Where is the Land of Uz?

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It is an example of a question to which there is no fact-based answer.
The Land of Uz is not in Google and is not on the map.
Maybe all knowledge about it is lost, because the poem is much older than even the oldest maps.

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The people of Uz lived in tents.

Those tents, some of them, would have been made of blue, purple and scarlet linen spread out and held down by strong pegs.

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From  Byzantine  Bible  manuscripts:  “Job owned large herds”

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They seem to have been fairly rich, had lots of cattle and time to talk.

It would be wrong to imagine nothing but silent sand and cactus for miles around. But Job had three thousand camels and seven thousand sheep. He also had a large family.

According to Wikipedia, Job was not Jewish, but a Bedouin sheikh.

>>>  > A sheikh is an Arab chief or a tribal leader, and a Bedouin is a nomadic Arab tribe, both according to WordWeb.
>>>  > Byzantine = from Byzantium, = the Eastern Roman Empire =  the Roman Empire in the Middle East after  395
>>>  > Manuscripts = handwritten documents

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Nobody knows how old the text is.

The strange thing is to find out that they considered their cities crowded.
It says that even so far back the wild donkey “scorned the multitude of the city and the shouts of the drivers”.

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Map of the World by Tourizm Maps ©2003

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This would likely be the region.

The poet may have lived in Mesopotamia, which means “between the rivers”, now mainly  Iraq, or in the Kingdom of Edom, marked yellow in the drawing below, now famous for Petra and its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system.

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Map of Biblical Israel of about 830 BCE  Published by Briangotts under a GNU Free Document license at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Levant_830.png

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Petra’s Roman aqueduct photographed by Emilio from Germany/Chile and published under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license at  P e t r a:  Roman Aqueduct

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It is poetry from the desert and there may have been more than one author writing successively, in stages.

The book is only some 20 pages, but it is difficult to read.

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It begins with God and Satan betting on Job’s integrity, and Job is placed under immense stress.

He suffers and with his friends discusses why God would allow pain to exist. — The drawing is by William Blake and shows Satan bringing pain to Job.

 Job was told that his large possessions had been attacked by hostile tribes.

 in public domain  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job_in_Byzantine_illuminated_manuscripts showing the enemy tribes attacking the herds and — on the bottom left — the messenger arriving with the bad news.

And a strange illness befalls him.

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Also by William Blake: Job and his friends.

They accuse him and say that he must have deserved his pain to make up for his sins.

Job  disagrees.

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Job says that the birds in the air and the fish in the sea say the same : that God does not act according to our ideas of justice :

“Ask the cattle and they will tell you,  ask the birds in the sky  or the fish of the sea.”

Nimirum interroga jumenta, et docebunt te;
et volatilia cæli, et indicabunt tibi
et narrabunt pisces maris.

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The photo of the desert flower is from this US travel agency.

The picture with the two camels is a fragment from a Klee painting.

Link to source text  English ……. Greek…….Hebrew……..Latin side by side

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From a Byzantine Bible manuscript:  those on the left are the fierce lions given as an example of how all of the Creation must obey God.

Quoting

Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario:

León de hedionda melena,
meditabundo león
¿sabes de Hércules acaso..?
-Sí. Y de Job.

Lion of the foul-smelling mane,
Deep-thinking lion:
Do you maybe know about Heracles?
Yes. And about Job

http://poema-s.blogspot.com/2009/04/poema-interrogaciones-de-ruben-dario.html.

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Job 39.5 Who set the wild donkey free?

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