O homem que falou bem de Deus: Job na tradição patrística

The Book of Job was widely used and commented on by the Church Fathers, in different manners and with varying aims. When the first commentators once more took up the topos Job, it had already enjoyed a long interpretative tradition which, from the version of the LXX to the Testamentum Jobi, prepared the ground for a rich and ‘free’ patristic interpretation. This tradition reconciled the two great representations of Job: on the one hand, the extra-Biblical Job and the legend, on the other, the Biblical patriarch. The symbolic and paradigmatic density of this personality has ended up by weighing heavily on the hermeneutic of the text itself. All of this, in a continuous effort to ‘update’ the figure of Job at each moment and in each circumstance. The aim is to show this in these brief notes on the reception of Job in the patristic tradition.