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.