Job 1:1a

Job is not a fairy tale. It is not a fable. It is not a morality play set against an ancient backdrop. Although it is told with poetry, we take it, along with the rest of Scripture, to be the truth, given to us by God through the pen of an inspired writer. These things actually happened as we have them recorded for us. The men and the woman who speak in this book did not for the most part speak in poetry, but the words we have, though stylized somewhat by the author, are nevertheless the true message about what happened. We begin with the context:

Prologue
אִישׁ הָיָה בְאֶרֶץ עוּץ אִיּוֹב שְׁמוֹ
1 There was in the land of Uz a man whose name was Job.

Many ancient places took their names from the early people who settled there. For example, after the flood, three of Ham's sons were named Cush, Mizraim and Canaan. Mizraim is the Hebrew name for Egypt; Cush is the land south of Egypt (modern Sudan). Uz was the name of one of Shem's grandsons through his youngest son Aram. He might possibly have given his name to Job's fatherland. However, there were two other men named Uz. One was the oldest son of Abraham's brother Nahor. Luther was of the opinion that this man gave his name to the fields where Job's flocks and herds grazed. Another possibility is found in the genealogies of Genesis 36 and descendants of Edom and some other rulers of that land. This included Uz, the grandson of Seir the Horite. In Jeremiah 25:20, the "kings of Uz" are described as "foreign people" who's land is associated with the other Canaanite nations like the Philistines, Edomites, Moabites and Ammonites including the Temanites (Jer. 25:23).

Although we cannot say with certainty which of these men named Uz (if any) was the namesake of the land of Uz, we can say one of two things about the location and date of the events. No Israelite, Moabite or Ammonite is mentioned in Job at all. This would seem to point to a time either before or not long after Abraham and Lot settled in Canaan. The Temanites are mentioned, and these are the people of Teman, another name for Edom south of the Dead Sea. A raid is made on Job's herds by Chaldeans (a people living near Babylon), and so the eastern bank of the Jordan might be a location. However, the distant Sabeans also carried away Job's oxen and donkeys, and they were a people living very far away (Joel 3:8), probably the southern end of the Arabian peninsula.

Uz, then, seems to be a place someplace east of the Jordan, either up near the Sea of Galilee or down around the southern tip of the Dead Sea. Either place would fit the context of the book.

The most important fact to take away from this opening sentence is that this did not happen "once upon a time," or "in a land very far away," but in a specific place. It happened to a real man. The suffering in Job was real suffering, and the mistaken accusations that pepper the book were real mistaken accusations. Job was every bit as real as Abraham and Abraham Lincoln. And more importantly, Job looked for an advocate, a Redeemer, to rescue him from his troubles and to rescue him from his sins, and that Redeemer was equally as real: Jesus Christ, who redeemed every one of us from our sins. Through faith in Jesus, we have the promise and the reality of eternal life forever in heaven.

NOTE: Job's name means something like "the sufferer" or "the oppressed," but we don't necessarily need to associate him with the Jobab in Scripture as some suggest. There was a Jobab who was king of Edom who was a Bozrite (1 Chron. 1:43), and although he might have been a contemporary of Job, we don't need to assume he was the same man, even though Job will be called "the greatest man among all the people of the East." One does not need to be king to be considered the greatest man in a country.

Luther's thoughts on this:

"Augustine and Ambrose think that this Jobab is of the family of Esau and that he is Job, and there are many conjectures linked with this opinion. For the letters agree and also the names of his friends, and of these Eliphaz the Temanite seems to have had his origin from Teman in the land of Edom, and likewise Bildad and Zophar. If this is true, it agrees well with history, for Job was very wise in God’s Law and embraced the doctrine and circumcision of his father Esau." (LW 6. Although he concedes the possibility here, elsewhere he makes it plain that he didn't think Job and Jobab were the same man, but he allows that they could have been. Yet he makes a convincing and scholarly counter-argument, also in volume 6, against the common argument that Job and Jobab are spelled too differently as inconclusive).