The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Book 20: Job: The Challoner Revision

The Book of Job is perhaps humanity's most ferocious confrontation with the problem of innocent suffering. A blameless man loses everything, children, fortune, health, on a wager between God and Satan, not for anything he has done but to test whether his righteousness depends on blessings. His wife tells him to curse God and die. His friends insist he must be guilty. Job insists he is not, and his protests against divine injustice are fierce and unflinching. The divine response comes not as explanation but as presence, from the whirlwind, God displays the cosmos in its terrifying immensity, the leviathan and the constellations, and asks Job where he was when the stars sang together. Job falls silent, then speaks the words that have sustained believers through centuries of anguish: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. The Douay-Rheims translation, with its formal gravity and archaic dignity, carries the weight of centuries of Catholic biblical scholarship. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever asked why the innocent suffer.