Psalm 90

Some notes. Before I start : please remember that I am a scholar, as well as a pastor. When I have the time, I try to read the text in their original languages. Greek for the New Testament and Hebrew for the Old Testament, and occasionally (frankly, very frequently) this opens the text in new ways.

Also know, that scholars routinely disregard the superscriptions to the psalms as secondary, that is, as later additions which in some way comment upon the text, and when this is done, the opening lines of Psalm 90 proper (in the King James Version, which is my favourite translation to English) are :

"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations"

The first note I have is the word 'Lord'. Usually, when we read 'Lord' or 'The Lord' in English-language bibles, what is behind the term is the name Yahweh (I am a scholar, I use the name, if it offends you I am sorry, but I am not going to stop doing so) . Not so in this psalm. Here we have the Hebrew word 'dny which means 'my lord' and can be used both of God and of a normal master / lord. SO, strictly speaking, at this point of proceedings our only pointer as to the identity of the Lord in question is the fact, that we are dealing with a text which is placed among other texts, which all deal with God and with the relationship between God and humans.
Not until the end of the following verse do we find a proper designation of who is adressed : "From (out of) Eternity and until Eternity, you (are) God"

The next note is on the word which, in the KJV, is translated 'dwelling place'
The Hebrew word is m'wn or ma'on and really ... translating that with 'dwelling place' is selling the word short. There are two different words that are spelled spelled exactly the same way, one is the 'dwelling' of the KJV, the other means 'help' or 'assistance'. The basic root has a number of meanings as well : to dwell, to cover, to call for help.

Now, this word can be qualified with words like 'sacred' or 'holy', and quite frequently is, in which case the scared or holy ma'on is synonymous with the Temple, which - in Old Testament speak - is also synonymous with the palace of God, God's heavenly abode. In the Old Testament, they are all the same, they are where God lives.

But ma'on isn't qualified here.
What is more, it is not referring to a place, but to a person. To God.
So, not 'your dwelling' but "you are, to us, a ma'on" A place of peace, where we can be at home, can find help or assistance, can be safe. A home.
Now, isn't that a wonderful opening :-)

Lord, you (!) are our home.
And have been so for generation after generation.

It is not an invitation to make my home with God, or to find a home in some 'house of God' or other. The entire sentence (in Hebrew) is constructed in a way that says this is; it isn't something which is in a remote future or past, or even in a different dimension or reality. Here and now, right now, God is my home. And for generation after generation, in every possible 'now', God is my home.
All I need do is move in.

Carol reminded me that I had this blog.
The Psalms-study also reminded me of Psalm 3.
When the 'Quilting the Psalms' group had their most recent read, this one started quite a lot of thoughts in me, and, being who I am, I decided to share.

As some might (not) know, I am a pastor, but I am also a biblical scholar, specializing in Hebrew Old Testament, teaching at University, longhaired and ivorytowered; this means, that I can (and do) read the psalms in the original format as well as in translation. And one of the things that have - recently - crystallized in my mind is the fact that when reading the Old Testament (in translation), we also translate the name of God. We read 'The Lord' rather than the name, but ... I am a christian.
And one of the things about being a christian is, that I call God by name. God gave me that right when he was born as a man, as a human being. When God chose to become flesh and blood, all human, God also chose to become my brother, and made me free with his name.
I know the name of God, and God himself gave me leave to use it.
Now, what I will suggest is anathema to scholarship. If any of my students at university attempted it, I would flog them alive.
Why?
Because the scholarly study of a text is an attempt to read what is there, however inconvenient it might be (and it is occasionally) it is not a reading of faith. This blog, however, is very much about faith, so ... This is my meditation on Psalm 3 :

Lord Jesus Christ
There are many against me, and I am just one
There are many who call me an idiot, because I seek you
They laugh and say : God never answers anyone

But you are Christ, my saviour
You protect me where I walk and where I stand
You fill my life with meaning, so I don't have to fill it all on my own
You give me meaning
You make me someone
You give me a voice, when there are no words left to me

When I call on you, you answer
When I feel like death, you resurrect me

Some attack me in the open
Some oppose me under cover
But with you, my fear disappears
In your love, I am never alone

Lord Jesus Christ
You are God, and I know you by name
With you in my life, the idiots and their idiocy becomes harmless, nameless, meaningless

Almighty, eternal God
Father, Son and Spirit
You are salvation - I am yours
You are blessing - I am yours
You are abundance - I am yours
You are God - I am yours

Amen

P.S. And the name of God, in the Old Testament, is Yahweh, not 'Jehovah'; the latter is a misconception (that I can elaborate on if wanted). To me, however, God's name is Jesus Christ.

Reading Job, part 6

Reading a biblical book is no simple thing.
But before you can even start to approach the book, you need to be very clear in your mind about what reading you're about to undertake.
Are you reading through the glasses of the scholar or that of faith ?
And please read "faith" in the widest possible meaning. In my interpretation, reading something to find "The Truth" is a reading of faith ... even if The Truth you're looking for is to debunk the whole biblical nonsense.

Reading with the glasses of the scholar, however, is not reading to find The Truth. Reading as a scholar (and this holds true for any book, not just biblical ones) means, that you try to find out how this thing works. What makes it work. In what way. And why. Not to find an elusive grand unification theory, because that is not possible in the humanities (and in this respect, theology of any faith is part of the humanities), but to find out little strings of connections, levers, tricks and clevernesses, techniques ... and oodles of other things, tangible and intangible.
You take it apart to examine the parts, and sometimes the parts can be very small indeed. And then, when you put it together again, it hopefully works :-)

The scholarly reading of a book like Job entails your trying to find out what really belongs where and why, because this book has been seriously messed with. It entails a lot of boring grammar and etymology and dictionaries and obscure (and very long) articles on half-verses and - sometimes - single words.
And once you have answered all your own questions to your own satisfaction, you then turn your finds over to others, so that they can take all your glorious arguments apart and ask the uncomfortable questions you didn't think of.
This is not necessarily nice :-)
Scholarly debates can be - metaphorically - bloody :-) BUT the usual point of everything going really bad is the point, where someone starts arguing from faith rather than from scholarship.
Faith is not a permissible argument in scholarly work. No. This is not a debatable point. It isn't.
Scholarship might be permissible in an argument of faith, but the other way round is not only a big no-no, it does not work !
A scholarly reading is not a reading in order to find objective proof that your faith is true. It is not even a reading that can help you find The Truth of your faith. The only kind of proof you can find re. faith is to be found within you (... and, naturally, with God, but God is not a permissible argument in scholarship either). And what you carry in your heart and your mind is - I'm sorry to say - for one thing rather immaterial, for another rather fragile. There is no such thing as proof of faith.

There may be something resembling proof of the etymology of a word, and the historical development of the use of that word.
An example : 200 years ago "condescending" was not necessarily a negative word. It meant that someone who was your superior, stepped down to your level. And this could be kindly meant. In a society where class was important, for a noblewoman to speak kindly to a peasant was ... condescenting ... in the positive way.
OUR society, however, only rarely acknowledges that one human being is superior to another. Class is still important, but it is not accepted to be so :-) This means, that the lord is expected to speak kindly and on level with the farmer, and if there is the slightest hint of superiority in the lord's manner, he will be judged to be condescending ... and that is most emphatically NOT a positive designation. If he doesn't speak with the farmer at all, it is not seen as his free choice either, he will be called names that are far worse than "condescending".
Now. If you read Jane Austen, this is important to know ! or you might read things into the relationship between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr Collins that are - in all probability - not intended by the author. What is more, if you want to transmit the same kind of relationship in a modern context, you would need to find different words, different actions and different metaphors.

To know the historical use of a word is scholarship. To translate it into modern terms is a work of love and .... yes ... faith. Because, you see ... you will have a very hard time showing that your modern version is The Truth. You can, however, show the historic development of the usage of a given word.
So. You can use scholarship to feed parts of the narratives and readings of faith.
But you cannot get a reading of faith from a scholarly reading.
What is more, trying to use faith as a part of your scholarly method simply doesn't work.
Even if you make a very good, modern version of an old story, you cannot take the findings of this modern version and read into the original story.

And what does this have to do with Job ?
It means, that this "reading of Job" part of my blog can now go in two distinctly different ways.
It can be faith-driven, in which case it will be more-or-less Job sermons, or it can be scholarship-driven, in which case it will mostly be discussions on single words, structures etc.
I'll try to be clear about which glasses I'm wearing when :-) not for your sake :-) but for mine.

Reading Job, part 5

The relationship between the frame-narrative and the poetic dialogue.

The book of Job has several distinctive parts. The most obvious "division" is that between the narrative at the ends, and the poetic bulk of the book.
The framework consists of chapters 1-2 and 42:7-17.
The rest is a sort-of dialogue between Job and his 3 friends : Elifaz, Bildad and Zophar, and then there are the Elihu-speeches (chapters 32-37).
The Elihu speeches are sort-of a problem, because they are ... different from the rest of the poetry. And yes. You can tell :-) Not necessarily by "objective" measures, but in the same way that you can tell that one author is not the other when you read them. Much of it is in the general ... tone. The skill of the author. And frankly, the skill of whoever did the Elihu-speeches is not the same as that used in the rest of the poetic parts of the book.
Now. Forests have given their lives to deal with these issues, so I will not bore on about them here. Suffice to say, the issues of which parts belong and which parts don't have raged in scholarly discussions over the past centuries.
My usual approach to something is : it is there for a reason. Someone put it there, and someone kept it there. For a reason. Even when we might not see any immediate reason for it :-)

But that does not do away with the puzzle of why it looks the way it does.
And with the book of Job, I'm about ready to give up on one of my principles. The above :-) And say, outright, that the frame-work narrative is, in fact, the first commentary on the poetic bulk of the text.
You can read the main part of the book without the introduction. It is possible. Yes, you end up asking "what happened before this", but you can do it. The question then is : how much of the poetry refers, directly or indirectly to the action in the first 2 chapters ?
And with a quick read-through, I've ended up with the following :
5:3-7
16:7ff
18:5ff
20:10
27:13ff
29:2-6
30:15ff (particularly vss 18-19)

But there are other passages, that seems to contradict the framework, a quick read-through brought up these :

14:21-22
19:13ff
21:25
22:23-24

Of all these passages, one is particularly interesting, because it seems to deal explicitly with loosing your family, violently. The second half of ch. 16 v.7
KJV translates : "... thou hast made desolate all my company"
RSV translates : "... he has made desolate all my company"
The Danish authorized version translates : "... you have exterminated all that is mine"

In the Hebrew, this is 3 words. Only one of them is unambiguous. The one translated "all". The other two can be discussed.
The verb can - as is the case above - be translated "to destroy" or "to lay waste" (make desolate), but the same verb can equally be translated "appaled" or "amazed".

The noun (object) can mean "company" (and it has a suffix denoting 1st person singular, therefore translated into "my company" or, "all that is mine"), but it can also mean : community, family, council, witness, sign, portent, command, promise.
Take your pick !

So the question I feel pressing on my mind after this bit of dictionary-work is : do we translate "desolation" and "company" here, because we have the story ?
In context, any number of other options could be equally possible, without changing as much as a dot in the Hebrew text.
If you read the next verse, verse 8, Job talks about how even his own decay bears witness against him, and if one looks at the general tone of the book, and the legal turn it takes, "witness" would, in my opinion, not be a bad choice. In fact, seen in the immediate as well as the extended context, "witness" would - in my opinion - be a better choice than one alluding to family and friends.
... but I'm sure that one can fit in just about any of the meanings with just a wee bit of creative footwork.

And with that particular piece in place (or out of it, as it were), I have felt a growing conviction, that the first 2 chapters, and the last part of the last chapter, are, in reality, the first commentary on what could have been "just" the poetic bulk of the book. I may even choose to debunk the Elihu-speeches too :-) but I'm still out on that one.
What is more, seen over-all, this would - in my opinion - only make the book stronger. The initial narrative is, as I see it, an interpretative stumbling-stone, which defines too much of the interpretation we put on the rest. We are so horrified at the idea that a good God can be the cause of so much distress as is evidenced by Job, that we will rather make God into someone who can be tempted by a trickster like the satan.
But ... the "real" answer really is in the bulk of the book, and Job gives it. Several times. If there is but one God, and this one God is almighty, then everything, good or bad, has to come from His hands.
Not from mine.
Job actually does not buy into the platitudes of the friends : that he can repent and make peace with God, and then he will be well again. Job insists, that he did nothing to deserve all that was good, and that he equally has done nothing to deserve to loose it. It all came from one and the same hand, that of God.

But we don't like that answer, do we ?
We want God to be nice.
But God isn't necessarily a cute guy who does what we want him to. As C.S. Lewis writes so aptly about his Christ-figure, Aslan, in the Narnia books : Aslan is not a tame lion.

In the same manner. God is not a nice or cute God. And in Job we seem to see parts of him that are tough to handle for us. Which does not make it less necessary to do so.

Reading Job, part 4. Biblical Wisdom

I'm reading commentaries. And general works on wisdom literature. There are 3 books of the Old Testament that everyone agrees is wisdom-literature : Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. They all belong to the same general genre, because they all deal with the life of everyman ...
or rather ... the issues dealt with in each of them are issues that every man (and woman) can relate to.
Proverbs is the easiest of the lot to get to grips with, even if it is not a particularly homogenous work. In it are hymns and proverbs, aforisms and good advise, admonitions and praises. But it is impersonal.
Ecclesiastes purports to be the work of one man, and his struggle to get to grips with what he percieves to be the meaning-less-ness of life Vanitas vanitatum, all is vanity, all is in vain.
And then there is Job. The received wisdom re. Job is, that it deals with innocent suffering. With the major problem, that if God is almighty, and there is only one, then all good as well as all suffering has only one source : God
And how can God allow things to go bad for the good man and good for the bad man.
All this is exemplified in the person of Job. But ... the book itself has different parts. There is the frame-work. Chapters 1-2 and chapter 42:7-17. This is the story that the remainder is hinged upon. Chapters 1-2 establish the piety, wealth and general wonderfulness of Job. It tells of how he looses everything through the work of the contradictor (the satan) first his possessions (and among those : his children) then his health. So, the health, wealth and happiness-deal is off, and when the main-part of the book starts, we find Job, sitting in the ash-heap, scraping his boils and wounds with a pot-sherd. And with 3 friends around him. There to mourn his losses with him.

And then comes the part that groups this one as belonging to the genre of wisdom.
A dialogue between Job and the friends (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar). Then a sololiqui by a 4th person (Elihu), and finally, the big show-down between Job and God.

But as I read, and read, and read ... the book itself (in so far 4 different translations and 2 re-tellings), and the commentaries, I frankly find it harder and harder to accept the received wisdom re. this work.
The more I read, the more I become convinced that this book is not about the suffering of the innocent. It is read as such, certainly, and it can be read as such, but ...
All good exegesis must start with reading what is there.
Not what one already knows or assume to know, but what is actually there.
As I wrote in the previous post. This can be troublesome with Job, but ... if the starting-point is, that the text is what it is (disregarding scribal errors), because someone wanted it to be this way, then we have to deal with the weird stuff too. And we have to account for it.
And in my endavor in this direction, the presupposition of the general genre of wisdom is becoming a hindrance. Not that I don't think that the ultimate ... goal of the text is, for the reader as well as the main protagonist to achieve wisdom, knowledge, insight, but ...

This is not an exposition on the right way to live for "everyman" (like Proverbs) or a tractate on how the individual can find meaning in an empty life, as Ecclesiastes attempts. The book of Job seems to me to be about loss and depression ... but the loss is only explicit in the narrative framework, not in the main part of the book. There it is implied, but not spelled out ... (but I need to re-re-re-re-read the main part to be certain about that).
Oh, well. For the moment, I'll try to separate what I know about wisdom-literature in general, and the received knowledge re. Job in particular and try to go with what I read.
After all, that is what exegesis is about :-)

Reading Job, part 3
Textual criticism.

There are many issues when reading Job.
One of the fairly serious ones is : Which Job are you reading ?
Just try reading the King James version and the RSV-version (and probably even the NEW RSV-version), and you will see that they differ greatly from each other at some points.
... and yet, they are both translations of the same, basic, Hebrew text.

With Job, the trouble lies not so much in the translations, but in the Hebrew.
You see, the Hebrew text is ... difficult.
There are passages in there that are well nigh impossible to get any sort of meaning out of. There are passages where every other word is one that only occur in the book of Job, and half of those are words that only occur this once.

When things like this happens, scholars turn to text-critique. Try to establish a firm text, one that is as close to "the original" as possible, and to do this, a battery of options are available.

The first one is : could there be a simple error of spelling. These texts have been handed down to us in written form, certainly, but ... errors occur. Letters are mis-read, repeated, omitted. Whole passages were repeated or omitted, not because the scribe/s were incompetent, but because they were human beings.
And when the next scribe along the line started copying, he knew, that he had to copy completely accurately, so ... a chance error was continued, now as (pardon) gospel truth.

And another couple of errors occur with the next scribe ... and the next ... and the next ...
Now, in scholar-speak, all the many possible scribal errors have each their name, and I'm not going to bore you with those. Just take my word for it, that haplography and dittography are just a few of them.

One way to deal with this is, to make a hyper-text. That's what New Testament scholars have in the Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament. That is a text where you take many different old manuscripts of the same text, and see if there is a concensus.
When there is no consensus, you generally go with the version found in the older manuscripts ... but other options are noted in a text-critical apparatus.

Old Testament scholars don't have that ... yet. In this country we use a print-version of the manuscript usually known as the "Leningradensis", which is the oldest known manuscript containing the entire Old Testament, as we know it. There is a manuscript called the "Aleppo" which is about a century older, but that one doesn't have Genesis, since it has been in a fire. SO, we work with an annotated version of Leningradensis (which is - and you may be surprised here - a medieval manuscript from the 12th century)

ANYway. You still look at what other manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts, have, and if most of the others have a different version, you may choose to go with that.
If this one doesn't work (every script writes the same gibberish), you go to what is called "the versions" : the Septuagint (ancient Greek version of the Old Testament) and the Vulgate (Latin version of the Old and New Testament) are the most important, but there are others. You turn to those and check what they have translated.
Sometimes - quite frequently in fact - this can solve the issue.
You can see, from their translation, that they had a word added (or not there), or where the spelling error is, or that they assumed a different vocalization, simply by translating backwards.

BUT, there are pit-falls in this one too.
One of the "solid" pillars of textual critisism is, that any copyist is more likely to change gibberish to sense than the other way around ... which again means, that the - to us - gibberish text might well be the "real" thing, whereas the ancient versions changed an original text to something more easily understandable.
This rule of thumb is called the rule of lectio difficilior "the difficult reading"
So, you're back to square one, with a gibberish text.

Job is overflowing with textual problems. Words that only occur once. Strange grammar. Weird spellings. You name it, it is there.
And this makes translating Job your basic, scholarly nightmare.
To translate right, you need to know what the general trust of the piece is.
To find out what the general trust of the piece is, you need to understand what it says.
... Catch 22 ...
And caught between the rock and the hard place, I have reached the point, where I need to re-think the entire book. Need to find out what I think the book of Job is all about.
Is it about the unjust and unjustified suffering of the righteous man ? the problem which is known as theodicé ? Or might there be other issues that are as important ?
But that will have to be the next post.

Reading the book of Job. Part 2
First commentary
Well, the first commentary on Job is read.
Anthony and Miriam Hanson : "The book of Job. Introduction and Commentary". SCM Press Ltd. London 1953 and later. Part of the Torch Bible Commentaries.
Now, don't get me wrong. It's a nice enough commentary, BUT ...
For scholarly work it is all but useless.
But then, it does not have the ambition to be scholarly. It is meant as a sort of self-help book on reading Job for the interested (and educated) lay (Christian) reader. As such it stands the test of time. There are some interesting parallels and similes drawn, the comparison between Job and Jonah in the implied picture of God is interesting, as is the drawing attention to the implied use that Paul makes of Job in his arguments in 1 Corinthinans and Romans.
So ... and uplifting book to use for personal, faith-determined study, but not a book that is useful for a scholar.