3[rd] Trinity 2015: Hollowell

Of all the books of the old Testament for me the Book of Job is the most interesting and mysterious.  If I was given the privilege of appearing on the BBC's  Desert Island Discs and, having selected my records,  was stuck on the island with the Bible and Shakespeare,  as my companions, I would turn to the Book of Job to remind me that there was once  someone  worse off then I am who went through a vale of misery and eventually emerged triumphant.  So interesting and mysterious, and stimulating.   
Interesting because it is a "one off":  the action does not appear to happen in Israel, indeed the Nation of Israel is never mentioned; we know nothing of the author but he is certainly a bold dissenting thinker.    The three so called comforters Eliphaz, Bildar and Zophar  emerge on centre stage at different points, play their annoying  parts and are heard of no more.   Interesting because it is, or so I have read, one of the great poems in world literature.  It is full of inventive metaphors.  For example Job compares the way that his so called friends have betrayed him to the drying up of a summer wadi, a desert gulch that may be filled up in the rainy season he then proceeds to follow the seasonal cycle, the melting snows and ice, the caravans crossing the desert desperately looking for sources of water.  It seems almost as if the metaphor of the text interested the poet as much as the sense of betrayal.  
It seems that this great work of Hebrew literature was recognised as part of the Bible very early on.  It appears in some of the fragments discovered the in caves at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls. 
Mysterious because it is a tale of a pact between God and the Devil, or the Adversary as the translator of my edition of Job describes him.  Satan is portrayed as an affable, astute fellow who is on terms of familiarity with God. When God asks him where he has been he replies  " From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down in it "    Pretty impertinent response you might think.
 Why should God treat a good man in this way playing games and agreeing with the Devil to make Job's life a misery ? 
Many readers  over the centuries have felt that God's speech  -  part of which we have heard this morning  -  is no real answer to the problem of understanding suffering and some have complained that it amounts to a kind of "cosmic bullying" of puny man by overpowering deity.  Here is what the great Hebrew scholar Robert Alter has to says by way of explanation [1]
The Book of Job is largely about faith and particularly about whether or not one can have faith in the goodness and worthiness of an omnipotent creator who is apparently responsible for creating evil.  While Job's attitude to his suffering is profoundly felt and very personal, the Comforters, very irritating as they are, are more detached.  But the important thing to remember is that the only people who really know what is going on in this story are God and Satan. 
Does Job have patience ?  No he does not.  For all but three of the 42 chapters of the book Job is exasperated by his comforters, reduced to abject misery by his afflictions and disillusioned and furious with God.   Instead of the patience of Job, The defiance of Job" would be a more appropriate phrase to have passed into our language. 
In the end God speaks out of the whirlwind, as we have heard this morning.  He finds the Comforters as obnoxious and irritating as Job  " My wrath is kindled against thee, he tells them, for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" .  He thus admits, rather disarmingly, that Job is right in his complaints. 
And then God goes on for 129 bombastic verses, of which we have heard the opening part this morning, about his achievements and power.  It is, as one commentator has put it, as if he knows he has abused his powers and does not want to admit it. 
This fascinating book needs a more knowledgeable interpreter than I am.  It is so full of anomalies dressed up, or so I am told, in sublime Hebrew language, not possible to render really effectively in translation.  It is subversive i.e. if God is omnipotent we cannot blame anything on the Devil. 
But it underlines Job's inner strength.  In our modern age he is the individualist who triumphs over adversity.  And we see in this story God's vast creation shot through with paradoxes. 

[ Read the last bit of Alter ]






 
