The Book of Job is the Bible's most sustained engagement with the problem of innocent suffering, and it arrives at its answer - if it arrives at an answer at all - through a literary form unlike anything else in the canon: a prose framework (chapters 1-2, 42) enclosing a long poetic dialogue between Job and three friends, followed by a divine speech from the whirlwind and the intervention of a fourth speaker, Elihu. The book refuses easy resolution. God declares Job righteous at the end, against the friends who argued that his suffering must indicate sin, but the divine speeches from the whirlwind do not explain why Job suffered - they overwhelm the question with the counter-question of divine immensity.
Doré depicts Job at his lowest point: covered with sores (Job 2:7-8), seated on the ash heap, scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery. His wife, who tells him to 'curse God and die' (2:9), may be one of the figures nearby; his three friends sit at a distance in an early stage of the seven days and seven nights of silent sympathy that preceded their disastrously inadequate attempts at comfort. The vast, desolate landscape under a brooding sky conveys the isolation that is both Job's physical condition and his existential state: this is the loneliness of inexplicable suffering.
Job's famous declaration in 19:25 - 'I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth' - became one of the most important Messianic texts in Christian use, the basis for Handel's 'I Know That My Redeemer Liveth' in Messiah (1741). The affirmation is extraordinary in its context: Job makes this declaration of hope at the very depth of his suffering, surrounded by friends who have told him the suffering is deserved, his body broken, his property and family destroyed. It is precisely the kind of faith that emerges when no evidence supports it.
Victorian culture was intensely preoccupied with the theology of suffering, and Job was a central text in that preoccupation. Industrial poverty, epidemic disease, the deaths of children in infancy at rates modern readers find almost incomprehensible, and the theological challenges posed by Darwinian natural selection all focused Victorian minds on the question of suffering's meaning. Doré's Job - the solitary figure on the ash heap, looking toward heaven in a posture of defiant trust - provided a visual vocabulary for this theological wrestling.
William Blake's Book of Job illustrations (1826) represent the most artistically sophisticated treatment of the subject before Doré, and Blake's typological reading of Job as a figure for the human soul's journey through suffering to divine encounter was widely influential. Doré's treatment is less theologically elaborate but far more widely distributed: his Job image reached audiences that would never encounter Blake's engravings, fixing the visual image of the ash-heap sufferer for a mass readership.
The philosophical tradition of theodicy - from Leibniz's coinage of the term in 1710 through the responses to the Holocaust in the twentieth century - has consistently returned to Job as its test case. The book's refusal to provide a satisfying intellectual explanation for innocent suffering, its insistence instead on the divine presence that speaks from the whirlwind, and its declaration that Job - who has accused God - is more righteous than the friends who defended God, constitute a theological position that has been radical in every era. Doré's visual rendering of Job's solitary endurance contributed to the common cultural stock through which this theology was transmitted and debated.