Job's gay son

 It hits me I should qualify the portrayal of Job's son as possibly gay.  This is stereotypical.  My experience with actual gay men is that they are not different, not at all noticeably like that.

Yes — and I think that qualification actually makes your observation more interesting.

In Good Omens, the joke is partly built on a recognizable comic stereotype: the boy's mannerisms and interests are presented in a way that invites the audience to think, “Ah, perhaps he's gay.” But that's very different from saying that those characteristics are evidence of sexual orientation.

Your real-world observation is much closer to the truth: gay men aren't a behavioral type. Some are flamboyant, some reserved, some stereotypically masculine, some stereotypically feminine, and most are simply… ordinary men whose sexual orientation isn't particularly visible in their manner.

And there's a nice irony here given what we were discussing about Job. The episode is actually rather good at undermining simplistic categories: Crowley and Aziraphale are busy trying to fit divine bookkeeping into human categories, while the children themselves don't necessarily fit the categories the adults expect. The possible-gay-son reading works as a comic suggestion, but it shouldn't be mistaken for a psychological observation about gay men.

I'd probably put it as: “The character is coded as possibly gay, using some familiar stereotypes; that coding says more about the conventions of comedy than about how gay men actually present themselves.”

The poetry in Job, the awe, wonderful.  The narrative that attached to the beginning and end ridiculous and anthropomorphic about God, as though he has to prove things.

Yes. That's one of the striking things about Job: the frame story and the poetry almost seem to belong to different intellectual universes.

The opening has this rather childish premise: God and Satan essentially make a wager about Job's character. God permits Satan to torment him, and Job becomes a sort of experimental subject. It's deeply anthropomorphic — God has to demonstrate that Job is genuinely righteous, as though his omniscience doesn't already tell him that. And the ending then rather awkwardly restores Job's fortunes, as though the losses can be balanced on a cosmic accounting sheet.

But then you get the speeches, especially God's answer from the whirlwind, and suddenly the scale becomes enormous. God doesn't really explain Job's suffering. Instead, the poetry confronts him with the immensity and complexity of existence:

    “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

And then come the sea, the dawn, the stars, the wild animals, Behemoth and Leviathan. It's not really an argument so much as a change of perspective. Job wants an explanation of his particular case; God shows him a universe vastly larger than the human moral bookkeeping in which the story began.

And I think that's why your earlier observation about Good Omens works so well. Pratchett and Gaiman can take that ridiculous opening premise — God and Satan apparently arguing over Job's children and possessions — and play it for comedy, while the underlying biblical poetry remains genuinely magnificent.

There's also something philosophically interesting about the contrast. The prose says, “God did this to test Job.” The poetry says, in effect, “You don't understand the world well enough to demand that the world make sense in terms of you.” The latter is considerably more profound.