even days of silently suffering that Job finally succumbed, and cursed the day he was born. Job was truly distraught by his plight, and in turn conversed with his visitors about why he was being chastised. It was through these discourses with his three friends: Eiphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite that they revealed their particular imago dei. Their shared vision was one that was common to the times. Job progressed through three cycles of dialogue with his friends in an attempt at rectifying his relationship with God. Each of the comforters, however, saw things quite differently than Job. They all were still viewing God with a narrow vision of who he was, trying to place specific boundaries on what God could and could not do. Their major flaw was the 'human' vision that they had of God. They expected that if humanity behaved a certain way, then it was only natural that God should react accordingly. If Job was being punished, then they figured he must have done something wrong. The whole time that Job was arguing with them, he was relating from a completely different position. In his estimation, he had done nothing wrong to merit the suffering that God had bestowed upon him. He couldn't figure out why he was being persecuted so. It was Job's individual experience that allowed him to question the traditional imago dei that had been bestowed upon him by the three comforters and his society. It was from this experience that a new and different imago dei appeared to Job. No longer did the idea of a perfectly fair and just God (in the human sense) apply; Job's experiences had taught him differently. His new experience was of a God who seemed not to discriminate amongst his creation, a God who ruled with no particular concern for punishing the evil and venerating the righteous. Job was quite flawed in his methods of addressing this seeming injustice. He misbelieved that he was somehow entitled to...
