Things Too Wonderful for Me

A Brief Examination of Epistemology in the Book of Job

In the contemporary pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty, epistemology plays a key role. In other words, what we believe about what we can know and how we can know will affect the way we pursue the transcendentals. This has chiefly been the case ever since the Enlightenment, when men like Kant and Hume called into question the certainty of our ability to know reality. But skepticism in the human condition has existed ever since Eve succumbed to the serpent’s temptation.

In this short essay, I am not going to contend with the Enlightenment skeptics. They are too contemporary and their skepticism is too abstract and heady. All of them admit eventually that there is no other option but to continue to live in the reality we are able to conceive; and, ultimately, we must resort to living existentially or absurdly.

Instead, I am going back even further, to the book of Job, who was probably contemporary with Abraham, or nearly so, and advocate for revelation as a viable way of knowing what we can know and how we can know. The book of Job most likely entered the Hebrew record with Moses’s writings and demonstrates God’s knowledge inexplicably exceeds man’s knowledge, and the knowledge God affords us by way of revelation is the knowledge we can count on and are expected to live by.