Two linked objections: (a) Proverbs 12:2 ('a good man obtaineth favour of the LORD') seems to contradict Romans 9:16 ('not of him that willeth... but of God that sheweth mercy'), one teaching favor is earned by goodness, the other that it depends on nothing human at all; (b) God wagers with Satan over Job, destroying Job's wealth, servants, and ten children to win a bet and prove a point, portraying God as petty and willing to sacrifice innocents for his own satisfaction.

(a) Proverbs 12:2 operates in the wisdom-literature register of general moral order — righteous living generally correlates with blessing in the ordinary unfolding of life (see the genre discussion applicable to Prov 12:21 above). Romans 9:16 operates in Paul's soteriological register, addressing the ultimate ground of election in redemptive history (illustrated by Jacob/Esau and Pharaoh), not a claim that no moral difference exists between righteous and wicked living. These are different questions in different genres, not one claim asserted and denied — Scripture affirms both without contradiction elsewhere (Phil 2:12-13: 'work out your own salvation... for it is God which worketh in you'). (b) On Job: ha-satan (הַשָּׂטָן, 'the Accuser') is a title for a prosecutorial functionary within the heavenly council (Job 1:6), whose challenge tests whether Job's piety is disinterested or merely self-interested — a genuine philosophical question (later formalized by Kant as the problem of moral worth: does virtue retain value if performed only for reward?) staged narratively, not a petty ego-driven bet. The text does not depict God directly slaughtering Job's children; it attributes the calamities to raiders, fire, wind, and the Accuser's agency operating within limits God permits (1:12, 2:6) — raising the serious, and honestly difficult, theological problem of God's permissive sovereignty over evil rather than direct divine murder. Scholars (Gordon Wenham, Robert Alter) widely recognize the prose frame (chs. 1-2, 42) as an inherited folktale-type frame, paralleled by ANE laments like the Babylonian Ludlul Bel Nemeqi, staging the poetic core's (chs. 3-41) unresolved protest against simplistic retribution theology; Job himself never learns of the heavenly wager, and God's climactic speeches (chs. 38-41) pointedly refuse to give a causal explanation, instead reorienting Job toward trust grounded in the Creator's transcendent wisdom. This remains one of the most difficult texts in the canon on the problem of evil and deserves honest acknowledgment rather than a glib dismissal.

Job models a faith not contingent on reward or explanation — its climax is not an answer to 'why' but a transformed relationship ('I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee,' 42:5) — a God worth trusting amid unexplained suffering, a theme the NT deepens at the cross, where God does not remain aloof from suffering but enters it himself in Christ (Heb 4:15).