{"id":2520,"date":"2013-05-09T13:26:25","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T20:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2520"},"modified":"2013-05-09T13:26:25","modified_gmt":"2013-05-09T20:26:25","slug":"the-book-of-job-critical-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2013\/05\/09\/the-book-of-job-critical-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Job: Critical Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s a good time to get back into the discipline of writing.\u00a0 I’ve recently begun reading the book of Job.\u00a0 I’m working with a commentary from the excellent “Belief” series by Westminster John Knox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Job is a fascinating and enigmatic text.\u00a0 As the author of the Belief commentary, Steven Chase, notes, textual and translation issues alone make any effort to interpret the text daunting.\u00a0 Chase suggests that translators must “often rely on grace and creative imagination” to make sense of the text.\u00a0 (Chase, p. 9).<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to know how and when Job was composed.\u00a0 The canonical book seems to be comprised of at least three parts:\u00a0 a folk tale about a wealthy man (Job) who loses everything; poetic dialogue; and additional poetic material concerning Woman Wisdom and Elihu.\u00a0 The folk tale might represent an early oral tradition, the poetic dialogue might have been composed during or shortly after the Babylonian Exile, and the additional Wisdom and Elihu material may have been added during the post-exilic period, but of these conjectures no one is certain.\u00a0 (Chase, p. 6).<\/p>\n

The author or (more likely) authors who composed and edited the text must have been highly educated.\u00a0 The poetic materials display deep knowledge of animals, the human embryo, weather patterns, constellations, mining practices (five different words for “gold” are employed), hunting (with multiple different descriptions of animal traps), and Egyptian lore.\u00a0 (Chase, p. 8).<\/p>\n

All of these considerations help establish that Job is not a “historical” text.\u00a0 Indeed, the text begins with a mythic setting:\u00a0 “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job….”\u00a0 (Job 1:1).\u00a0 “Uz” does not seem to relate to anyplace in ancient near eastern geography — even in the text it is situated in the nondescript “east” (Job 1:3) — a strong signal that we are about to hear a folk tale.\u00a0 It is not difficult to imagine a group of nomadic herders around a fire, telling each other stories that begin with lines like “There was a man in the land of Uz….”<\/p>\n

A final introductory point relates to the character of “Satan” in this story.\u00a0 It’s tempting to look to the interaction between God and Satan as some sort of window onto the workings of the actual heavenly realm, as refracted through later Christian theology concerning the Devil and demons.\u00a0 That is a mistake.\u00a0 The Hebrew term used in Job for this character is hassatan<\/em>, literally “the adversary” or “the accuser” (ha <\/em>is the article, “the,” and satan<\/em> is “adversary” or “accuser”).\u00a0 The text pictures God in His heavenly court at which various heavenly beings (“the sons of God”) appear from time to time on court business (see Job 1:6).\u00a0 “The satan” appears to be one of these court officials, whose job is to monitor the earth and report to God when someone has done wrong.\u00a0 Chase notes that “[t]he\u00a0satan<\/em> is not God’s opponent, but rather an advocate surveying human behavior and reporting on persons living in truth with faith and love.”\u00a0 (Chase, p. 24).<\/p>\n

These points about genre and dating suggest that we should not read Job for systematic doctrinal content.\u00a0 It is not that kind of book.\u00a0 Rather, Job will tell us things about ourselves and about God in the way of a poem, a painting, or a play.\u00a0 We<\/em> are invited to gather around the fire and ponder the strange tale of the man from Uz who finds his life destroyed by the impenetrable machinations of God’s heavenly council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a good time to get back into the discipline of writing.\u00a0 I’ve recently begun reading the book of Job.\u00a0 I’m working with a commentary from the excellent “Belief” series by Westminster John Knox. Job is a fascinating and enigmatic text.\u00a0 As the author of the Belief commentary, Steven Chase, notes, textual and translation issues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-studies","category-scripture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-EE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}