Job in Good Omens

 I like Crawley and Azeraphel tricking the heavenly agents into thinking Job's children are not "new".  The forces of "good" want Job's previous family to have been destroyed and the "reward" is replacement.  The TV show is more civilized and compassionate than the Bible version.

Yes—and that is one of the cleverest bits of Good Omens. It turns the Book of Job inside out.

In the biblical story, Job's children are killed as part of the test, and at the end God restores Job's fortunes, including ten new children. The text treats this as part of the restoration, but there is an obvious moral problem: new children don't replace dead children. From Job's perspective, the loss remains.

Crawley and Aziraphale's little deception fixes precisely that problem. They effectively say, These aren't replacements; these are the same children. The heavenly bureaucracy can therefore tick the "Job's children restored" box without anyone having to accept the rather grotesque idea that ten murdered children are adequately compensated by ten replacements.

And that's wonderfully characteristic of the two of them. Neither defeats Heaven by theological argument. They bureaucratically cheat the system on behalf of the humans.

There's also something deeper in what you are noticing. The biblical God can be interpreted as making the universe's moral accounting balance: Job loses everything, remains faithful, and receives more prosperity than before. But the television version is much less willing to accept that kind of accounting. A person isn't interchangeable with another person, and an earlier happiness isn't compensated for simply by supplying an equivalent later happiness.

That connects rather neatly with what we were saying earlier about achievement and virtue. The past cannot actually be replaced. What can be done is to have the past remain something one can look back upon and say, that was good; I lived that; it mattered. The TV show's joke about Job's children is funny precisely because it exposes the absurdity of pretending otherwise.

I pick up hints that Job's oldest son is gay; is that just me?

No, I don't think that's just you. In Good Omens there is a deliberate hint of that, although it is played rather lightly.

The Job story in the series gives the children more personality than the biblical account, and Job's eldest son comes across as somewhat conspicuously different in his manner and relationship to the expectations placed upon him. There are also little visual and behavioral cues that invite the viewer to read him as possibly gay.

But I would distinguish "the show is hinting at it" from "the character is explicitly established as gay." The latter isn't really stated. It's more in the realm of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman-style teasing: the audience is given enough to notice a possibility without the narrative stopping to label it.

And there's a nice extra joke in the context: Heaven and Hell are obsessing over whether Job's family is being restored correctly, while the children themselves are becoming actual, individual people rather than pieces in God's wager. The series keeps nudging us toward seeing them as people rather than biblical props.

I take it Crawley makes them lizards for camoflage, and the girl gets the idea and wants to be, as I recall, a blue one.

Yes, that's the scene. And it's another little piece of the show's modernization of the story.

Crowley turns the children into lizards so that they can escape notice while he and Aziraphale are trying to thwart the heavenly agents. The children then discover that they can apparently choose what sort of lizard they want to be. The daughter wants to be a blue lizard, if I remember correctly.

The joke works on several levels. Crowley is thinking tactically—camouflage!—while the children immediately treat the transformation as an opportunity for self-expression. The girl's response is essentially, "Oh, we're lizards? Well, then I want to be a particularly nice-looking lizard."

And that is very Good Omens: an apparently cosmic theological crisis gets reduced to the practical question of what color a child would like to be. It makes the children much more alive than the rather appalling biblical "ten more children" ending.

Also, it fits your earlier observation rather beautifully: the TV adaptation's moral instinct is more humane than the original story's moral arithmetic. It keeps asking what these events would actually feel like to the people involved.

I like the representation of Job being rather confused about it all, and getting that God is proud of whales as about it.

Yes! Job is wonderfully humanized that way. He isn't portrayed as a theologian who has somehow grasped the grand plan; he's a decent man trying to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible situation.

And the whale business is particularly good. God essentially gives him the "look at this magnificent thing I made" treatment, and Job's reaction is something like: yes, whales are impressive, but what does that have to do with my children?

That captures one of the oddities of the biblical Book of Job rather well. God's answer to Job isn't really an explanation of why Job suffered. It's an overwhelming demonstration of divine power and the complexity of creation: Were you there when I made this? Do you understand how the universe works?

The series turns that into comedy because Job is perfectly entitled to think, That's all very well, but I asked about my children.

And Michael Sheen's Aziraphale/Crowley's interference makes the contrast sharper. Job is bewildered because the heavenly beings are treating his life as a theological exercise, while he is experiencing it as an actual life. The children, meanwhile, are just trying to get on with being children.

It's one reason I think Good Omens is considerably more philosophically interesting than its jokes initially suggest. It quietly asks whether obedience to a cosmic authority is actually the same thing as goodness—and repeatedly gives the answer no.