Job and the god of Babylon

In this new analysis of the Book of Job, Jacob Kaaks looks at the theopolitical motives of the priests who assembled the Old Testament and puts one of the most puzzling books of the bible into the context of Akkadian literature. In this reading, Job is not the long-suffering embodiment of piety, but a figure with the ability to guide an evolving concept of God. Complete with a new translation of the Book of Job that takes into account Kaaks’s scholarship, Job and the god of Babylon is an impressive study that recasts the Old Testament not as a religious text existing in a vacuum, but as a product of its historical era.