with one horrible disease after another. The urge to find a meaning for pain is surely biological. We are hardwired to determine what is causing our pain so that we could avoid such things in the future. The only problem, however, is that we don’t always have the answer to why. Not just in Job’s time, but also in the 21st century. And, in the absence of knowledge, we tend to invent reasons and meanings. In Greco-Roman times the answer to why was that I must have offended the gods in some way. Yes, only the answers to why vary. In Job’s day the reason of pain was usually moral – what have I done wrong, asks Job, to deserve this? The word pain is actually derived from the Latin word poena which means penalty or punishment. Even though he can’t find a reason, poor Job can’t stop searching for one. “The word pain is actually derived from the Latin word poena which means penalty or punishment.” And this actually brings us to the downside of the imagination and metaphor when it comes to pain, which also happens to be the subject of Susan Sontag’s book, Illness as Metaphor. On the one hand, metaphors are so critical because they are the only way to conceptualise and communicate the experience. But, on the other hand, because of the urgent demand to determine the why of pain, there is a tendency to keep on inventing and imagining reasons, to never be completely satisfied. So at first we might start talking about knives and stabbing but then we might start asking who is wielding the knife and after that, why is that person or God wielding the knife. A line of questioning that becomes absurd. Yes, but just as long as we realise that we can’t do without the metaphor either."