Job’s tale is the Bible’s profound and unsettling meditation on suffering, justice, and the inscrutability of life. It begins in prose (as it will close), introducing the legend of the pious man from the land of Uz and revealing what Job himself never knows: that the miseries visited upon him result from a bet between God and the Accusing Angel (whom we might as well call Satan), who is sure Job’s piety is a consequence of the blessings bestowed upon him rather than true love of the Lord. What would happen if those blessings disappeared? You can read the Book of Job in countless translations, but through Stephen Mitchell’s particular eloquence (abetted by his insightful introductory essay) the reader is powerfully reminded that the tale is prayer as well as story; its words are infused with the searching, impulsive expressiveness of need. In no other writing save the Greek tragedies is the sheer challenge of human existence (to say nothing of the dark majesty of divinity) so boldly assayed.