Why do People Suffer? Five Ancient Answers

Timeless and time-tested answers to frame suffering in a better light

“Why do people suffer?”

That may be one of the oldest and most important questions ever asked — and answered.

Unfortunately, our gut instincts lead us astray, and so do modern soundbites. So most people in the modern world live with an albatross of wrong answers choking them when they most need solace. As an antidote to these destructive forces, here instead are five ancient answers that have stood the test of time as a better way to frame life.

As we’ll see, the first one is intuitive but dangerous, while the last one, fortunately, offers great comfort even though it is less intuitive. (For more information about all five, start with my The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor.)

Life Is Fair

The first answer is that life is fair. Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This answer is the most intuitive, but also the most harmful.

It’s intuitive both because it reflects the way humans are built, and because it is usually reinforced in childhood. Parents and other adults use a reward-and-punishment system to teach children: ice cream, say, in return for good grades; or no dessert at all in response to misbehavior. As a result, by the time we ourselves are adults, we have so fully internalized our notions of reward and punishment that we seldom stop even to question them.

The “life is fair” approach features prominently in Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. Good things happen to people who follow God’s ways, and bad things happen to people who disobey God. Thousands of years later, most people still think that this is how the world works, whether or not they believe in a deity.

When life takes a downturn, we intuitively ask ourselves “What did I do wrong?” or “What did I do to deserve this?”

The premise of these questions is that life is fair, that misfortune comes as a punishment.

Then, in response to these bad questions, we give ourselves bad answers: “I wasn’t a good enough person,” for example, “so I didn’t get the job.” Or “My aunt was a strong fighter, so she beat cancer,” but alongside that, “My mom is died of cancer, so it must be because she didn’t fight strongly enough.”

But even in antiquity they knew that this approach, while deeply intuitive, was mostly misguided. One doesn’t have to look hard to find good people who suffer and (equally vexing) bad people who thrive. That’s why the Old Testament also includes the Book of Job.

Life is Enigmatic

The Book of Job, an obvious allegory, opens with God and Satan observing the perfectly righteous Job. Satan suggests to God that Job only praises God because Job’s life is so good. “If I ruined that righteous man’s life completely,” Satan says, “he would curse you.” God (bizarrely in my opinion) says, “Okay, let’s find out!” So Satan ruins Job’s life, afflicting him with painful diseases and killing his children.

The key to the allegory comes when Job finally has a one-on-one with God. Job asks in pain, “Why did You do this to me?”

God’s answer is essentially, “Who the hell do you think you are? You don’t even understand how the world was created! What makes you think you could understand something even more complex, life happiness and suffering?!”

The point of the allegory has nothing to do with Job, God, or Satan. Rather, the point is that we as humans will never understand why we suffer. It’s beyond us, completely out of our human capacity; we shouldn’t even bother trying.

Don’t believe Deuteronomy, the Book of Job teaches. Don’t believe that life is fair. Rather, life is enigmatic.

These two positions define the Old Testament. Though it’s tempting to believe that life is fair, it’s not. Don’t fall into that trap — because if you do, you’ll start asking bad questions like, “Why am I being punished?” And then you’ll give yourself bad answers. “I must have done something wrong.”

But no, Job says. Life isn’t fair. In fact, it’s enigmatic.

Despite Job, though, we weren’t ready to give up on fairness so quickly. We have a third position, and it tries to save reward and punishment.

Life is Fair if You Wait Long Enough

We as humans are so enamored with fairness that we couldn’t fully reject it, despite copious evidence that it’s not how the world works. In response to the obvious observation that good people sometimes suffer, we came up with a way of preserving fairness: life is fair, but not in this lifetime. There’s more to life than just this life.

This is the approach we see in the New Testament, which comes from a time when Jerusalem’s Jews (they were still Jews, Christianity not yet having been formed) were miserably oppressed by the Romans. Surely the Romans weren’t better people than the Jews, the Jews thought. But why then are the Jews suffering?

The answer was that the reward for good behavior comes in the life to come! That is, good people may suffer now, but they will receive an eternal reward after this lifetime. Similarly, bad people (say, the Romans) may seem to thrive, but they will be punished in the world to come. The New Testament gives us Heaven and Hell. Or to look at it differently, Heaven and Hell are a way of preserving fairness in the face of demonstrably unfair human experience.

And it’s not just the New Testament that advances some form of this approach.

We find it another well-known work from the same time period, The Apocalypse of Abraham.¹ There Abraham, like Job, has a one-on-one with God (symbolically, of course — this too is an allegory). Abraham’s burning question, again like Job, is why people suffer. God answers by showing Abraham a future world where good people are rewarded and bad people are punished.

Karma is another form of this solution, another way of preserving fairness in a manifestly unfair world. Similar to Heaven and Hell, Karma assumes that there is more to life than just this life. Unlike Heaven and Hell, though, Karma works both forward and backwards. Our suffering in this lifetime, according to Karma, may be compensated by reward in future lives, but it also might be a punishment for previous lives.

What we’ve seen so far is this: We’re tempted to think that life is fair (Deuteronomy), but we shouldn’t believe it (Job), but actually life is fair if you wait long enough (Heaven and Hell, and Karma). There are two more approaches.

Life is Broken

The fourth answer to why people suffer comes from the Book of Enoch,² an enormously popular crowd-pleaser in its day. (It’s day was also Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago. And while it doesn’t appear in most Bibles, the Book of Jude in the New Testament quotes it.) Enoch starts with the observation that deciduous trees grow leaves in the summer when people need refuge from the heat, and lose those leaves in the winter when people need the warmth of the sun. The world works in perfect concert, Enoch notes.

Except that it doesn’t.

Enoch also revisits a seldom-highlighted passage from the beginning of the Old Testament, where God’s angels come down to Earth to mate with human women in violation of God’s will. “That can happen?” Enoch wonders. “God’s will can be violated?” Yes.

Enoch comes to the conclusion that the world has gone awry. He says we are not (or perhaps no longer) living in the world as it was intended.

There’s a horrible story that repeats itself with some frequency across the world: a driver driving as carefully as possible nonetheless hits a little girl and kills her, even though her parents, too, were acting as carefully as possible. No one’s fault. Just a terrible accident. Deuteronomy says she or her parents must have done something to deserve this tragedy. Job says we’ll never know why it happened. The New Testament says that the girl and the parents will get their reward in the next life; Karma agrees, adding the possibility that maybe the girl or the parents did something wrong in a previous life.

Enoch says it wasn’t supposed to happen. It was a mistake. The world is broken.

This was one of most popular answers 2,000 years ago, and I think it resonates no less deeply with citizens of the modern world.

There’s one last answer, and it’s the most insightful and the most helpful.

Life is a Mixed Bag

The final answer comes from a runaway bestseller, once again from Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago. It was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, then spread through the ancient world in translation, first into Greek, then Latin, then other languages. It was the must-read of the day.

Misleadingly named “The Life of Adam and Eve,”³ the key scene is when Adam (allegorically representing humankind) asks Satan (allegorically representing unhappiness): “Why are Eve and I suffering? What did we ever do to deserve this?”

Satan’s answer is that the question is misguided. “You didn’t do anything,” he says. “It’s not because of anything you did that you’re suffering, but simply because you’re human.” His point is that the human experience is by nature a mixed bag, with both joy and suffering.

Just like teenagers who think that they alone are going through puberty, so too we, when things go wrong, think that we are alone. And just as the teenager shouldn’t ask “Why me?”, neither should we. The only reason is that life includes suffering.

We should stop thinking that our suffering is a punishment, stop thinking that things would be better had we acted differently, stop thinking that this is a test from God, or that it builds character, or that it was sent to make us stronger, or that it’s a blessing in disguise, or that the Universe will make it up to us.

In short, this 2,000-year old document lies in stark contrast to most modern popular wisdom (in particular the destructive soundbites that litter the Internet).

Stripped of our misconceptions about suffering, even life’s downturns become easier to endure, and misfortune, instead of impeding our happiness, becomes part of a happy life.

1. I translate this into English in chapter 6 of The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor. A critical edition can be found in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume 1.

2. The Internet loves the Book of Enoch, but there’s a ton of bad information floating around. I translate the relevant parts accurately in chapter 7 of The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor. A fuller treatment is in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume 1.

3. A complete translation and my explanation appears in chapter 5 of The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor. Additional details about the history of the text can be found in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume 2.