Why didn't the Book of job mention Satan being kicked out of heaven or going to Hell, and what does this omission suggest about his role at that time?

 

Because Job is not talking about the Christian version of Satan that developed later.

By the time Satan appears in the Gospels, he is the cosmic devil that we know him as today. He was in a divine struggle, attempting to tempt Jesus, the son of God, into sin.

But he wasn’t always that way. That was a tradition that developed during the late Second Temple period when the infinite God needed a villainous counterpart. Something for him to struggle against.

In Job, which is an older story, that tradition doesn’t exist. The character who appears in Job is not the Satan. He’s not the Prince of Darkness, the fallen angel and the lord of demons or whatever. It’s hard to tell exactly what Satan was to people back then because all we have are the traditions that survive, but a lot of scholars think that he’s on the Divine Council which is depicted in Psalm 82.

Keep in mind, prior to the Babylonian exile, it is very likely that the Israelites were polytheistic with YHWH as the greatest god overseeing a council of other gods. Satan likely began as one of those other gods. Perhaps he was a mischievous or trickster-type god like Loki, but he wasn’t the arch-villain and cosmic source of all evil that he would become by the time the Gospels were written.

This is why they hardly seem like enemies in Job but coworkers, he might even be an advisor. They are not at war, they are working together.

Satan is a later invention that came possibly through Persian influence. Expecting to find hints of it in a much older text is like asking why stories of Saint Nicholas don’t contain toy-making elves and reindeer.