Suffering in the Bible

Suffering is one of the most persistent themes in the biblical texts and one of the central problems in the philosophy of religion. The Hebrew Bible contains multiple frameworks for understanding suffering that stand in tension with one another: the Deuteronomistic retribution principle, the protest theology of Job, the empirical skepticism of Ecclesiastes, and the unresolved lament of the psalms. The New Testament introduces additional frameworks through the theology of the cross and the eschatological promise of future restoration. This article surveys the biblical texts on suffering, the scale of suffering observable in the natural world and human history, and the theological frameworks that have been developed to address the relationship between divine power, divine goodness, and the existence of suffering.^{1, 4}

The retribution principle

The Deuteronomistic theology presents a direct causal relationship between moral conduct and experienced outcomes. The framework is stated programmatically:

“If you will only obey the LORD your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you.”

The curses that follow disobedience are catalogued in detail: “The LORD will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed” (Deuteronomy 28:20, NRSV). The curses include disease, drought, defeat in battle, exile, madness, and siege conditions so severe that parents will eat their own children (Deuteronomy 28:53-57). Noth demonstrated that this retribution theology structures the entire Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through 2 Kings), which interprets the rise and fall of Israel’s fortunes as a direct consequence of covenant fidelity or infidelity. The kings are evaluated by a single criterion — faithfulness to YHWH — and national outcomes are presented as correlated with that criterion.⁵

Proverbs reinforces the retribution framework in the wisdom tradition: “The LORD does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked” (Proverbs 10:3, NRSV). “No harm happens to the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble” (Proverbs 12:21, NRSV). “The fear of the LORD prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short” (Proverbs 10:27, NRSV). These are not merely proverbs of general tendency but assertions about the moral structure of reality: the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer because God has ordered the world to operate on retributive principles.¹

Job and the challenge to retribution

The book of Job mounts a direct assault on the retribution principle. Job is introduced as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1, NRSV) — his righteousness is established at the outset, by the narrator and confirmed by God (“there is no one like him on the earth,” Job 1:8). He loses his children, his wealth, and his health. His three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar) operate within the retribution framework and argue that Job’s suffering implies hidden guilt. Eliphaz asks: “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?” (Job 4:7, NRSV). Bildad asserts: “If you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you” (Job 8:6, NRSV).²

Job rejects the friends’ explanation and demands a legal hearing before God: “Oh, that I had one to hear me! Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!” (Job 31:35, NRSV). When God responds from the whirlwind (Job 38-41), the response does not address Job’s suffering at all. Instead, God catalogues the wonders of creation — the foundations of the earth, the storehouses of snow, the habits of the mountain goat, the power of Behemoth and Leviathan — without offering any moral explanation. Newsom reads Job as a “contest of moral imaginations” in which multiple frameworks for understanding suffering are placed in dialogue without any one achieving final victory. The legal metaphor, the disciplinary model, the retribution principle, and the divine speeches’ appeal to cosmic mystery all compete for the reader’s assent.²

The epilogue contains the most pointed rejection of the friends’ retribution theology. God declares to Eliphaz: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7, NRSV). The text vindicates Job — the one who protested and questioned God — over the friends who defended God with conventional theology.²

Ecclesiastes and empirical observation

Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) approaches suffering from an empirical standpoint. Seow identifies Qohelet’s method as systematic observation of human experience, using the terms darash (to investigate) and tur (to explore) to describe a comprehensive inquiry into the conditions of human life. The book’s central finding is the failure of the retribution principle under observed conditions:³

“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.”

And: “In my vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evildoing” (Ecclesiastes 7:15, NRSV). Qohelet also observes systemic injustice: “I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there” (Ecclesiastes 3:16, NRSV). The canonical preservation of Ecclesiastes alongside Deuteronomy and Proverbs means the biblical collection contains texts that directly contradict one another on whether righteousness leads to prosperity and wickedness leads to ruin.^{3, 1}

Lament and unresolved suffering

The psalms of lament give voice to suffering without resolving it. Approximately one-third of the 150 psalms are laments — prayers of complaint, protest, and petition arising from experiences of pain, abandonment, persecution, or divine silence. Brueggemann identifies the lament as a canonical form that authorizes protest against God: the worshipper is not required to accept suffering passively but is given liturgical language for complaint and demand.¹

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1, NRSV) — the line the Gospel of Mark places on Jesus’s lips at the crucifixion (Mark 15:34). Psalm 44 protests national suffering that appears undeserved: “All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten you, or been false to your covenant. ... Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?” (Psalm 44:17, 23, NRSV). Psalm 88, the bleakest psalm in the Psalter, ends in unresolved darkness: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness” (Psalm 88:18, NRSV). Brueggemann reads the preservation of Psalm 88 in Israel’s worship as a deliberate theological choice: the tradition refuses to guarantee that every experience of suffering will be resolved with divine deliverance.¹

Trible identifies a further category of biblical suffering in narratives she calls “texts of terror” — stories of women who suffer violence within the biblical narrative without the text offering moral commentary or divine intervention. The rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13), the dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19), the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11), and the expulsion of Hagar (Genesis 21) are preserved in the canon without resolution: the victims receive no vindication, and God does not intervene to prevent the violence. Trible reads these narratives as the canon’s refusal to sanitize human suffering — the texts stand as witnesses to suffering that has no moral explanation and receives no divine response.¹⁵

Divine agency and suffering

The biblical texts do not uniformly present suffering as a consequence of human action. Several texts attribute suffering directly to divine initiative. Fretheim identifies a pattern in the Hebrew Bible in which God is presented as the direct agent of suffering, not merely its permitter:

“I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.”

The Hebrew ra’ in Isaiah 45:7 can mean both “evil” and “calamity” — the text places woe alongside weal as the product of divine creative action. Amos 3:6 asks: “Does disaster befall a city, unless the LORD has done it?” (NRSV). Lamentations 3:37-38 states: “Who can command and have it done, if the Lord has not ordained it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?” (NRSV). Seibert identifies these texts as presenting a God who is not merely permitting or allowing suffering but actively causing it — a portrait that stands in tension with other texts asserting divine compassion and justice.^{4, 16}

The divine speeches in Job compound the problem. God responds to Job’s suffering not with consolation but with a catalogue of creation’s wildness: the ostrich that “deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers” (Job 39:16, NRSV), the predator for whom God provides prey (“Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions?” Job 38:39, NRSV), and the Leviathan that cannot be tamed. Fretheim reads these passages as presenting a creation that is not fully domesticated — a world in which wildness, predation, and suffering are built into the structure of reality rather than introduced as punishment for sin.⁴

The scale of suffering

The empirical scope of suffering, both human and animal, provides context for the theological frameworks the biblical texts offer.

Dimensions of global human suffering^{6, 7, 8}

The vast majority of suffering on Earth occurs among non-human animals. Most animal species employ r-selection reproductive strategies, producing large numbers of offspring with the expectation that the overwhelming majority will die before reaching reproductive age. A single female Atlantic cod can produce up to nine million eggs per spawning cycle, with survival to maturity below 0.01%. Sea turtles lay approximately 110 eggs per nest, with an estimated one in a thousand hatchlings surviving to adulthood. Ng argues that for r-selected species, the default experience of most individual organisms that have ever existed is a brief life dominated by starvation, predation, disease, parasitism, or exposure, followed by death before reproduction.⁹

Dawkins articulated the scope of this suffering:

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (1995)¹³

Suffering before humanity

The fossil record documents hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering predating the emergence of Homo sapiens. Raup and Sepkoski identified five major mass extinction events in Earth’s history, each eliminating between 75% and 96% of existing species:¹⁰

The Ordovician-Silurian extinction (approximately 445–440 million years ago) occurred in two pulses associated with severe glaciation and falling sea levels, eliminating approximately 85% of marine species. The Late Devonian extinction (approximately 375–360 million years ago) devastated marine ecosystems over a period of 15–20 million years, virtually eliminating reef-building organisms and removing approximately 75% of species. The Permian-Triassic extinction (approximately 252 million years ago) was the most severe: massive volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Traps released enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, causing extreme global warming, ocean acidification, and widespread anoxia. Erwin estimates that approximately 96% of marine species, 70% of terrestrial vertebrates, and 83% of insect genera were eliminated.^{10, 11}

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction (approximately 201 million years ago) was driven by volcanic eruptions from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, eliminating approximately 80% of species through climate disruption. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (approximately 66 million years ago), caused by the Chicxulub asteroid impact, eliminated all non-avian dinosaurs along with approximately 75% of species.¹⁰

Southgate identifies these pre-human extinction events as a significant challenge for theodicy. If suffering entered the world through human sin (the Augustinian reading of Genesis 3), the geological evidence of hundreds of millions of years of animal death, predation, parasitism, and mass extinction before any humans existed requires either reinterpreting the Fall as non-historical or reconceiving the relationship between sin and natural evil. The predator-prey relationship, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters all predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years and cannot be attributed to human moral failure.¹⁴

New Testament frameworks

The New Testament introduces the theology of the cross as a framework for understanding suffering. Paul writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Romans 8:22, NRSV) — a text that acknowledges cosmic suffering while interpreting it as anticipatory of future transformation. Paul also writes of his own suffering as participation in Christ’s suffering: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10, NRSV).

The book of Revelation presents an eschatological resolution: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4, NRSV). This promise of future redemption does not explain present suffering but reframes it as temporary — suffering is real but will ultimately be overcome. The author of 1 Peter writes: “In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith — being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:6-7, NRSV). The “testing” framework presents suffering as purposive — a refining process that produces faith of proven quality.¹

Jesus’s own response to a question about suffering rejects the retribution principle in one specific instance. When asked about a man born blind — “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” — Jesus answers: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:2-3, NRSV). The response denies that this particular suffering is punishment for sin but introduces a different framework: suffering as an occasion for the display of divine power. Luke 13:1–5 similarly rejects the inference from suffering to guilt: those killed when the tower of Siloam fell were “not worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem.”⁴

The theological problem

The biblical texts simultaneously affirm divine omnipotence (“Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” Genesis 18:14, NRSV; “For nothing will be impossible with God,” Luke 1:37, NRSV), divine goodness (“The LORD is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made,” Psalm 145:9, NRSV), and the reality of innocent suffering (Job, the psalms of lament, the “texts of terror”). The conjunction of these three claims generates what philosophers of religion call the problem of evil (see problem of evil): if God is both omnipotent and perfectly good, why does suffering exist at the scale documented above?¹²

The biblical texts do not resolve this tension systematically. What they provide instead, as Brueggemann argues, is a collection of testimonies and counter-testimonies that address suffering from multiple, sometimes incompatible angles: retribution (Deuteronomy), protest (Job), empirical skepticism (Ecclesiastes), unresolved lament (Psalm 88), divine mystery (Job 38–41), participatory suffering (Philippians 3:10), eschatological hope (Revelation 21), and the refining of faith (1 Peter 1:6–7). The canon preserves all of these without privileging one over the others. The retribution theology of Deuteronomy is not corrected or withdrawn — it continues to stand alongside the counter-testimony of Job and Ecclesiastes that directly challenges it.¹

Fretheim identifies the Hebrew Bible’s most radical contribution to the theology of suffering as the idea that God suffers alongside creation. The divine lament in Hosea 11:8 — “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? ... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (NRSV) — presents a God who is not impassibly above suffering but anguished by it. Whether this portrait of divine suffering addresses the philosophical problem of evil or deepens it remains a matter of ongoing theological debate.⁴