Who were the intended audience for the Book of Job?

Answer 1

The Book of Job is generally considered to have been written after the Babylonian Exile, probably in the Persian period, although it clearly contains some very old material. The chief reasons usually given for a post-exilic date are the speculative nature of the book's theology, the acquaintance of the author with other Old Testament writings such as Isaiah 40-55, and the presence of Satan as a member of God's heavenly court - since the only other references to Satan are certainly post-exilic. Thus, the audience of Job, at least in its present form, would have lived late in the first millennium BCE.

The book could not have been written without a wide knowledge of the literary world of the ancient Near East outside Palestine. This fact, together with the unexplained peculiarities of the language of the poetical part of the book, has led some scholars to suppose that the author was either a Jew living outside Palestine or even a non-Jew. Thus, the book could have been written for diaspora Jews, with Palestinian Jews a secondary audience.