The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the few instances in the Bible where we encounter epicureanism, which essentially boils down to this:Eat, drink and be merry for tommorrow you die. "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!" This phrase is the book's motto, but through it we can also see an example of how it was dealt a hard hand in translation. The word in Hebrew, hevel, is exceedingly difficult to translate. It's literal meaning can be given, roughly, as "mist", "vapor" or "fog". So all endeavor is reduced to a fog, because all of us, the good the evil, the industrious and the lazy, the wise and the stupid, all come to the same end. We all die eventually. It's as Charlotte says in Charlotte's Web: "What's a life anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die."

And I also know how I can properly correct people who use that phrase, "the Patience of Job", particularly when employing it in a way that tries to uphold retributive justice. They, in all probability, concentrated only on the Prolougue and the Epilogue and ignored--or skimmed over--the whole middle section. In this section Job is very vocal in his insistence that he did not deserve all this shit happening to him, and even asks God to come down and explain why good people suffer and bad people don't. God does so, but he of course doesn't answer the question. He tells Job(and this is of course paraphrasing) "I am mightier then you are, and unknowable! Do you except this?!", to which Job(perhaps understandably humbled) says "Oh yes Lord! Forgive my impudent questions." But at least he had the guts to ask. And maybe that's all that ever really can be done is ask. I don't know.