ABSTRACT
This chapter understands the voice of a suffering community in the context of socio-economic and political oppression and violence in dialogue with Job 24. The struggle to understand God was a challenge in the life of ancient Israel particularly in the context of social disturbances. The views of interlocutors (Job and his friends) over the way God works in the life of human society is bewildering and confusing yet Job, the main protagonist in chapter 24, hopes that the oppressors’ lives are meaningless. Job declares that by viewing God as the unspeaking ruler of the world, the ‘nocturnal visits of the wicked to the margins’ will be judged by God as a matter of extreme and urgent importance when the time arrives. The re-reading of Job 24 from a Dalit experience confirms that it might be difficult for the suffering community to figure out and understand God in the context of pain and pathos, but Job as speaker assures the people on the margins that read and hear him that the wicked will not be sturdy forever, but their desires and activities will come to absolutely nothing but a source of hope and basis for self-assertation for Dalit/Madiga Christians.
