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ancient person took as a fact—that God is both above the world and involved with it, how can one explain the corollary fact that people suffer?
    Many of the biblical authors were concerned with this question—even obsessed with it. From Genesis to Revelation, biblical writers grapple with this issue, discuss it, agonize over it. A very large portion of the Bible is devoted to dealing with it. If God has chosen the Jews—or (also? alternatively?) the Christians—to be his people, why do they experience such horrible suffering? It is truethat there was nothing in the ancient world quite like the Holocaust. That required the technological “advances” of modernity: the ability to transport millions by rail and kill thousands by gas and incinerate hundreds in specially built crematoria. But there were slaughters aplenty in the ancient world and wretched suffering of all kinds caused by all manner of circumstances: military defeat, cruelty to POW’s, and torture; drought, famine, pestilence, epidemic; birth defects, infant mortality, infanticide; and on and on.
    When these things happened, how did ancient authors explain them?
    One of their most common explanations—it fills many pages of the Hebrew Bible—may seem simplistic, repugnant, backward, or just dead-wrong to many modern people. It is that people suffer because God wants them to suffer. And why does God want them to suffer? Because they have disobeyed him and he is punishing them. The ancient Israelites had a healthy sense of the power of God, and many of them were convinced that nothing happens in this world unless God has done it. If God’s people are suffering, it is because he is angry with them for not behaving in the ways they should. Suffering comes as a punishment for sin.
    Where does this view come from, and how can we explain it within a biblical context? To make sense of this “classical” view of suffering as a punishment for sin, we need to consider some historical background information.
     
    Suffering as Punishment: The Biblical Background
     
    The religion of ancient Israel was rooted in historical traditions that had been passed from one generation to the next for many centuries. The books of the Bible are themselves written products that come at the tail end of this long period of oral (and earlier written) tradition. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible—sometimes called the Pentateuch (meaning the “five scrolls”) or the Torah (meaning “instruction,” “guidance,” or “the law,” since they containthe Law of Moses)—recount many of these important ancient traditions, beginning with the creation of the world in Genesis, through the times of the Jewish ancestors (Abraham, the father of the Jews, his son Isaac, Isaac’s son Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons who became the founders of the “twelve tribes” of Israel; all in Genesis), through the enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt (the book of Exodus), to their salvation from slavery under the great leader Moses, who led the people out of Egypt and then received the Law of God (the Torah) from God himself on Mount Sinai (Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers). The Pentateuch continues by describing the wanderings of the Israelites through the wilderness (Numbers) until they were on the verge of entering Canaan, the land that God had promised to given them (Deuteronomy). Traditionally these books were thought to have been written by none other than Moses himself (he would have lived about 1300 BCE ), but the books do not claim to be written by him, and scholars are now convinced, as they have been for more than 150 years, that they were written much later based on sources that had been in oral circulation for centuries. Today scholars maintain that there were various written sources behind the Pentateuch; typically they date its final production, in the form we now know it, to some eight hundred years after the death of Moses. 12
    Whenever they were actually written, the books