Some turn to the Scripture in times of personal peril, turmoil or strife. Maybe they look to Job, a figure in all three major western religions. Perhaps Job’s ultimate survival despite the enormity of his calamity will help them through their own. Still, some actually judge Job for questioning God, even though he was clearly pushed to his breaking point. How, they ask, could he in any way challenge God’s ways? As if he had not already lost his wife, his sons, his flocks, his fortune—all for no apparent reason other than a test manipulated by Satan, with the concurrence of God? A faithless wretch, some might argue. Judges—particularly those who sit millennia away and without enduring suffering in the same way—can often be harsh in their judgments.

Sometimes, when we imagine how we collectively might react to a societal calamity, modern man looks to how the Hebrews conducted themselves through slavery in Egypt and through the aftermath of the Exodus to better determine how ”we” might match up if our world, as we know it, were to fall apart.