September 22, 2002 The Wager 1:6-12
Prologue: A Dialogue of Heaven and Earth 1:1--2:13
1:1-5: Narrative Introduction to Job Himself 1:6-12: Heaven--One: A Question Which Sets the Drama in Motion 1:33-22: Earth--One: Job’s Affirmative Response to His Calamity 2:1-7a: Heaven--Two The Heavenly Question Given Sharper Point 2:7b-10: Earth--Two: Job’s Ambiguous Response to His Deepened Calamity 2:11-13: Conclusion: Introducing Job’s Friends and Alluding to His Growing Pain
Introduction
So far in our study of Job we have encountered various suggestions concerning what the book is all about. We have seen the questions with which some have approached it. Last week Rabbi Harold Kushner viewed Job as “the most profound and complete consideration of human suffering in the Bible,” and the Latin American liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez began to reflect on it from the standpoint of “the suffering of the innocent” and the questions this leads to.
We began our study of Job four weeks ago with the views of two Old Testament scholars. Gerald Janzen in his academic lingo judges that “the Book of Job constitutes a critique and an implicit deepening and transformation of Israel’s understanding of creation, covenant, and history.” Truly big questions for the Christian these days-- creation, covenant, and history! Bernard Anderson in simple human terms concluded that the deepest question Job asks is “What is a person’s relationship to God.”
But it is the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez, feeling that “it is not possible to grasp the meaning of the polemical dialogues” without the prose sections, who furnishes us with the bridge to today’s study. He writes,
In the narrative part the author gives us, in a few brief strokes, the key to the interpretation of his work. From a literary standpoint the book is built on a wager made with regard to talk about God.
So we begin with this wager as we are introduced to
“The Satan”—the Accuser 1:6-12
One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (vv. 6-8).
“One day” in Hebrew is literally “the Day” (hayyom). Jewish Targumic and Midrashic tradition identified the day as New Year’s Day. Since in Mesopotamian religion the gods assembled on New Year’s Day to determine destinies for the coming year and since New Years Day in ancient Near Eastern culture celebrated and renewed the creation of the cosmos with all its life giving power, “One day” (“the day”) suggests the full implication of Job’s troubles.
”The heavenly beings” are literally “the sons of God” (KJV) matching the introduction to “the sons of Job” in 1:1-5. What is this “Divine or Heavenly Council”? Can it be simply dismissed as merely “a poetic and concrete way of portraying the divine government of the world”? John Hartley identifies “the sons of God” as “the celestial beings or angels whom God created as his servants” who are assembled “to give an accounting of their activities to God.” Genesis 1 pictures this Divine Council as involved in the creation of the human race: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” The interesting thing in our text is that Satan came to the meeting of “the sons of god”--“Satan also came among them”—and was asked to give an account of his activities: “The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’” Is Satan an intruder or is he more probably a member in good standing in the Heavenly Council? The figure of Satan as he appears here in the prologue of Job is most fascinating, as is the question of his absence from the epilogue. The Hebrew word for “Satan” is literally “the satan” (hassatan) and functions as a title rather than a personal name. His answer to the LORD’s question, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” or “Have you been doing your job?” pictures him as the eyes and ears of the monarch “whose special function is to investigate things on earth” G. B. Caird goes so far as to say that the Satan as one who has the right of access to the heavenly court acts there as the public prosecutor of wrong-doers. But to identify the Satan here as a “public prosecutor” is not yet fully evident in the Old Testament’s presentation. This all fits the lexical meaning of the Hebrew hassatan as “the accuser” or ”the adversary.” Thus in Zechariah 3:1 we read, “Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan (hassatan) standing at his right hand to accuse him.” Here the Satan’s function as a prosecuting attorney is now clear. The verb “to accuse” is the same Hebrew root (stn) as Satan. In the New Testament the Greek word for “the devil” (e.g., Matthew 4:1) is ho diabolos with the basic lexical meaning of “the slanderer” from the verb diaballo, “to bring charges against w. hostile intent” In Revelation 12:10,
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser (kategor) of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses (ho kategor) them night and day before God”
the verb kategoreo is used with identical meaning: “to bring charges in court.” So as suggested by this language, the satanic figure is the consummate legalist! He is the accuser on the basis of absolute justice—no mercy! His role as the tempter to evil is a secondary development in the OT, only unquestionably evident in 1 Chronicles 21:1. We can read the New Testament as well in the light of these primary and secondary meanings for “throughout the New Testament period Satan retains his juridical duties.” Illuminating is the way Thomas Merton picks up on the legalistic character of the biblical satanic figure with what he calls “The Moral Theology of the Devil” in which
the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. . . . The Cross, then, is no longer a sign of mercy (for mercy has no place in such a theology), it is the sign that Law and Justice have utterly triumphed. . . . The theology of the devil is for those who . . . because they have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy. . . .That is why God Himself is absent from hell. Mercy is the manifestation of His presence.
As the LORD begins to praise Job’s religious and moral integrity, the understanding of the Satan’s role in the prologue of Job as not merely that of an observer but primarily as an accuser, is evident as he answers the LORD’s question, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (vv. 6-8).
To this Satan responds with
An Accusation: How Righteous is Job, Really? 1:9-8
Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, all that he has is in your power, only do not stretch out your hand against him!” So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD (vv. 9-12)..
Note that this all does not take place “in a secret meeting between Yahweh and the Satan. Rather it was decided openly before the heavenly assembly.” This scene therefore, pictures a questioning going on “within the life of God,” perhaps somewhat like that of Hosea 11:8-9 where one commentator writes of “an impassioned self-questioning by Yahweh.” For as Yahweh struggles with his attitude toward his apostate child (1:1), Israel, he cries out
How can I surrender you, O Israel? . . . My heart is turned over within Me (or “turned itself against me”), All my compassions are kindled (11:8, NASB).
The fascinating thing is that in the text before us the questioning within the life of God is a questioning shared with Job which in turn develops into his own life-probing question. And as you and I allow the book of Job to put its mirror in front of our lives, we too share in the question that comes through from within the life of God through Job!
Before we get to the big question, “Does Job fear God for nothing?”, it is worth noting that the Satan suggests to the LORD that Job “will curse you to your face” if he, God, would only “touch all that he has.” We saw this phrase first on Job’s lips in 1:5 expressing his concern for his children, then Satan uses it a second time 2:5, and finally it is on the lips of Job’s wife in 2:9 as Job’s troubles reach their zenith. The repetition of this language appears to mark an increasing intensity in Job’s temptation as we shall see when we explore the rest of the prologue.
With the Satan’s “Does Job fear God for nothing?” we arrive at the really big question. This challenge from the Satan is the key to the Book of Job. The question “has to do with Job’s piety—its grounds and, therefore, its nature.” Is Job only pious because he has been uniquely blessed and prospered by the divine creator—“his possessions have increased (burst out) in the land”? Does Job’s piety arise merely as a “creaturely response to the divine goodness”?
As Gutierrez poses the big question,
Can human beings have a disinterested faith in God—that is, can they believe in God without looking for rewards and fearing punishments? Even more specifically: Are human beings capable, in the midst of unjust suffering, of continuing to assert their faith in God and speak of God without expecting a return? Satan, and with him all those who have a barter conception of religion, deny the possibility.
So to what extent does our piety have to be disinterested to be genuine? Can it be true that “piety and uprightness must exist for their own sake, or purely for God’s sake, or forfeit any claim to be called piety”?
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a Cistercian monk and Abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Clairvaux in France suggests three stages in our growth in love to God:
One begins by loving oneself for one’s own sake. Second, one begins to love God for one’s own sake. Finally one begins to love God for God’s own sake.
What do we do with this question of disinterested love for God? Is the latter stage as the Satan suggests out of the question? Or do these modes co-exist in our lives, sometimes one, sometimes the other? To what extent are we stuck with a “barter-like” relationship to God? Or is God capable of so creating us that we attain “to such freedom and independence, such spiritual and moral maturity, as to be in a position to choose to offer God worship and service because of God’s intrinsic worthiness to be loved?” So the question becomes, “What sort of a covenant is possible between us and God? How do we answer this as Wesleyans?
Conclusion
Thus in our text we are introduced to the inauguration of the “body and spirit” agony of Job that can be seen as his participation in the agony of God himself. Such participation for Job and consequently for us as well implies a thrilling “measure of the dignity of humankind as made in the image of God.” Of this exalted insight our study of Job will surely convince us!
APPENDIX
Janzen concludes the discussion summarized in our conclusion with the following parentheses:
For such a reading of the Book of Job, it is significant that the Satan appears only in the prologue and is absent from the epilogue. Far from indicating the secondary/character of the epilogue, as some would have it, the Satan’s absence there is one signal that the rift which has opened up to the divine consciousness though [sic] the rise of the question has been closed through Job’s vocational response. J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 25. Slightly edited. Prologue: A Dialogue of Heaven and Earth 1:1--2:13 Dialogue: First Cycle 3:1—14:22 Dialogue: Second Cycle 15:1—21:35 Dialogue: Third Cycle 22:1—27:23 Soliloquy 28:1—31:40 A Voice for God, the Voice of God, and Job’s Response 32:1—42:6 Epilogue: Order and Freedom in Felicity 42:7-17 Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1983), 30. Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), xviii. Janzen, 13. These could be formulated as follows: (1) How do we believe in creation? (2) What are the nature and implications of our covenant with God? and (3) Can we see the purpose of God in our troubled history? Bernard W. Anderson assisted by Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, Understanding the Old Testament (Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 4th ed., 1997), 535. Gutierrez, 1. Ibid. John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 74, says that to speak of a wager here “is inaccurate, for no sum was set to be handed over to the winner.” Anderson, 530, however, has no problem with this use of “wager.” Janzen, 37. Ibid. Hartley, 71. Other like Old Testament passages include Psalm 29:1; 82; 86:5-8; 1 Kings 22:19-23. Hartley, 71, comments that “the setting for this scene closely parallels ‘the assembly of the gods’ that is well attested in ancient Near Eastern literature. . . . But in the OT the complete dependence of these sons of god on God himself and their total submission to him is not questioned.” See Appendix below. Ibid. Anderson, 530. See Janzen, 39. G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1956), 32. Hartley, 72, suggests in this scene the Satan “acts as a troublemaker, a disturber of the kingdom.” William M. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew Lexicon of the Old Testament (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 350. See Psalm 109:6. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1979), 181-182. Ibid., 423. “Satan (satan) stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel.” Note the absence of the article on satan. Hartley, 72, n. 8, points out that the Satan’s role in Job “reveals numerous characteristics which suggest that he is contiguous with the later Satan, God;s primary antangonist.” He cites his contemptuous and impudent attitude in the narratives. Caird, 33. See his chapter on “The Great Accuser,” 31-53. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1961), 96, 91-92. Hartley, 72. Janzen, 38. James Luther Mays, Hosea, A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 159. Ibid., 151. Gutierrez, 4. Janzen, 39. Gutierrez, 1. Janzen, 40. Ibid. Ibid., 41. Ibid. Janzen, 41-42.
5.2.4, Job #4 DATE \@ "MM/dd/yy" 01/10/07 TIME \@ "h:mm AM/PM" 7:07 AM PAGE 1
Frank G. Carver San Diego, California