August 10–16, 2026 · Come, Follow Me

Job 1–3; 12–14; 19; 21–24; 38–40; 42

"Yet Will I Trust in Him" · the Church's lesson page

This week's Come Follow Me lesson covers the hardest, strangest, and most argued-over book in the Old Testament. To do it justice, this guide divides the fifteen assigned chapters into five sessions of 20–30 minutes each — one per weekday, or take them at your own pace. Each session gives you a reading assignment, a short briefing distilled from seven companion essays written from very different vantage points (a Latter-day Saint scholar, an academic Bible scholar, a rabbi, an honest questioner, and others), and a handful of questions meant for wrestling, not for filling in blanks. Every borrowed insight links back to the essay it came from, so you can always pull the thread further. Read the chapters first; the briefing works best as a companion, not a substitute.

25–30 minSession 1: The Wager and the Silence

Reading assignment: Job 1 · Job 2 · Job 3

Before/as you read. Job opens like a folktale — "There was a man in the land of Uz" is the Hebrew equivalent of "once upon a time," set pointedly outside Israel, with schematic numbers: seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep (more from our academic scholar). The rabbis noticed this too: the Talmud preserves the opinion that Job "never existed... he is a parable," alongside vigorous objections — and leaves the argument standing, unresolved, for you to inherit (more from our rabbi). Latter-day Saints have their own version of that debate, since Ezekiel, James, and D&C 121:10 all treat Job as a real exemplar; faithful readers land in different places, and the current manual pointedly takes no position (more from our honest questioner).

Watch the figure who sets the plot moving. The Hebrew is ha-satan — "the accuser," a title with a definite article, functioning like a prosecuting attorney in a divine council scene (more from our academic scholar). Restoration cosmology is unusually at home in that council — the "sons of God" presenting themselves before the Lord reads naturally alongside Abraham 3 (more from our LDS scholar) — but whether this adversary is the personal devil of latter-day revelation or the theological furniture of the author's own era is a genuinely open question (more from our honest questioner). Note that he works on a leash: twice given explicit limits (more from our rabbi).

The book's whole machinery depends on an information gap: you, the reader, see the heavenly frame — Job's suffering is a test, not a punishment — while Job and his friends will argue for dozens of chapters without it (more from our doctrinal connector). And don't rush past 2:13. The friends' finest hour is seven days of silence; Jewish law derived the etiquette of the shiva house from this verse — comforters may not speak until the mourner speaks first (more from our rabbi). Everything the friends do wrong happens after they open their mouths (more from our practical disciple). Then chapter 3 detonates: the "patient" Job curses the day of his birth in a poem that systematically unmakes Genesis 1 — "Let that day be darkness" (more from our academic scholar).

Think deeply.

1. The reader is told from the start that Job is innocent and his suffering is not punishment — information Job himself never receives. Why might the book be built on that gap, and what does it imply about the theology we construct inside our own gaps?
2. Read the wager at face value and it is disturbing: children die to settle a question about their father's motives, and God says he was moved "to destroy him without cause" (2:3). Is the prologue a folktale frame designed to guarantee we know Job is innocent, a window into how testing actually works, or something you simply hold unresolved? What hangs on your answer?
3. "Doth Job fear God for nought?" (1:9) is the engine of the whole book. Strip away every blessing you associate with faithfulness — would your discipleship survive? How would you know?
4. Job 1:21 ("the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away") is often quoted as a sedative — but Job first tore his robe and shaved his head. What is the difference between grief-plus-worship and stoicism, and which one does your ward culture actually reward?
5. The friends sat in silence seven days, and their ministry failed only when they started explaining. When you last visited someone in pain, were you relieving their discomfort or your own?

20–25 minSession 2: Faithful Complaint — "Though He Slay Me"

Reading assignment: Job 12 · Job 13 · Job 14

Before/as you read. These chapters are Job's answer to friends whose comfort has curdled into accusation — "physicians of no value" whose wisdom would be silence (13:4–5). Job's controlling metaphor is the lawsuit: "I desire to reason with God" (13:3) uses a Hebrew root of legal disputation — Job wants to litigate (more from our academic scholar). And he levels a remarkable charge at the friends: defending God with false theology is itself a sin God will punish (13:7–10) — a charge the book's ending will vindicate exactly (more from our academic scholar).

Now the verse behind this week's lesson title. The Hebrew manuscript tradition preserves two readings of 13:15 at the same point: the consonantal text as written says "Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope," while the marginal reading tradition, which the KJV followed, says "in him will I hope." The two words sound identical and mean opposite things (more from our LDS scholar). This is not a modern discovery — the Mishnah itself flags the ambiguity and declares "the matter is even," undecided; the Jewish Publication Society prints the harder reading (more from our rabbi). Either way, the second half of the verse is undisputed: "but I will maintain mine own ways before him." Whether Job says "I have no hope" or "in him will I hope," he will argue his case to God's face — which may be the more courageous sentence (more from our academic scholar). Perhaps both readings are you, on different days (more from our rabbi).

This is the template for what one essay calls faithful complaint: Job talks to God, ragged and wounded, rather than about God in tidy theories — and God will ultimately endorse Job over the friends. The relationship stays open; everything goes on the table except the covenant itself (more from our practical disciple). Liberty Jail canonizes the same pattern: "O God, where art thou?" is pure Joban idiom, and the divine answer does not rebuke the lament — it absorbs it (more from our LDS scholar). The Talmud even rules from Job's case that "a person is not held responsible for what he says in his distress" — halakhah for the broken-hearted (more from our rabbi). Chapter 14 then turns to mortality itself: "If a man die, shall he live again?" (14:14) — a question Job raises and leaves hanging, which matters for Session 3.

Think deeply.

1. A single ambiguous Hebrew particle makes 13:15 mean either "I have no hope" or "I will hope in him" — and the lesson title hangs on it. What does it do to your reading that both are ancient, legitimate, and preserved side by side? Could trust and hopelessness coexist in the same faithful sentence?
2. Job accuses the friends of "speaking wickedly for God" — lying in God's defense. Where does well-meant religious explanation shade into perjury on God's behalf? Have you ever committed it?
3. Are your own prayers ever "half performance review"? What would a fully honest prayer — including the complaint you've been editing out — actually sound like this week?
4. The rabbis ruled that no one is held accountable for words spoken in anguish. How would ward life change if we extended that ruling to each other — to the grieving, the doubting, the newly diagnosed?
5. Job demands a hearing while conceding God may kill him first. What distinguishes his defiance from his wife's proposal to "curse God, and die"? Where exactly is the line?

25–30 minSession 3: "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" — One Verse, Six Outlooks

Reading assignment: Job 19

Before/as you read. One chapter today, because it contains the most beloved — and most contested — passage in the book, and it deserves to be read through more than one lens. Our panel walked Job 19:23–27 through BYU professor Donald W. Parry's six "outlooks" for reading scripture, and that walk-through is the backbone of this session (read the full six-outlooks essay).

Start with the near view. Read 19:13–19 first: Job inventories everyone who should have stood by him — kin, friends, servants, wife — all turned away. In Israelite law, a ruined man had one recourse: his go'el, the kinsman-redeemer obligated to buy back his land, ransom him, avenge his blood (think Boaz in Ruth). So when the man abandoned by every earthly kinsman declares "I know that my go'el liveth," the first audience heard something startling: a Kinsman remains who will rise in court and take up his case (more from our six-outlooks essay). Rashi read the vindicator as God himself, who will outlast Job's persecutors (more from our rabbi). Honesty about the text: verse 26 is among the most difficult in the Hebrew Bible — the KJV's "worms" and "body" are supplied words with no Hebrew behind them, and "in my flesh" can equally read "apart from my flesh" (more from our six-outlooks essay); most critical scholars doubt the poet had bodily resurrection in view, since Job elsewhere says "man lieth down, and riseth not" (more from our LDS scholar, more from our honest questioner).

Then the distant view — and it is not a cheat. Nephi's "likening" authorizes reading the verse christologically as faithful appropriation without claiming the poet consciously prophesied Easter (more from our LDS scholar). The kinsman-redeemer is exactly the office Latter-day Saints ascribe to Christ: the next-of-kin who pays what the debtor cannot. The book even supplies a near fulfillment — Job's vindicator does stand up for him, publicly, in chapter 42 — which becomes a type of the final one (more from our six-outlooks essay). And the doctrinal payoff: resurrection never rested on one difficult Hebrew verse; it stands on many witnesses, and Job 19 joins the chorus as a witness, not a lone proof-text. A reader grounded that way can hold scholarly ambiguity in one hand and doctrine in the other without dropping either (more from our six-outlooks essay). A prophet at the end of his life — Joseph Fielding Smith, October 1971 — still chose Job's words as the vocabulary of his final testimony, and the hymn built on this verse has been in our hymnals since 1835 (more from our doctrinal connector).

Think deeply.

1. Job speaks 19:25 from total abandonment — the verse is the climax of a chapter of desertion, not a detached Easter text. How does reading verses 13–19 first change what verses 25–27 mean?
2. The plain-sense reading (a legal vindicator) and the prophetic reading (the living Redeemer and resurrection) are different claims. Can you articulate both without weakening either? Which do you need more right now, and why?
3. If you first learned about the textual uncertainty of 19:26 from a hostile website instead of from your own study, how might that have gone? What does that suggest about how we should teach beloved proof-texts?
4. Job wished his words "graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever" (19:24) — and they outlived him beyond his imagining. What words of your own testimony would you want engraved, and what uncertainty would you honestly engrave beside them?
5. Try Parry's fifth outlook: read 19:23–27 slowly and pay attention to what the Spirit actually brings up — which may have nothing to do with resurrection. What came?

25–30 minSession 4: The Friends Lose on the Evidence

Reading assignment: Job 21 · Job 22 · Job 23 · Job 24

Before/as you read. These four chapters are the debate at full temperature. The friends are not straw men — they hold the Old Testament's most common theology, running through Deuteronomy and Proverbs: the righteous flourish, the wicked perish, so the sufferer should examine himself (more from our academic scholar). In chapter 22 Eliphaz finally says it outright — "Is not thy wickedness great?" — inventing crimes Job never committed (more from our LDS scholar). Job's rebuttal is empirical, almost sociological: "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?" (21:7). Consult the evidence, he says — ask anyone who travels (21:29). Chapter 24 widens the lens into one of the Bible's bleakest catalogs of social injustice — the dispossessed gleaning others' fields, the naked freezing against rock — ending with the devastating "yet God layeth not folly to them" (24:12): the wounded cry, and God files no charges. The friends defend the ledger; Job reports the data (more from our academic scholar, more from our LDS scholar).

The friends' syllogism is durable because it is comforting to the untouched: if sufferers earned it, then I, who am careful, am safe. You will hear it at church — "sometimes trials come because of our choices..." — and it also runs inward, as "what did I do to deserve this?" (more from our practical disciple). The Book of Mormon systematically dismantles it: Alma's righteous people were placed in bondage anyway, and Mormon interrupts the story to insist the Lord "trieth their patience and their faith" — trial as divine policy, not punishment (more from our doctrinal connector). D&C 121:10 assumes the same reading: the worst thing that happened to Job was not the Sabeans or the boils but the theology of his friends (more from our LDS scholar).

Chapter 23 is the block's devotional hinge. "When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold" (23:10) is magnificent — but it sits inside a chapter of divine absence: "I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him" (23:8–9). Read whole, the chapter models faith as the persistence of the search, not possession of the answer (more from our LDS scholar). Job's experience is the ancestor of what philosophers now call divine hiddenness — and Latter-day Saints have a canonized version of the cry in D&C 121:1 (more from our honest questioner). Notice what Job's integrity consists of during the silence: not feelings, which have collapsed, but footwork — "my foot hath held his steps" (23:11). When you cannot perceive God, integrity lives in habits kept from the light (more from our practical disciple).

Think deeply.

1. Job wins the argument with data: the wicked demonstrably prosper and the innocent demonstrably suffer. Why do we keep rebuilding the prosperity ledger anyway — in testimony meetings, in our self-talk — when both Job and observable life refute it?
2. Eliphaz invents specific sins to make Job's suffering make sense. What is it about unexplained suffering that we find more threatening than a false explanation?
3. If God said nothing to you for a year, what would still be true about your behavior on Tuesday? What are the two or three covenant habits on your own Job 23:12 list?
4. Chapter 24 is Job indicting God's governance over social injustice — the poor crushed while heaven files no charges. Is protest over injustice a form of faith? What separates Job's indictment from cynicism?
5. When retribution theology surfaces in a class — aimed at someone's divorce, unemployment, or wayward child — what would it look like to answer with Job 42:7 kindly, and then find the person it landed on?

25–30 minSession 5: The Whirlwind, the Trapdoor, and the Errand

Reading assignment: Job 38 · Job 39 · Job 40 · Job 42

Before/as you read. God finally speaks — and answers none of Job's legal questions. No mention of the wager, no theodicy; instead, a torrential tour of a cosmos conspicuously not centered on humanity: rain falling "on the wilderness, wherein there is no man" (38:26), the wild ass scorning the city, the war-horse laughing at fear (more from our LDS scholar). The poetry of chapter 38 deliberately picks up the imagery of Job's birth-curse in chapter 3 — doors, womb, darkness, light — and turns it inside out: Job's counter-cosmogony is answered with a cosmogony of wild, exuberant order without retribution (more from our academic scholar). Critics have called this bullying; defenders say sufferers need presence, not explanation — and the book, characteristically, declines to arbitrate (more from our honest questioner).

The whirlwind's opening question — "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth... when all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (38:4, 7) — expects the answer "nowhere." Restoration doctrine complicates the rhetoric wonderfully: if those sons of God are the premortal family of God, then Job was there. The question that humbles him also dignifies him (more from our doctrinal connector). The pattern — creation recital, then a mortal learning at once his smallness and his sonship — is one Latter-day Saints will recognize as the deep grammar of temple worship (more from our doctrinal connector).

Then the book's last textual trapdoor. The KJV's "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (42:6) supplies a "myself" the Hebrew lacks; the verse admits renderings from abject repentance to the JPS's "I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes" — a creature's acknowledgment of creatureliness, not self-loathing (more from our rabbi); whether Job repents at all is, textually, an open question (more from our academic scholar). What the text plainly gives is 42:5 — "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee" — the movement from secondhand theology to firsthand encounter. The property is epilogue; the theophany is the point (more from our LDS scholar, more from our doctrinal connector). Then the double verdict: God vindicates the protester and requires the orthodox comforters to seek his intercession (42:7–8) — and the restoration begins "when he prayed for his friends" (42:10). The honest problems of the epilogue — ten new children do not resurrect ten dead ones, though the daughters are named, praised, and given inheritance (more from our honest questioner) — sit beside its final assignment. One rabbi's summary is the most usable in an actual house of mourning: "why do I suffer?" has no available answer; the question is what my suffering obligates me to do — and Job's healing came through interceding for the men who wounded him (more from our rabbi).

Think deeply.

1. God's answer to a demand for justice is a tour of wilderness, weather, and wild animals — a world not organized around human deserving. Why might that decentering be a real answer rather than an evasion? Has an encounter with something vast ever done for you what an explanation couldn't?
2. Job never learns about the wager. He receives an encounter instead of the explanation the reader got in chapter 1. Which do you actually want from God — and which has He historically given you?
3. "Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (42:7): God sides with the man who complained over the men who defended Him. What does that verdict say about what God counts as speaking rightly of Him?
4. The epilogue doubles the flocks but not the children — seven sons and three daughters, the same count as before. Is that a folktale's tidy ending, a quiet signal that children are not replaceable property, or a genuine problem the text hands you? Can a resurrection-affirming faith read it differently?
5. Restoration came "when he prayed for his friends" — the sufferer ministering to his failed ministers. Whichever role you currently occupy, the wounded or the one who said the wrong thing at the funeral, what is your chapter 42 errand this week — by name?
6. After five sessions: the written text of 13:15 may say "I have no hope," and Job argues anyway; 23:8 finds God in no direction, and Job keeps walking anyway. What is "yet will I trust in him" now, in your own words — a feeling, a conclusion, or a set of appointments you keep?

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The panel's essays

• Our LDS scholar — What current scholarship says about Job's text, genre, and cruxes (13:15, 19:25, 42:6), and why a Restoration framework can hold it all — including Liberty Jail as the Doctrine and Covenants' own Job cycle.
• Our academic scholar — Job as a composite ancient Near Eastern masterwork: the prose frame vs. the poem, the Babylonian parallels, the lawsuit metaphor, and three places the KJV smooths over the Hebrew.
• Our honest questioner — Seven hard questions the book raises (historicity, the satan, the ethics of the wager, the tidy ending, the resurrection reading, and more), with the faithful range of responses to each.
• Our rabbi — A Jewish reading: the Talmud's arguments about Job, the shiva laws born in 2:13, the medieval commentators, what a christological lens can miss, and Job after Auschwitz.
• Our six-outlooks essay — Job 19:23–27 walked through Donald W. Parry's six ways of reading scripture, from the kinsman-redeemer of Israelite law to the living Redeemer of latter-day testimony.
• Our doctrinal connector — Five Restoration connections: the council frame, Liberty Jail as inspired commentary, the Book of Mormon's refutation of the friends, "Where wast thou?" answered, and the hymn we kept singing.
• Our practical disciple — What Job asks of you before Saturday: ministering in silence, faithful complaint in prayer, integrity when God feels absent, and what to say (and never say) to sufferers.