The Keep Shelf: Moses, Job, and a Story Worth Remembering
I have a lot of books.
Probably too many, if you ask my husband (which is why we don’t ask him).
But as much as I love books, I’m surprisingly willing to get rid of them. Once I finish one, I’ll usually pass it along to someone else, donate it, or find it a new home. I loved it. I read it. It served its purpose. I don’t necessarily need it taking up space on my bookcase forever.
Except for one shelf.
There’s one shelf in my personal library reserved for the books I can’t give away—my Keep Shelf.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Benefit of Doubt by Craig Groeschel. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Just to name a few.
They’re different books, written by different people, about completely different things. And I don’t keep them because I think I’ll forget what happened in them.
I keep them because something happened to me while I was reading them.
They challenged something I believed. Put words around something I couldn’t articulate. Changed the way I saw the world. Found me at exactly the right moment.
They’re the stories I needed.
And recently, while studying the book of Job, I started wondering:
Was Job that kind of story for Moses?
Now, before anyone writes me an angry email, let me be clear: I’m fully aware that we don’t know for sure who wrote it. The Bible never names its human author. There is, however, an ancient Jewish tradition recorded in the Talmud that attributes the book of Job to Moses. I’m not presenting that tradition as fact, and what I’m about to suggest is certainly not something Scripture tells us happened.
But, as I’ve said many times before, consider this my sanctified imagination.
Because if Moses did have something to do with preserving Job’s story, I can’t stop wondering why.
Job is a pretty strange book when you think about where it sits in the story of Scripture.
Job isn’t an Israelite king or prophet. His story doesn’t take place in Jerusalem. It doesn’t move us closer to the Promised Land, establish the monarchy, build the temple, or advance the national story of Israel in any obvious way.
It begins somewhere else entirely:
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job…
Job 1:1
Even today, we can’t say with certainty exactly where Uz was.
Yet somebody remembered Job. Somebody told his story. Somebody preserved it. Eventually, this account of a suffering man from outside the central storyline of Israel became one of the books we would call the Bible.
Why?
If Moses really was the one who recorded it, I wonder if the answer might begin long before Israel needed Job’s story.
Maybe Moses needed it first.
This is where geography makes my imagination start running.
Again, we don’t know exactly where Uz was located, and several locations have been proposed. So I won’t be planting a little Bible-history flag into a map and declaring, “UZ: JOB LIVED HERE” anytime soon. Biblical geography has enough arguments without me starting another one.
But several of the proposed locations place Job’s world somewhere east or southeast of Israel, around Edom or northern Arabia.
Which becomes interesting when we remember where Moses spent forty years of his life: Midian, traditionally located in northwestern Arabia.
Are you following my red thread yet?
Moses’s story began in Egypt. He was born a Hebrew at a time when Pharaoh had ordered Hebrew baby boys to be killed. But through an extraordinary chain of events, Moses ended up being raised in Pharaoh’s own household. Acts tells us:
Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.
Acts 7:22
He knew privilege. Education. Influence. The palace.
Then, at forty years old, Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and killed him. When Pharaoh learned what had happened, Moses fled for his life.
He ended up in Midian, where he married Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian. He started a family and became a shepherd.
That sentence goes by awfully fast in Exodus considering it represents about forty years of the man’s life.
Forty years.
I get impatient when God takes more than 3-5 business days to make sense of something.
Moses had an entire adulthood in the wilderness.
The man raised in Pharaoh’s household became the guy watching his father-in-law’s sheep.
And yes, shepherding would eventually become incredibly significant preparation for Moses’s calling. But Moses didn’t know that. He didn’t have Exodus 3 yet.
He didn’t know there was going to be a burning bush. He didn’t know he would stand before Pharaoh again. He didn’t know the Red Sea would split. He didn’t know there would be tablets of stone, manna on the ground, water from a rock, or a nation looking to him for leadership.
He was just in Midian.
I wonder what those forty years felt like while he was living them. I wonder if there were days when Moses looked at his life and thought, “I had a life. And now I have this one.”
Which is why I can’t stop imagining someone telling him about Job.
(This is where we step firmly into the realm of my imagination.) The Bible doesn’t tell us if Moses heard Job’s story in Midian. It doesn’t tell us Jethro knew it. It doesn’t tell us the story circulated among the Midianites.
But indulge the thought with me.
Moses had married into the family of a Midianite priest. He was living among people outside Egypt, learning their land and presumably becoming familiar with their customs and stories. If an account of a man named Job had been preserved somewhere in that broader world, is it impossible to imagine Moses hearing it there?
Picture a man who once had everything sitting near a fire after another day of tending sheep that don’t even belong to him. And someone begins:
“There was a man in the land of Uz…”
Job had once had everything, too. Scripture describes him as “the greatest man among all the people of the East.” He had children, livestock, servants, wealth, and respect.
Then, in a devastating stretch of loss, his life collapsed. His livestock and servants were taken or killed. His children died. Then Job himself became terribly ill, covered in painful sores. The life he knew was gone, and he had no idea why.
If you’ve read his story, you know something Job didn’t: the opening chapters describe a heavenly conversation in which Satan challenges Job’s faithfulness, claiming Job only worships God because his life is blessed. But Job never gets that information.
He suffers without access to the explanation.
Moses’s experience wasn’t Job’s experience. I don’t want to flatten either story by pretending their suffering was the same. But I wonder it Moses would have recognized the feeling underneath Job’s words.
I don’t understand how I got here.
I don’t understand what God is doing.
I don’t know if this is what the rest of my life looks like.
Maybe Job gave language to something Moses couldn’t articulate yet.
That’s what the books on my Keep Shelf have done for me.
Job spends chapter after chapter trying to understand what God is doing.
His friends arrive with plenty of explanations—which is a helpful reminder that having something to say and having something helpful to say are two very different spiritual gifts.
But Job wants more than their theories. He wants an audience with God. He wants answers.
And finally, God speaks.
Except God doesn’t give Job the explanation we might expect. He starts asking questions. Like, a lot of questions.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell Me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Job 38:4-7
God goes on to talk about the sea, snow, stars, lions, ravens, mountain goats, wild donkeys and more.
Creation. Weather. Animals. Wilderness.
Which is fascinating to imagine being heard by a man who spent forty years outside tending sheep.
Imagine hearing the words of Job 38 and then walking outside beneath a Midianite sky.
Imagine being “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” and encountering a story in which the Creator essentially asks, And how much do you actually know?
Egypt had taught Moses many things, but the wilderness was teaching him his limits. And maybe Job’s story was teaching him what to do when he reached them.
Because Job carries an enormous and uncomfortable truth:
You can be completely unable to explain what God is doing and still discover that He is trustworthy.
Job never receives the behind-the-scenes explanation the reader gets in chapters one and two. Instead, something changes in Job himself.
Near the end of the book, he says:
“My ears had heard of You but now my eyes have seen You.”
Job 42:5, emphasis mine
That line has been sitting differently with me since I started thinking about Moses. Because after forty years in Midian, Moses sees something, too.
Exodus 3 begins with Moses doing his normal job. He’s tending Jethro’s flock and leads the sheep to the far side of the wilderness. Forty years of ordinary days, and then one day a bush catches fire.
Except…it doesn’t burn up.
Moses walks over to investigate, and God calls his name from the flames. “Moses! Moses!”
Suddenly, the God Moses may have known about is speaking directly to him. And Moses has questions.
Who am I to go to Pharaoh?
What should I tell the Israelites when they ask who sent me?
What if they don’t believe me?
What if they don’t listen?
Moses wants information. He wants reassurance. And at several points in the conversation, he would also seriously like God to consider another candidate.
God does answer him, but underneath His answers is something much bigger:
“I will be with you.”
Exodus 3:12
And when Moses asks God’s name:
“I AM WHO I AM.”
Exodus 3:14
Job asks why and ultimately encounters Who.
Moses asks how and receives I AM.
Neither man is handed the entire plan. But they’re given something better—a deeper revelation of the God they’ll have to trust when the plan is beyond their understanding. And Moses was going to need that.
Because the burning bush wasn’t the end of his wilderness story. In many ways, it was the beginning of another one.
Moses would return to Egypt, confront Pharaoh, and lead the Israelites out of slavery. Then those people would spend forty years in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.
Moses went from spending forty years shepherding sheep in Midian to forty years shepherding people through the wilderness.
And those people had questions, too.
Why did you bring us here?
Why couldn’t we stay in Egypt?
What are we going to eat?
What are we going to drink?
Is God really with us?
They were free from Egypt, but they couldn’t yet see where God was taking them. They knew what they had lost more clearly than they could see what God was building.
Moses knew a thing or two about that kind of wilderness.
And if Job’s story had accompanied him there—if he had carried it around in his mind for years—maybe Moses understood something his people desperately needed to learn:
Pain you don’t understand does not mean God has abandoned you.
Maybe Job prepared Moses for more than a burning bush.
Maybe Moses once thought Egypt had been the significant part of his life and Midian was the interruption.
But God was forming a shepherd.
Which brings me back to the question that started all of this: Why Job?
Job doesn’t advance Israel’s historical storyline in the conventional sense. He isn’t standing in Pharaoh’s court, marching around Jericho, sitting on David’s throne, building Solomon’s temple, or preaching to exiles.
And that’s part of the book’s beauty.
Because Job asks a question that doesn’t belong only to Israel. It belongs to every generation.
Who is God when my life doesn’t make sense?
I can’t prove Moses heard Job’s story in Midian.
I can’t prove he carried it with him for forty years.
And I certainly can’t prove that one day, looking back on everything God had done, Moses thought, “People need to know this story.”
But I love imagining it.
Because I know what it’s like to encounter a book at exactly the right moment. To read someone else’s words and realize they’ve given language to something happening inside me. To finish a story knowing I’m not quite the same person who opened it.
Maybe Job was that story for Moses.
Maybe somewhere in the wilderness, it changed him.
Maybe Job was on Moses’s Keep Shelf.
And maybe, years later, Moses understood that the story he had needed in his own wilderness was a story worth giving to everyone else.
Somebody remembered Job. Somebody retold his story. Somebody decided that the story of a suffering man from Uz—who lost almost everything, demanded answers from God, and ultimately discovered that God was bigger than the answers he wanted—was worth preserving.
And now, thousands of years later, we still have it.
Which makes me wonder if God sometimes gives us stories before we understand why we need them.
Maybe you’re in your own Midian right now.
The life you thought you’d have looks nothing like the one in front of you. Something ended. Something changed. A door stayed shut. What once made you feel useful or important is gone, and what you’re doing now feels painfully ordinary. You thought you’d be something significant. Instead, you’re tending sheep.
And maybe you keep asking, God, when are You getting me out of here?
But maybe there’s another question worth asking: God, what are You teaching me about who You are while I’m here?
Moses didn’t know the burning bush was coming. For decades, Midian didn’t look like preparation to him. It was just his life.
But the man who had once known about the God of his ancestors would eventually hear that God call him by name. Years later, Exodus would describe their relationship this way:
The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.
Exodus 33:11
And maybe somewhere along the way, Moses realized that a story he once needed had become a story someone else would need, too.
That’s what happens with the books on my Keep Shelf. I keep them because they found me when I needed them.
But the best stories don’t stay on the shelves. Eventually, we tell someone else, “You need to hear this.”
Maybe that’s what happened with Job.
Maybe some stories God gives us in the wilderness aren’t only meant to help us survive the wilderness.
They’re preparing us for what comes after it.
And sometimes, what comes after it is another person sitting in a wilderness of their own, trying to understand a life they never expected.
Maybe that’s when we pull an old story off the Keep Shelf, sit down beside them, and begin:
“There was once a man in the land of Uz…”
Lord, when I don’t understand what You’re doing, teach me to trust who You are. Help me not to rush through the wilderness or dismiss the ordinary seasons as wasted ones. Open my eyes to the ways You are forming me, the truths You are teaching me, and the stories You are placing on my own Keep Shelf. Give me the courage to take those stories down and share them with someone who needs them. May what You teach me in my wilderness become a reminder of Your faithfulness in someone else’s. Amen.
If Moses’s encounter at the burning bush has you wanting to stay in Exodus 3 a little longer, check out my three-part series, Lessons From a Burning Bush:
(PART 1) I AM: When God Names Himself