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The biblical story of Job shows us the protagonist in the bottomless despair of the dark night, where God is experienced not as a loving being, but as a defying, completely veiled one. At the height of the disaster, the biblical Job did not appease himself, nor did he take comfort by his friends' pious thoughts, but moaning, he cried out to God, and God appreciated that and condemned the theodicy attempts of Job's friends.
I know nothing about the divine, and I mistrust those who comport themselves as if they knew anything on this issue (be they religious or antireligious).
But I know quite a few things about human distresses and about the possibly cathartic and/or illuminating virtue of literature. The author(s) of the book of Job expressed a deep insight into the dignity of man facing the strokes of fate (whether willed and permitted, respectively, by God/a god or not). In that story, the man Job comes off better than his divine counterpart. But I know nothing about the divine, and even the book of Job, which is a marvellous fiction on the topic human's grievance / God's apologia, does not remedy my lack of knowledge.
Methinks this is the very quintessence of the story of Job: He, the proposing believer, summons the disposing Deity down from the cloud-shrouded throne, and his God wins the dispute by paltrily making reference to his almightiness, but Job, that literary personification of human afflictions, comes off as the moral winner, and the divine protagonist of this story admits that(!).
That's but great literature! Its gist is only rinky dinky light years away from Goethe's Prometheus:
Shroud your heaven, Zeus,
With cloudy vapours,
And do as you will, like the boy
That knocks the heads off thistles,
With oak-trees and mountain-tops;
Now you must leave alone
My Earth for Me,
And my hut,
Which you did not build,
And my hearth,
The glowing whereof
You envy me.
[...]
Should I honour you? Why?
Have you softened the sufferings,
Ever, of the burdened?
Have you stilled the tears,
Ever, of the anguished?
Was I not forged as a Man
By almighty Time
And eternal Fate,
My masters and thine?
[...]
The wailing Job is ethically superior both to his friends, who bloviate with theodicean zeal, and to his god, who boasts about his inscrutable almightiness. Job's justification face to face with his god is not based on divine grace; it is based on the dignity of human beings with a vertebral column (in a metaphorical sense) and an upright stance (ditto), a dignity which, as Job's big counterpart in this story eventually admits, is indefeasible and suable. Thus the winner is Job --inspite of his losses--, and with him, optionally: us.
This is why I esteem the story of Job as a literary work with a theologically problematic and humanistically notable gist.
