Back in 1992 when Kris Kross released its first album and inspired many youths to sport backward jerseys and overalls, two seventh graders collaborated on their own musical number for a Jewish history class; a rap that told the story of the Maccabees.

Fast-forward 13 years, and Eli Batalion and Jerome Sable are still friends and still writing biblically-based raps - but now for audiences much larger than their Montreal middle school.

"Every time we'd get an assignment at school we wanted to make a big funny production of it. We realized we had this shared interest and then we just basically started doing everything together," Batalion said.

"J.O.B. The Hip-Hopera" is Sable and Batalion's latest brainchild and retells the Old Testament story of Job as an allegory of contemporary corporate life in the music business. It's recited completely in verse and features break-dancers and a DJ.

Sable and Batalion studied the biblical story of Job in high school and found it to be a classically troublesome story that embraced a theme of bad things happening to good people.

"The story of Job for us was always already a story about corporate politics: boss and underling," Sable said. "And so for us, it was the perfect story for us to explore the hip-hop industry.

"It's like how 50 Cent works for Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope Records. 50 Cent is the rapper and he's supposedly the artist, but he goes through a factory of marketing … Hip-hop's changed drastically from being an underground street movement to being a commercial mainstream process. There are so many questions about what happens to it, what happens to rappers."

The setting of "J.O.B" is Hoover Records, a bustling hip-hop factory with a corporate ladder that leads all the way to label president J. Hoover (aka Jehovah) and Vice President of Finance Lou Saphire (aka Lucifer), who decide to test the loyalty of their head of A&R, Job Lowe (aka Joe Blow). Meanwhile, two aspiring rappers who work in the mailroom, MC Cain and MC Abel, debate the situation and how he should respond.

The parallel story of MC Cain and MC Abel is an off-shoot of Sable and Batalion's own philosophical discussions about the Old Testament story of Job, along with current religious and political debates. Abel, who was historically more religious, would be more inclined to follow authority blindly, while Cain, who was more iconoclastic, would want to follow his own beliefs.

"Current biblical scholars and priests and rabbis would interpret and say, 'We're not sure why the Holocaust happened, but you still gotta believe in God; and we're not sure how Katrina could happen, but we'll work it out' ... Others say, 'That's ridiculous, if there's no explanation to me, I don't need that three letter word to direct my life, I'm going to do my own thing,'" Sable said. "That's the Cain and Abel debate: Should we continue to be subservient to our authority just because we like authority and because we need authority? Cain says no."

Unlike the majority of performers and playwrights living in the Los Angeles area, Sable and Batalion did not study theater, but instead both majored in philosophy at Brown University.

"As writers, we're coming from a different perspective … we spent our time learning liberal arts because that improves our writing. And in terms of how we approach acting our plays … we just do it naturally because of our chemistry, and I think that if we started to really question our process, it might actually be detrimental," said Batalion.

One can only imagine what Sable and Batalion will come up with next.

"The best trajectory is that we continue to do bigger and better things, sample more worlds and bring them all together," Batalion said. "One of the nice things about this hip-hopera is that it's us as writers, performers and composers. It's cool to be able to dabble in all those worlds."