October 13, 2002 From Heart to Heart
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 1:13-22: 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
From Heart to Heart: Today our study takes us From the Heart of God to the Heart of Job as we complete our consideration of
The Prologue: What is here structurally? How does it prepare the way for what follows? What does it say to us where we are?
The climax of the Prologue appears to be reached when Job’s wife says to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die” (2:9). The wife’s question, “Do you still persist in your integrity,” contains two questions, one asked on earth and the other in heaven. “Why do the righteous suffer?” is the question asked on earth while the question voiced in heaven is “Is there disinterested piety?” These two questions, in essence “two sides of one question,” are the questions on which the book of Job turns.
Disaster Begins—On Earth 1:13-22
One day when his sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in the eldest brother’s house, a messenger came to Job and said, “The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were feeding beside them, and the Sabeans fell on them and carried them off, and killed the servants with the edge of the sword; I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them; I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “The Chaldeans formed three columns, made a raid on the camels and carried them off, and killed the servants with the edge of the sword; I along have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house, and suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead; I alone have escaped to tell you.” Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshiped. He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong-doing.
Note here that the order of Job’s loss is first herds and donkeys, then flocks and camels, and finally his sons and daughters in chiastic contrast to the order in 1:1-5 where the order of blessing was first of all his sons and daughters, then flocks and camels, and finally herds and donkeys!
Observe also the indications of oral narrative style, particularly the fourfold repetition of the conclusion, “I alone have escaped to tell you.” We are reminded of the poignant twofold repetition of “So the two of them walked on together” in the Genesis story of the God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19).
Interesting too is the fourfold origin of disaster that befalls Job, alternately human—the Sabeans, divine--fire, human—the Chaldeans, divine--wind, revealing to Job that “all the forces of heaven and earth had turned against him.” The disasters had come from all four points of the compass with four being the symbol of the “full measure of totality.” As one born and raised on the Nebraska prairies the image of destructive prairie fires is very real. I remember those times when we all arrived on someone’s ranch with our shovels and gunnysacks soaked in water to beat back the consuming flames. And I can still see the winds that would arise suddenly with their whirling cones of dust, and feel those prevailing forceful winds that would blow for days across the fields and pastures penetrating one’s very soul.
“Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshiped” (1:20). Job’s actions, a customary social ritual in such times, were designed to function as what has been called “the formfulness of grief.” Janzen comments that “such formal enactments of grief serve as a hedge against utter chaos of feeling and help to sustain a margin of sanity.” Rituals are valuable and necessary in those times of trauma when we encounter what is beyond our control, those experiences that meet us from beyond. Ritual, writes Evelyn Underhill, is “a proclamation of the Divine Transcendence.” Although she is writing about the experience of worship, such may be true as well of the experience of grief.
Job said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (1:22). Indicated by Job himself being the subject of the first two verbs is the immediacy and reality of his experience, “Naked I came . . , and naked shall I return,” which then moves him to a religious affirmation with the LORD as the subject of the second two verbs, “the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away.” Job has been stripped of all but his faith in Yahweh, the redemptive and covenant God of Israel. In the same manner as he came forth from his mother’s womb, just “so he would return to the earth, the mother of the living”--“the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
So the narrator appropriately concludes with the comment, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong-doing” (1:22). “Yahweh is winning the bet.”
The Wager Revisited—In Heaven 2:1-6
One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD. 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. He still persists in his integrity, although you have incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” Then Satan answered the LORD, “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”
Notice how stylistically similar this second heavenly scene is to the first one. They are almost identical—repetition is a consistent feature of story telling in an oral culture. The slight changes indicate what is significant in the mind of the narrator.
As in 1:6-12 the conversation takes place openly before the heavenly assembly and therefore again reveals a questioning taking place “within the life of God.” The conversation within the heart of Yahweh is still going on.
“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. He still persists in his integrity, although you have incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason’” (2:3)—“you have incited me against him for no reason.” Although he has been stirred by the Satan to take an action he would not normally take, Yahweh takes full responsibility for Job’s plight. But Job’s losses were “for no reason” because Yahweh believes in Job’s innocence, and so he rebukes the Satan with an assertion of the meaninglessness of Job’s suffering.
And meaninglessness is most difficult for us to deal with, as we will see in Job’s speeches. We would rather have “any” answer, no matter how pat, than no answer! Victor Frankel in Mans’ Search for Meaning, writing about his Nazi concentration camp experience, observed that those who could find no meaning in their suffering were the first to give up and die. The survivors were most often those who drew on the resources of their Jewish heritage for meaning in their sufferings, a meaning not unlike that which we Christians can find in the Cross of Jesus.
“Then Satan answered the LORD, ‘Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face’” (2:4-5). Our embodied selves, our within our skin selves, is us! The Satan is now attacking not merely the possessions of Job, but his very person, for he believes that Job has not yet been fully tested! Thus the explanation of Job’s blameless actions thus far. Can we posit this question within the very heart of God!
“The LORD said to Satan, ‘Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life’” (2:6). So “in this way God allows Job’s faith to be tested to its innermost core.”
Disaster Intensified---On Earth 2:7-10
So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his heard. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes. Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
“Job . . .sat among the ashes” (2:8). Scholars are uncertain what this act meant in the culture of Job’s day. Janzen suggests that the uncertainty about Job’s actions “may be a narrative device by which Job’s inner self is shrouded in ambiguity, in contrast to the open, straightforward and conventional response in 1:20-21.” Job’s behavior is not interpreted. It appears that we are moving here into the heart of Job! Job’s wife, certainly undergoing her own suffering, now speaks up:, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die” (2:9). The “curse God” language, formerly twice on the Satan’s lips in the heavenly conversation (1:11; 2:5) has now come directly to Job on the lips of the one closest to him—his wife! Job’s alienation is now extreme—even from his wife. But what is her role as one who is bone of Job’s bone and flesh of his flesh Genesis (2:23)? The Satan in touching Job’s bone and flesh has also touched her bone and flesh. In whose name does she speak? Is she simply as Augustine asserted “the helpmeet of the devil”? Or as Janzen puts it, can we say that just as the Satan has articulated Yahweh’s incipient question, so the wife articulates Job’s emerging questions? Job’s rhetorical question seems to indicate as much—“Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
“But he said to her, ‘You speak as any foolish woman would speak’” (2:10). Does Job’s forceful outburst against his wife indicate that he is aware of the possibility that what his wife suggests is already welling up within himself? Does the husband-wife dialogue disclose an inner turmoil? Is space opening up between what Job is saying and what he is thinking?
Is Job hiding his real self in the form of his rhetorical question? Is there an ambiguity on Job’s part that signals the beginning of a loss of confidence in his ability to objectify his experience even in confessional language? Are the raw edges of his experience challenging his traditional frame of reference so that he has to speak with a more subjective rhetoric?
We have come in the narrative now from the heart of God to the heart of Job in preparation for the rest of the book as we become aware of the deep connection between the prologue and the dialogues that follow.
Yet the narrator concludes that “in all this Job did not sin with his lips” (1:10). This is significant in that “the lips express a person’s deepest thoughts.” Job’s questioning, his inner agony that comes to expression in the dialogue is therefore not to be condemned! Job’s “response is sincere, but it will have to reach a deeper level,” writes Gutierrez, but this deeper understanding of Job’s faith “will require a passage through the dramatic crises of which we are told in the poetic section of the book.”
Friends? 2:11-13
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and their raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air on their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
Job’s three friends were genuine friends, they came from a distance, they wept, they performed the symbolic ritual of mourning, and they sat with him in sympathetic silence for seven days and nights, “for they saw that his suffering was very great“ (2:13). They came to “console and comfort him,” that is, to share in his grief and to “speak to his heart” in hopes of easing his pain.
The fact that they “did not recognize him” suggests that the alteration in Job was far deeper than merely his physical features and his place on the ash heap.
Their “seven days and seven nights” during which ”no one spoke a word” was a manifestation of the seriousness of their fellowship with him in suffering and the depth of their sorrow at seeing their friend in such misery.. “They were “serious and learned men, though perhaps oversure of their wisdom.”
Part of Job is represented by his friends, thus granting him “a certain freedom to give himself over to another part of himself.” This prepares us to move into the dialogues that encounter us with Job’s complaint and with his friend’s efforts to give him rational answers, their attempts to explain what is happening to him.
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 Ibid., 50. Bold mine. John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 76, n. 13. Ibid, 77. Ibid. Walter Brueggemann, “The Formfulness of Grief,” Interpretation, XXXI, 3, (July 1977), 263-275. The article deals with the form and function of the Lament psalms. He writes that “by the use of the form the grief experience is made bearable and, it is hoped, meaningful. The form makes the experience formful just when it appeared to be formless and therefore deathly and destructive.” 265. Janzen, 43. Evelyn Underhill, Worship (New York: Harper & Row, 1936), 46. A study of the value and function of ritual in our lives would be profitable for us sometime. Hartley, 78. Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, tran. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), 5. Janzen, 27. See Hartley, 79-80. Another topic worth exploring that may come up again in our study of Job. Ibid., 81. Janzen 48-49. See Janzen, 49-55 for this and the following three paragraphs.. Harley, 84. Gutierrez, 6. See Hartley, 85-85, for the suggestions concerning the countries of origin of Job’s friends. The Hebrew for “to console” “means literally ‘to shake the head or to rock the body back and forth’ as a sign of shared grief.” Hartley, 85. Janzen 57. Gutierrrez, 7. Janzen 59-60.
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Frank G. Carver San Diego, California