Christine Hayes continues her Yale course Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) with a lecture on biblical responses to suffering. She opens with Lamentations, the short cycle of dirges mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, then turns to the Ketuvim, the Writings section of the Hebrew Bible, and its wisdom literature. Proverbs gets examined as an expression of Deuteronomistic retributive justice, the idea that the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Hayes then works through the Book of Job in detail, covering its prose prologue, its poetic speech cycles between Job and his companions, and God's climactic response from the whirlwind, showing how the book challenges the very moral order Proverbs assumes. The lecture traces how Job questions whether virtue can survive real affliction and whether God can be charged with negligence for letting the innocent suffer. Recorded in 2006 as part of Yale's Open Courses series, RLST 145.