Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (self published, 2025), 103.
The historical books of the Hebrew Bible are anonymous. The authors or editors behind the texts are not in the spotlight. The focus is on the narratives about how God was working among the covenant people of Israel throughout their history. The stories are presented from God’s vantage point. The Gospel writers likewise do not put the spotlight on themselves. They put it squarely on Jesus. John the Baptist’s pronouncement that Jesus “must increase, but I must decrease” is a good encapsulation of what they were doing when writing about Jesus (John 3:30 NRSVue). In the end, it is the message, and not the individual messengers, that truly matters.
The Amateur Exegete 
Hi Ben, still on the topic of Job and James.
From what you’ve said, it seems that the author of Job would understand all moral temptation — including the inducement to sin — as originating from God, since in Job it is God who “puts Job in the situation” that could potentially lead him to sin.
If that is the author of Job’s view, then are you saying that:
— all of which James describes as arising from one’s own desires (Jas 1:14–15; 3:14–16) —
would, according to the logic of Job, have been caused by circumstances that God himself created?
In other words, in the view of the author of Job, would God be the indirect (or even direct) cause of the circumstances that give rise to these sins?
I ask because this conclusion seems to create a significant contrast between:
James’s view, in which temptations to evil arise from human desires,
and
the reading of Job you are proposing, where God is the one who creates the conditions in which a person might fall.
Is this really what you understand the author of Job to be saying?
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Ben, in one of our conversations you used Abraham as an example of someone whom God tempted to sin.
The first problem with this reading is that it presupposes that human sacrifice was already understood as morally evil within the horizon of the text, which is anachronistic. Explicit prohibitions against human sacrifice only appear later in Israelite legislation. Genesis 22 belongs to a patriarchal and narrative context, not a legal one, and therefore cannot be evaluated on the basis of norms that had not yet been instituted within the world of the text.
Second, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that ancient Jews understood Abraham as being on the verge of committing a sin. On the contrary, both in the text itself and in later Jewish tradition, the Akedah is interpreted as a test of faithfulness and obedience, not as a near moral failure. If the intent of the text were to portray Abraham as standing on the brink of a morally evil act, it would be strange that this reading is entirely absent from the history of its reception.
Finally, the argument seems to depend on an even deeper anachronism: the imposition of modern moral categories onto an ancient text. What is morally unacceptable to us in the twenty-first-century West was not necessarily conceived in the same way by the people of the time, place, and culture in which Genesis was composed. I am not denying that human sacrifice is morally wrong; rather, I am pointing out the methodological problem of mixing modern ethical judgments with a historical and exegetical analysis of the biblical text.
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I read your posts above and wanted to respectfully offer the following. (I understand that your comments and questions were directed toward Ben, so apologies if I am intruding on the conversation.):
In your first post, you asked “Is this really what you understand the author of Job to be saying?”
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(Continued from above)
2. This is probably more of a philosophical aside (similar to the debate between the innate ideas perspective of rationalism vs. the learned ideas view of the British empiricists) and if so apologies for the digression. But is it possible to act on certain sinful desires without an object in our surroundings or memories being the cause? For example, take the prohibition of Jesus in Matthew 5:28 against men having lustful thoughts when looking at a woman. If a man had never seen a woman before, could he ever experience feelings of desire toward the female body? (Just to clarify, this is only for the purposes of illustration. I think Jesus is mistaken here about the possibility of controlling our thoughts vs. controlling our actions. He also did not have a modern medical understanding that hormones like testosterone cause physical desire and these cannot be toggled on or off by our conscious thought processes. A married man can’t halt his production of hormones to prevent his experiencing thoughts of lust toward women other than his spouse, as much as someone like St. Augustine might have wished with his bizarre notions regarding Adam before the fall!)
3. As hinted above, if James did in fact differentiate somehow between external sources of temptation and internal sources of temptation, I think he saw them as connected or being part of a single instance of a person’s trial. The outside situation prompts a person to engage in possible sin as a result of their inherently fallen human nature which they must choose to overcome or risk failing the test in Godliness. (This is what I take to be New Testament’s understanding; it’s not necessarily my own.) For example, in Job’s case there was a situation (loss of family members, disease, etc.) that might have led Job (a human with a fallen sinful nature) to engage in the wrong of cursing God. What seems to indicate James thinks of temptation as something external is his use of the conditional phrase rendered “whenever you face trials of any kind” in 1:2. This would make sense for a source of temptation that frequently though not always occurs. If he were referring to desires from within a person (that would always be in effect due to being intrinsic), the conditional would make less sense.
4. It’s possible, though, that James does not make a fundamental distinction between external and internal sources of temptation. In an annotation to the Harper-Collins Study Bible, Sophie Laws writes “The same words are used in Greek for trial as an external test (see 1.2) and trial as temptation, an internal prompting.” (pg. 2271) So if this is true, then the denial on the part of its author that God tempts anyone in 1:13 would seem by extension to apply to the external trials of 1:2, since there is not difference in the original Greek between the two referents. James would be denying God could cause either sort of temptation.
5. In regard to Abraham being tempted to sin in Genesis 22, what I understood Ben to mean was that, according to the biblical authors, he was being put in a situation where he might refuse to obey God’s command.
If for the sake of argument (I obviously reject the idea that a benevolent deity would condone human sacrifice under any circumstance), we assume that Abraham needed to start the process of sacrificing Isaac (before the angel intervened) then the possible internal element would have been the temptation for Abraham to withhold his only son (Genesis 22:12). This was purely a test on God’s part that Abraham could have failed by giving in to his desire (from the viewpoint of Genesis) to keep his son alive in spite of God’s command.
So, even granting that God could have ordered Abraham to sacrifice his own son, the temptation was Abraham’s being put in a situation where he would be tempted to withhold his son. This is another situation where someone is presented with a external circumstance that might cause them to sin, in this case, a prompting (whether verbal or not) from God to perform an action.
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Hello, thank you for the response. I would like to clarify my point a bit further.
My argument is not simply that Job and James belong to different theological contexts — I agree with that. My point is more specific and concerns the meaning of what counts as “temptation” in each text.
If we understand that, in Job, every moral temptation originates from God “creating the circumstances” in which a person might fall, then this logic must be applied consistently. That would mean that all circumstances created by God — including blessings — would have to be classified as temptations.
However, this is not how the Book of Job itself operates. Job’s initial wealth is presented as a sign of his righteousness, not as a moral danger or a temptation (Job 1:1–3). Likewise, the restoration of his prosperity at the end of the book (Job 42:10–17) is not portrayed as a new test or temptation. In other words, within the author’s framework, blessing and temptation are not interchangeable categories.
This contrasts with James, where temptation is explicitly located in human desires (James 1:14–15) and can be triggered by both adversity and prosperity. In James, wealth can function as a temptation precisely because it stimulates internal desires such as pride, self-sufficiency, or injustice.
Therefore, what I am suggesting is that Job and James are not operating with the same definition of temptation. In Job, the issue is an extraordinary test related to faithfulness, not a general moral principle that applies to every life circumstance. In James, by contrast, temptation is an internal moral dynamic that may be catalyzed by different external situations.
This is why I asked whether we should really understand the author of Job as claiming that God is the (direct or indirect) cause of all situations that give rise to sin. That reading seems to go beyond what the Book of Job itself affirms and ends up collapsing categories that the text itself keeps distinct.
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