For future reference for this series see Barbara Brown Taylor When God is Silent, 67-71, and the work of William Safire. Also get Clovis G, Chappell, Sermons from Job (1957), 223.1 C467s Susannah Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth (T & T Clark: London, 2005). Recommended by David F. Ford See Ford’s use of Job in his The Future of Christian Theology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
JOB August 25, 2002
“The Shakespeare of the Old Testament”
Art has finally given Herb and I permission to study Job, “The Shakespeare of the Old Testament”! You would have thought that Art, above all, a teacher par excellence of English literature, would have insisted that we do this years ago!
“Shakespeare”!
Job as outstanding literature? As one Old Testament scholar commented back in 1980,
the distinction between the Bible as literature and the Bible as scripture is largely artificial. The church can properly hear its Bible as Scripture only when it reads it as literature.
He adds later in his article that
the literature of the Old Testament is essentially story or poem.
My primary commentator for this study states:
In our view, the interpretation of Scripture has tended to move prematurely to questions of historical fact and literary pre-history (‘matter’), and/or to questions of theological meaning (‘content’); it has moved too quickly to what Scripture means apart from how it means.
Bernard Anderson reports that the book of Job is
the greatest monument of wisdom literature in the Old Testament. . . . Luther extravagantly said that Job is “magnificent and sublime as no other book of Scripture.” Tennyson called it “the greatest poem of ancient and modern times,” and Carlyle declared that “there is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it of equal merit.”
So let us appreciate, enjoy, and then hear the message of Job!
What is Job All About?
What do you think? A model of patience? (James 5:11: “Ye have heard of the patience (hypomonen of Job” (KJV). NRSV reads “endurance.”
Or of impatience! Anderson has a heading entitled “The Impatience of Job. . . . Job is a titanic figure who doubts, rebels, and shouts defiance at God.”
The problem of suffering (evil)?
The philosophical question of how absolute goodness and absolute power are reconciled in the nature of God (theodicy)?
Philosophy meaning “the love of wisdom” was not merely a Greek thing in the ancient world, it was “a fundamentally human concern” whether “Greek, or Jew, Babylonian or Egyptian, male or female, monarch or slave.”
In Israel the wisdom sages were interested in the human person. The literature falls into two classes, “practical advice to the young on how to attain a successful and good life” (Proverbs), and “reflective probing into the depth of human anguish about the meaning of life, often in a skeptical mood” (Ecclesiastes and Job).
So Job is basically about the human question. As Anderson writes:
The concrete portrayal of the man Job is evidence enough that the poetry deals with the stuff of daily experience, with human life as it is lived in history. Yet the author raises the historical question in a way that has universal relevance. In the last analysis, the historical question is the religious question: What is the meaning of my life—this solitary person who thinks and loves, remember and hopes, lives and dies? The poet, looking into the depths of one person’s existence, has exposed the human question.
Anderson concludes that the deepest question the book of Job asks is “What is a person’s relationship to God.”?
Janzen characterizes Job in a sweeping theological statement:
The Book of Job constitutes a critique and an implicit deepening and transformation of Israel’s understanding of creation, covenant, and history.
Yet Job is penetrated throughout by the “existential question,” one “not posed to be answered,” but a question that “poses a goal to be lived toward, in such a way that, in time, the questioner becomes a self which is then the ‘answer.’” The lectionary readings for this Sunday are Isaiah 51:1-6, Psalm 138, Romans 11:33-36, and Matthew 16:13-20. David J. A. Clines, Story and Poem: The Old Testament as Literature and as Scripture,” Interpretation, Volume XXXIV, Number 2 (April 1980). Ibid., 117. See 126-127. J. Gerald Janzen, Job: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 15. The stated aim of his commentary is “to lead the reader into the text and to entertain its meaning from within the text, according to the perspective and the entry which this commentator has so far gained." Bernard W. Anderson assisted by Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, Understanding the Old Testament (Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 4th ed., 1997). 529-530. The fuller quote by Carlyle calls the book of Job “the most wonderful poem of any age and language; our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem—man’s destiny and God’s way with him here in this earth. . . . There is nothing written in the Bible or out of it of equal literary merit.” From Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1983), 31. The biblical text used in this series is the NRSV, unless otherwise indicated. Ibid., 530, 538. Ibid., 510. Ibid., 511. Ibid., 534. Ibid., 535. Janzen, 13. Ibid., 19.
5.2.4 DATE \@ "MM/dd/yy" 06/04/16 TIME \@ "h:mm AM/PM" 3:53 PM PAGE 1
Frank G. Carver