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.