The Vancouver Island Oxford and Cambridge Society invites alumni and guests to join them for a series of diverse talks provided by some of our talented VIOCS members. Our talks will be held on the second Thursday of every month at 7pm on Zoom.

Our second talk is titled - Job and the Justice of God, by Francis Landy

"Job and the Justice of God." Job is one of the books most critical of the Wisdom tradition that there is a cosmic order, that evil is punished and good rewarded.  Job is a perfectly righteous man who loses everything he has, in a dizzyingly subversive tale in which God surrenders him to a figure - not yet the Devil, but the arch-sceptic - called the Satan.  There follows an exhaustive dialogue between Job and three Friends, who represent conventional wisdom. Job insists not only that he has suffered unjustly, but that there is no moral order in the universe, and demands an explanation from God. Finally, to everyone's surprise, God appears in the whirlwind, but instead of justifying himself, describes creation and the panoply of animals, ending with the great sea-monster, Leviathan. Job surrenders and God turns the table on the Friends by telling them Job was right all along.  There is a strange, ironic, happy ending. Francis will speak about how the terms of the debate keep on shifting, from the question of justice to the experience of a violent, topsy-turvy world, and also about the poetry and the poet.

Francis Landy (Jesus, 1966) was Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta between 1984 and 2015 (the last two on a post-retirement contract), specializing in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible.  He has written three books, Song of Songs, Hosea, and a collection of essays entitled Beauty and the Enigma. Currently, he is completing a big book on Isaiah.  Additionally, after moving permanently to Victoria in 2017 (after some years going to and froe), he has taught a class for the local synagogue on the Bible; last year, he did Job, this year, he will do Samuel.  Francis is also an active associate fellow of the Centre for the Study of Religious and Society at the University of Victoria. His approach is literary-poetic, for he is more interested in what the writers thought and said than in historical-critical questions. The latter, he has noted, about which we can know little anyway.