The purpose of this essay is to study the book of Job from the Old Testament, in order to establish the potential evil of God looking at it with the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. I will chart the ethical dilemmas that I can find in the book of Job with a hermeneutic method. I am using a qualitative method in order to penetrate deeper into the potential dilemmas that can be found. I am then looking at the ethical dilemmas that can be found from a utilitarian perspective in order to judge the actions of God as right or wrong. In order to define if God is good or evil, I make a definition of evil with help from Christian ethics, exegetics and philosophy. The potential evil of God is in this way defined through utilitarianism and Christian ethics.

I later put the utilitarian values that I’ve distinguished through a hermeneutic method against the Christian outlook on life that is mentioned in the Swedish national curriculum Lgr11. The hard thing about using the book of Job is that it belongs to the Old Testament, while Christian ethics are usually based on the New Testament. The book of Job is often defined as metaphorical literature, or literature containing a moral message about the trust and faith that every man should have in God.