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.