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Humanity has been struggling to understand the human condition, specifically the reality of human suffering, for millennia untold. It's really not that difficult to accept if you believe in gods who are indifferent, capricious, or even hostile towards humanity - not really good options, but they do lend themselves well to simple explanations for suffering. That is to say, if the powers that be up in the heavens don't care about you, it's easy to figure out why life can be so hard. But if you believe in a god who is good and who cares for humanity, how do you explain suffering? The situation suddenly becomes much more difficult to figure out.
Imagine that you are a poor Semitic agrarian living sometime in the early Iron age (1300-600BCE). Life is hard: you work and sweat and strain and break your body in a humble effort to have enough food and goods to feed your family. Even when you have enough there always seems to be someone more powerful than you who feels that he has the right to some of what you've worked so hard to have. If it isn't nomad raiders who take from the little you have, it's likely either your ruler or someone in his employ. You hope against hope that the crops won't fail, that you and your family will have enough to eat. You hope that what little you have won't be taken by force. You hope that disease will not come to your area, since disease means death. Speaking of death, you hope your wife will survive the child-birthing process and that your children (at least some of them) will survive into maturity so that you will have someone to care for you in your old age (if you make it that far). Life is hard; life is short. It's not completely devoid of moments of pleasure or happiness; but the reality of human suffering is ever present.
Where do you, a poor agrarian, put your hope? Who can you turn to for assistance? Well, how about the gods - certainly they can improve your lot in life. Yes, they can... but will they? Why not turn to Ba'al? He is a powerful god, perhaps one of the most powerful. After all he does have the power to bring rain for your crops; or perhaps you should try his wife, Asherah, who has the power over fertility - between the two of them, they could take care of most of your worries. But the problem is that they don't really care about you. Yes, you can offer sacrifices and hope that they are moved to action by them, but you never really know if they are listening.
With an indifferent, or capricious god, it is easy to come to grips with a hard life, with human suffering. Especially if you happen to be part of a culture (such as the Canaanite one) with a cosmogony that tells you that humans are created to serve the whims of the gods, that they are generally unwanted and barely tolerated by such beings. One some level, the gods of the Canaanite pantheon actually needed the service that humans rendered to them through sacrifices; but beyond that basic cultic requirement, there was nothing else binding them to humans. To the gods, perhaps with the exception of some kings and the like, who were generally considered in closer relationship to the gods, humans were a necessary evil.
Why do humans suffer? Because suffering moves down the ladder and humans are sitting on the bottom rung; and because the ones at the top of the ladder, the ones with the power to help, really don't care.
This is generally the way the human condition was viewed... that is until the new kid in town arrived - and then everything, and I mean everything, began to change. But I'll leave that part for the next post.
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