The author indicts God for not holding up the covenant, by censuring and silencing God throughout the text to uphold Job's innocence. God is forced to be the defendant in the case, yet remains the ultimate judge against Job and his friends. Job becomes the plaintiff and prosecutor with his friends serving as witnesses, co-defendants, and judges. The author clearly expresses a tension between theodicy, an undying faith in God's justice despite terrible personal tragedy, and an active protest in which God is put on trial. Influenced indirectly by Hellenistic thought and literature during the Second Temple period, the Book of Job was the first individual, critical response to the doctrine of retribution in the Torah. There was a sense of collective responsibility for evil as sin, expressed most clearly in Deuteronomy. In the biblical and First Temple periods, evil was not even discussed, based on the assumption that God is just. Here visions of God's omnipotence, omnipresence, and goodness are radically compromised and God's relationship to evil is blurred in the face of unjustified suffering, illustrating the continually swinging pendulum between theodicy and antitheodicy throughout history. Yet in between those extremes exist the bulk of Jewish responses to evil. Throughout history, Jews have addressed the relation between God, evil, and human suffering by demonstrating a spectrum between those who defend, justify, or accept God's relationship to evil and those who refuse to ascribe any positive meaning for the presence of evil in the world, even reaching the extreme of protesting against God on behalf of their respective communities.