“It is the greatest thing ever written with pen,” the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said of the book of Job. “There is nothing, I think, written in the Bible or out of it of equal merit.”1 This is high praise indeed, especially when considered in the context of the regard most have for the Bible’s overall literary excellence. As John Gardner noted in an op-ed piece more than a century later, justifying why the Bible remains on his “recommended reading list,”