Let's take A Serious Man more seriously, shall we? An opening salvo of considerations Slothrop does not seem to have considered in his denigration of this miraculous film:
Eliphaz the Temanite:
1. A Serious Man is not a straightforward narrative, but rather a framed narrative. Slothrop would no doubt agree that until the viewer has found a place in his viewing for the mustachioed cowboy, who introduces the Dude and applauds him off-camera, that viewer has not been fair to The Big Lebowski (well, Slothrop, do you agree?). If so, then Slothrop--and any viewer of A Serious Man--is responsible for accommodating, in any critical account of the movie, the opening scene, its separate place (an eastern European Jewish shtetl), its own time (late nineteenth or early twentieth century), its own language (Yiddish), its own allusion (to Ansky's play, The Dybbuk), and its own tragedy (the disappearance of this setting and its characters and its language thanks to the Holocaust, which is a serious part of A Serious Man). Seems to me The Big Lebowski begins with the place, language, time, allusions, and comedy we already recognize (L.A.; English; August 5th, 1990; the Westerns we Americans have all watched and the Bush Sr. speech we all heard as kids; free milk). Whether or not you agree with that parenthetical contrast you still must account for the frame of each film in a comparative fashion, and you have not done so. And for that matter, what's the difference between a cowboy who ushers us both in and out of a film with his smile, and a dybbuk who ushers us only into a movie, and leaves us to the tornado to whirl us out of it--that is, what's the difference between a framed narration and a narrative half-framed? But no matter what, without the frame, you got nothin'.
2. A Serious Man is not a straightforward reworking of the book of Job, or even simply "Biblical"; it is a painstaking allusive narrative, which supplements its principal source--Job--with additional Biblical sources. One example (the one I noticed most emphatically): the scene on the roof (which provided the promo poster you've uploaded) refers us not to the story of Job--which is notable for its lack of a love-interest/lust-temptation--but to the story of David ogling Bathsheba (from II Samuel, maybe? but in any case the allusion, incidentally, behind the glorious Pixies song "Dead"). In other words, your adjective "Biblical," by which you reduce this film to one-dimensionality, contains within it multiple dimensions. So, does the notion that A Serious Man is carefully, multiply allusive (think, Lebowski fan, not only the Gulf War, but also of the evil German N's of WWII, but also of Vietnam) change your easy repudiation of the Bible as a single source, at odds with the miracle we know better as disciples of supermarkets in L.A.? What if the Bible is worth more than you think it is?
3. (and then Eliphaz will rest...)... How easy it is, once having referred the reader/viewer to the Jewish Bible, to refer pussily to the New Testament, and get around whatever philosophical/ethical problems the original Bible might raise? Bombarded as I Jewishly am, in this Thanksgiving season, by prematurely-ejaculate Christmas music in any given dry-cleaners or supermarket, how delightful to find a film absolutely immune to the mellifluous promises of the supposed second and better half of the Bible. How miraculous--having just taught Milton, who clever as he was, bought the easy, Christian way out of his own shortcomings--to find a pair of Jewish Coen brothers unimpressed by that evangelical back-door, by that magic answer to the problems that afflict us all. The fact that this film refers us only to the Old Testament--and does so without any possibility of error--and not to the New, is almost unique in Hollywood tradition, and recommends it, if not above, at least on the same level as any Jesus we discover at the bowling alley. I challenge you to find any other film of recent times brave enough to allude to the Old and not to the New, to the sublime original and not to the more marketable imitation. Films that portray the death of Jesus but not his Resurrection don't count--that's equivalent to pretending Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. But A Serious Man doesn't care about any of that; instead, it goes back to the book of Job, in which Satan is merely "the Adversary," the unanswerable motherfucker given power by an unseen God over your wife and your children and your life as you know it. It's possible--I really do think--that The Big Lebowski can compete with that, but only barely, only just.
4. Bildad got two friends, mofukka, so bring it if you dare.
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