The book of Job has the form of a poetical drama. It is, at least in part, the earliest of the poetic books of the Bible, and the oldest drama in the world. It opens with a prose prelude, telling who Job was and how his difficulties arose. Job lived apparently about the time of Moses, so that we must associate with our ideas of him and of the scenes amid which he moved, the patriarchal simplicity of those early days. He might indeed, from the tone of the story, have been a contemporary of Abraham rather than of Moses, a dweller among vast herds and flocks in a time when men’s simplicity still led them to speak of meeting God face to face, and of arguing with Him almost as with a fellow man.
In those ancient days Job dwelt in the “land of Uz.” This has been sometimes thought to mean Arabia near Edom and the Red Sea; but it is more generally believed to refer to the region around Damascus, that oldest of all known cities. Here Job lived in wealth and peace, a man “perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil.”
Source: LOGOS