We are going back about three thousand years, to ancient Israel, to a culture where poetry was not decoration. It was survival. The book we call Psalms, or Tehillim in Hebrew, meaning "praises," was the hymnal, prayer book, and therapy journal of an entire civilization. These five psalms sit near the very beginning of that collection, and they are all attributed to King David, a man remembered as both warrior-king and poet, someone who could kill his enemies and weep over them in the same week.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lXiNtPlKnOpx85X10NJ0e5ZTVo9MBOb/view?usp=sharing

Welcome, everyone. Before we open the first page of the Book of Psalms, we need some context. The Psalter, as scholars call it, is basically the ancient hymnal, prayer book, and theological anthology of Israel, all rolled into one. It took shape over centuries, with roots going back at least to the early Israelite monarchy around 1000 BCE, though it was probably compiled into its final form sometime during or after the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The world that produced these texts was the ancient Near East, a landscape of rival kingdoms, temple cults, and court poetry. Egyptians composed hymns to Amun-Ra. Mesopotamians sang to Marduk. Canaanites praised Baal. Israel's psalms came out of that same world, borrowing forms, repurposing imagery, and arguing, sometimes fiercely, for the supremacy of their own God, YHWH.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eS1joXoJaSA_EbWMZbWElNo1IjqwPro6/view?usp=sharing

We're somewhere in the ancient Near East. The time is probably the first millennium BCE, though the story may be older than that. This is a world where livestock is wealth, sons are your legacy, and God does not typically explain himself.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wiVErlVV2RfYu_nsdEKpnJgE2oJczDOJ/view?usp=sharing

We're picking up the Book of Job at its climax. The book was probably written somewhere between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE, though scholars debate this and the range is genuinely wide — the prose frame and the poetry at the center may have different origins. The world it draws on is older still: the world of the ancient Near Eastern patriarchs, where wealth was counted in cattle and camels, where there were no priests or temples, just a man, his altar, and his God. Job is from the land of Uz, somewhere east of Canaan — most likely Edom, based on the connection in Lamentations 4:21. He's a righteous man whom God has allowed to lose everything: his wealth, his children, his health. Three friends — Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar — have spent chapters insisting he must have sinned. Job has spent the same chapters insisting he's innocent and that God is being unjust. Then a fourth, younger man named Elihu appears in chapters 32 through 37, speaking at length and preparing the ground for what comes next. And then God speaks — out of a whirlwind.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qcvhxsXZx3PkHZf7OMr7DvQD42as0I8E/view?usp=sharing

We're somewhere in the ancient Near East. The story of Job presents itself as set in a patriarchal world — the kind of world that existed in roughly the second millennium BCE, before Israel had a monarchy or a written law code. Whether the book was actually written then is a separate question we'll come back to. For now: this is a world where the cosmos isn't a neutral backdrop. It's a living arena full of divine beings, chaos forces, and the constant threat of things coming apart. And the operating assumption, for most people in this world, is simple: if something terrible is happening to you, you did something to deserve it. That was the standard thinking. Job's whole book is an argument against it. And after thirty-seven chapters of human debate, God finally shows up.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nJTHdvaf05ELrmRSaYRc1rS6dzzmYb12/view?usp=sharing

This episode covers chapters 32 through 37 of Job. The book was probably written sometime in the first millennium BCE, though nobody agrees on exactly when. It's set in the ancient Near East, in a world where the gods are not distant ideas but active forces — where suffering counts as evidence, where justice is expected to be visible, and where a righteous man's demands for an explanation can go unanswered for a very long time.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RZq70yhX8Le42c7O97nivrJG32I7o_uQ/view?usp=sharing

Sometime around the fifth or fourth century BCE, a poet — probably Jewish, probably living in or near Jerusalem — wrote one of the strangest books in the ancient world. It asks three questions: Can innocent people suffer? Can God be put on trial? And if the answer to both is yes, what does that mean for how the universe works?

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rioZ3W-jmD4RfqtuoLdzAqZWPNweAqF3/view?usp=sharing

We're somewhere in the ancient Near East. Scholars put the final form of the Book of Job in the Persian period — roughly 540 to 330 BCE — though the stories behind it are almost certainly older. The world the text inhabits runs on active mining operations, a gem trade stretching from Ethiopia to Phoenicia, and a real cultural worry about cosmic order: who controls it, who understands it, and whether any human being can ever get a handle on it. Egypt and Mesopotamia had their own versions of that worry. Keep it in mind.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1swBbbnGx6VmmuJYVnxttzeuDKOxf0bPC/view?usp=sharing

The book of Job is set in a world the author deliberately placed in the ancient past — a pre-Israelite time, somewhere in the land between modern-day Jordan and Arabia, before the covenant with Moses, before the Exodus, before Israel existed as a nation. The composition of the book itself is most likely from the Persian period, around the fifth or sixth century BCE, but the story is set in a much older world: one where wisdom literature is a live tradition, where educated men gather, exchange proverbs, debate theology, and argue about how God works. The book is a long philosophical poem about suffering and justice — specifically, about what it means to have a relationship with a God who doesn't explain himself. By the time we get to chapters twenty-two through twenty-seven, we're in the third and final round of a formal debate between Job and his three so-called friends: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IH93u6-tVrnaTa9t52cDGEagZ-BkFx6i/view?usp=sharing

We're somewhere in the ancient Near East. The story is set in the patriarchal-style world of Edom or northern Arabia — that much is fairly clear from the names, the geography, and the divine title Shaddai used throughout. The date of composition is a different question entirely, and a genuinely contested one. Most scholars now favor the Persian period, roughly 540 to 330 BCE, based on the strong Aramaic influence woven through the Hebrew of the poetic sections. The Yale Biblical Scholar and the Wikipedia article on Job both reflect this as the current mainstream view. Some place it earlier, in the 7th or 6th century BCE. A few traditional interpreters argue for the patriarchal period itself. The honest position: the story is set in the ancient Near East of the second millennium, but when it was actually written is probably much later and nobody knows for certain.

Source:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ThwNNOdn6wgNwERV_7-fDMXqI1e6hnNw/view?usp=sharing