Thoughts of Death in a Cruel World: 
Job’s suicidal ideation and the “right” Christian response to depression

By Jennifer Michael Hecht & Emily Herrington

"Job's Evil Dreams," William Blake, 1821

This article is an adapted and condensed version of Jennifer Michael Hecht's essay in the recently released volume Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions, edited by Karl Giberson and published by Oxford University Press. The original article is titled, "Ancient Hebraic Voices of Chance and Choice over Fate and Justice.” It has been adapted for God & Nature magazine by editor Emily Herrington.
 
 
When Christians talk about the Book of Job, they often do so with a focus on the theme of divine redemption following unhappy circumstances or tragedy. For Christians contemplating Job, suffering is often seen as the work of the devil, and escape from suffering the work of God’s providential hand restoring what is owed the righteous.
 
This narrow focus on an easy-to-parse, takeaway lesson or moral misses some of the intriguing and instructive details of Job’s narrative—not least of which are the poetry of his anguish and the rage he feels against God for making his life so miserable without just cause. Job explicitly critiques notions of fairness in the mind of God and in this critique, he does not focus solely on his own suffering, but widens the circle of concern to other deeply troubling truths including the cruelties of war and the cognitive deterioration of the aged. These are keen observations by a man who can, presumably, after a long life of wealth and abundance, finally appreciate the agony of those who struggle to procure basic necessities, or who live in constant pain with no hope of help or improvement.
 
The author of the Book of Job’s great insight is that even one case of unfair suffering can give lie to a whole system—and the problem is not avoidable just because Job gets it all back again at the end. Life, as we all know, isn’t always sensible or predictable. In the same way that one case of unfairness can suggest brokenness across a whole system, one case of redemption does not dislodge the countless instances in which anguish persists undeserved.
 
Job exclaims, against God and in bitter recognition of these facts that, “[God] increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them . . . He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.” What a strangely cruel catastrophe is aging as we humans do it, forgetting. How bizarre that a generation gets cut down in war, or lives without livelihood. We stagger in pitch-dark ignorance, like drunks.
 
Job voices these biting and uncomfortable observations to the few friends who have come to visit him in his misery. By this point Job has lost his home and his work; his children are dead, and his body is covered with painful, disgusting boils that ooze and reek. His friends barely recognize him when they see him, yet rather than deplore the wrongness and unexpectedness of Job’s misery, his friends spend much of their visit theologizing and speculating about the “true” reason for his disgrace. Not being privy to the agreement between the Hebraic God and Satan prior to Job’s testing/torture that affirms for readers the undeserved-ness of all of it, Job’s friends simply cannot accept that he was truly innocent (in ancient parlance, an “upright man”).
 
Besides the feeble, yet often touted lesson from the Book of Job that piety (almost approaching complacency) in the face of suffering will ultimately be rewarded—what can we learn from Job about the correct Christian response to pain and injustice?
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Importantly, we should note that Job’s pain does not drive him into moral chaos. At first, Job accepts the disorder or caprice that hurt him, and can cope with his personal tragedy without rebellion. But everything changes when Job’s friends attempt to make moral sense of his suffering. Job knows his own innocence and goodness, and the true calamity of his own grief. He responds as a man shocked that these people think he is still living in their universe, with things like fairness and good.
 
Job’s fierce lament is varied and compelling. He rages at God for giving him terrifying dreams so he cannot even rest in sleep. What kind of cruel ironic mind could decide that even when unconscious we should be harried by nightmares? Job is, in a word, suicidal: he repeats as a refrain that he wishes he were dead. He accepts bad luck, but asks why his misery must follow him through the night and then meet him in the very moments he awakens. Why are grief and depression so relentless? Here is one of the only times Job seems to admit to having done anything wrong at all, and it is almost sarcastic. He is addressing God directly here:
“How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.”
 
Job is almost triumphant that he will at last escape God with death. The issue of forgiveness is not typical of his concerns, as he rarely suggests that he might have done anything needing pardon, but it brings up, for us, what will become a central Christian question, “Why doesn’t God just forgive us and take us all to heaven?” It is not the central question here, because Job does not feel guilty in any way that matches what has happened to him. He does not want forgiveness, he is furious and somewhat beyond caring.
 
Surely, back when Job was healthy, wealthy, and beloved he had noticed that some of the other rich people were neither good nor pious. He must have known that the poor and unlucky did not deserve their suffering. But we are to see that it doesn’t truly penetrate his consciousness until it hits his own flesh, “My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.” Until you have been tested—really tested—be careful what you say about the fairness of this world. In the face of other people’s suffering, work hard to be empathetic or you will miss all sorts of truth.
 
Interestingly and consequentially for Christians who cannot escape pessimistic or worse, suicidal thoughts—where pain occludes all remembrances of happiness and challenges the very fabric of faith--God says twice that where the friends spoke wrongly, Job spoke correctly. The friends said God was fair and to be trusted, Job said God was not fair—did not punish the wicked, nor help the weak, nor reward the good.
 
Perhaps we are to infer that God liked Job’s honesty. There is comfort, too, in seeing the bad for what it is. Yet all Job’s fine points about being good, all the observations about the wicked, God ignores. If the two major reasons to believe in the Hebraic God are science (how did all this get here?) and wishes (the dream of a fair world), God disregards the wishes and offers a breathtaking panorama of the science. God repeatedly reminds Job that humanity could not have made this world. We are vividly schooled in how lovely, interconnected, bizarre, and impressive is the natural world.

​The argument is nothing other than an insistence on the otherworldly imagination it would require to dream up an ostrich—not just its weird giant flightless birdness, but also, specifically, that it responds to danger to its children by putting its head in the sand. Why does it rain in the wilderness where there is no one to make use of it? Why waste the rain? Where does rain come from, and where dew, and where ice? Could you make the stars? Do you know how many months a goat gestates or how the eagle knows how to find dead meat? Consider the myriad bizarre yet somehow regular and regulated systems of nature. It is enormity and complexity beyond comprehension.

Job folds. He is in awe. He apologizes for his insolence. “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
 
It seems to me that the Book of Job is part of a robust tradition of accepting unfairness and death and learning to live a rich life anyway. It is correlated with occasional profound despair. In the book, people do not speak of life as meaningless, they speak of it as vastly, crassly unjust, vicious, irremediably unforgivable. And responding to the recognition of this universal unfairness with anger and despondency seems in no way to be contraindicated for Christians—quite the reverse.
 
Two things on which the faithful and the non-faithful can agree are highlighted in the Book of Job: life’s unpredictability and pain is real, and no one really understands why things turn out the way they do. Thus, urging the depressed or pessimistic people in our churches to pray more or to seek reconciliation with God as an answer to the heaviness of their souls—as Job’s friends do—misses the wisdom and insight they can offer those with lighter physical, cognitive, or emotional burdens. We might ask instead what they have experienced and what they see as being the dark lining of even the most silver-looking clouds.
 
Instead of offering unsolicited advice or rationalizations to these visions, we might try living in a seeking frame of mind with the cosmic and theological tensions that their answers (perhaps correctly) identify.  Even if there is no fairness or even silver lining to be found, even if we see the "cosmic...tensions" as unsolvable, we can still bear witness—to another's pain and to our own. Seeing and being seen can be the grace we were hoping for. (If it's difficult and feels nearly impossible: congratulations, you're doing it right.)

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Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, historian, and commentator. She is the author of many books, including the bestseller Doubt: A History, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It; The Happiness Myth; The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France, and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology, which won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” Her first book of poetry, The Next Ancient World, won three national awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s First Book award for 2001. Her latest poetry book, called Who Said, was published in November 2013. Hecht holds a PhD in the history of science and European cultural history from Columbia University (1995) and has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and the New School in New York City. Hecht has also published in many peer-reviewed journals, and has delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cal Tech, and Columbia University, as well as the Zen Mountain Monastery, Temple Israel, Saint Bart’s Episcopal Church, and other institutions of learning. Hecht has been featured on many radio programs, served as one of the five nonfiction judges for the National Book Award in 2010. She is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

 
Emily Herrington is a PhD student in communication at the University of Pittsburgh, with focus areas in rhetoric of science, bioethics, STS, feminist theory, and oral history.
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Prior to her doctoral work, Emily studied poetry at Bellarmine University in Louisville (B.A. '08) and science writing at MIT (M.S. '11). She has also spent many years working as a professional writer and editor for academic and popular outlets; among them, God & Nature magazine is a favorite project.