October 27, 2002 Job 3:1—26
“Give me that pitch back!”
Dialogue: First Cycle Job 3:1—14:22
Job’s Opening Soliloquy: “To Have Been or Not to Have Been” 3:1-26 Eliphaz’s First Response 4:1—5:27 Job Moves from Soliloquy to Dialogue 6:1—7:21 Bildad’s First Response 8:1-22 Job Responds to Bildad by Seeking Common Ground with God In the Sensibilities of Law-court and Workshop 9:1—10:22 Zophar’s First Response: On the Hidden Depths of Divine Wisdom 11:1-30 Job’s Response to Zophar Concluding the First Cycle 12:1-14:22
Introduction
October 15, 2002: It is the bottom of the ninth. The score is tied 1-1. Matt Morris has pitched brilliantly into the ninth inning. But having allowed two consecutive singles he is relieved. Steve Kline takes the mound to save the game. He throws one pitch. It is a strike, a little higher than intended. And Kenny Lofton connects for the third single. David Bell scores from second base. The San Francisco Giants are in the World Series!
Talk about instant misery! Can you imagine Steve Kline’s emotions—just one pitch—and the 2002 World Series for the Cardinals has evaporated before their eyes! “Kline would have liked to have that pitch back,” wrote columnist Tim Sullivan. Kline wished to will the pitch into non-existence.
This is a feeble insight into the heart of Job as out of his misery he curses the day he was born: “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth” and said ‘Let the day perish in which I was born’” (3:1, 2). He wished the day of his birth had never existed. No one of us has ever felt that way!!
So we look now at
The Curse: Job’s Quest for Death
Job himself breaks the seven day silence as he sits among the ashes with his friends and seeks relief with what has been designated a “self-curse.” In 2:10 he refused to curse God but now ironically Job does not hesitate to curse his own life:
Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, “A Man-child is conceived.” Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it. 5 Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds settle upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6 That night—let thick darkness seize it! let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. Yes, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it. Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan 9 Let the stars of its dawn be dark: let it hope for light., but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning-- 10 because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, and hide trouble from my eyes. 11 Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? 12 Why were there knees to receive me, or breasts for me to suck?
The prophet Jeremiah, prophesying in the agony of the last days of the kingdom of Judah, sought relief in the same literary genre (20:14-18):
Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, saying, “A child is born to you, a son,” making him very glad. Let that man be like the cities that the LORD overthrew without pity; let him hear a cry in the morning and a cry at noon, because he did not kill me in the womb; so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great. Why did I come forth from the womb To see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?
Job never considers the option of suicide, but he does want to reverse God’s creation! He desires to undo the day of his birth, to return it to primordial chaos. So with his soliloquy he indulges in “a counter-cosmic incantation.”
Job’s magic-like language of curse has an interesting background in the ancient world. The peoples of the ancient Near East thought that all beings and forces had their origin in a primordial womb or realm, whose decrees had to be obeyed. Yet this impersonal realm could be manipulated by magic or ritual, often permeated with the language of birth and creation. Potent spells were able to tap this mysterious power. By inverting the language of creation spells of doom could unravel the cords binding the universe together and bring death and destruction.
With this as his model “Job pronounces a counter-cosmic incantation designed to reverse the stages of the creation of the day of his birth, which was thought to be essentially the same as the stages of the seven-day creation of the world.” So each stage of creation has to be negated by an incantation. This is why his language in 3:3-13 is so closely linked to the language of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:4. So in desperation Job utters the curse as a last resort to ease his pain. He desires never to have existed. But the curse is of course not effective for the pious Job, but its utterance does indicate the extreme depth of his misery.
A Lament: Job’s Quest for Meaning
But then Job inserts a new and surprising note, for he seems to counter his quest for death with a quest for meaning. He begins to ask “Why?” not once but five times, beginning with verses 11-12 of the curse:
11 Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?
12 Why were there knees to receive me, or breasts for me to suck?
Listen to Job’s Lament:
Now I would be lying down and quiet; I would be asleep, then I would be at rest with the kings and counselors of the earth who rebuild ruins for themselves, or with princes who have gold, who fill their houses with silver. Or why was I not buried like a stillborn child, like an infant that never sees the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters. “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave? Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in? For my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.
Apparent is at least tension, if not contradiction, between these verses and what has preceded, for out of the energy of Job’s quest for death arises a quest for meaning “as a particular moment and a momentary theme. The very vital energy of Job’s quest for meaning gives the lie to his quest for death.” His depression cannot totally contain his spirit. Job is breaking out from behind the wall of the curse he has pronounced against himself. Yet even his questions seeking for meaning contain a strong complaint against God as he questions God’s creation, God’s goodness:
Why did I not die at birth? . . .
Why were there knees to receive me? . . .
Why was I not buried like a stillborn child? . . .
Why is light given to one in misery? . . .
Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in?
This last question has an ironic twist, the Satan had complained that God had built a fence around Job to keep him safe from harm (1:10), and now Job complains that God has fenced him in to keep any help from reaching him! A song popular when I was in high school (1941-1945), “Don’t Fence Me In!” is the cry that spills out of his soul.
Two verses about “rest” close the two sections of the chapter. Verse 13 gives voice to Job’s intense desire for rest,
Now I would be lying down and quiet; I would be asleep, then I would be at rest.
And verse 26 expresses his resignation to the fact that he has no rest:
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.
Or as Marvin Pope renders it,
I have no rest, no quiet, No repose, but continual agony.”
Following his expression of his quest for rest, verses 14-15 express Job’s longing for the rest that Sheol, the shadowy realm of the dead, offers, like kings and princes have, who regardless of being in such a state, have a more peaceful existence than do the masses who are still living. Job is envisioning a death that he prefers to life, resembling perhaps “the climax of the creation story insofar as it offers rest.” Describing that rest, he reflects,
There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters.
But he concludes in verse 26, “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.” Ironically what Job desires is not a rest given by God, but a rest from God! He has had enough of the LORD’s interference in his life. He just wants to be left alone by the divine taskmaster (19). This was Job’s complaint! His lament!
So can we say that the “why?” question directed to God’s providence is not inherently to be condemned, that it is not a biblically illegitimate question for us to ask? Can we accept that “Why?” is not unchristian? For even Jesus in the language of Psalm 22 cried out in his anguish, “My God, my God, why”?—“why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46). But we can not expect a pat answer or a “fix it” response as a solution that evades the Cross. But with the Cross, there comes the certainty of the Resurrection!
Conclusion
Job’s complaint in chapter 3 contains “the hardest words Job utters against himself in the entire book.” Yet almost surprisingly he interrupts the curse with his questions. With literary finesse he interweaves the Quest for Meaning with the Quest for Death. Job’s positive affirmation faintly implied in the questions in no way displaces the negation of life implied in his curse. Together they make up Job’s divided soul. How like him we are when trouble piles in upon us in ways that we think are too overwhelming to bear—we despair, we question, hoping for an answer!
We can take heart in the fact that Job “survives his darkest hour, since he neither curses God nor takes his fate into his own hands.” Like him we can survive! For us. like Job, the last word is not that placed by the famous bard on the lips of the Scottish general when he was told that “the queen, my lord, is dead”:
Out, out, brief candle, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, ull of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 25-26. 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 Tim Sullivan, “Kline won’t whine after fateful pitch,” The San Diego Union Tribune (October 15, 2002), D1. John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 88-89. Hebrew, “redeem.” Conjecture, Hebrew reads “day.” The Hebrew spelling of the two words are very similar, yom and yam. Vowels were not written in the Hebrew manuscripts until the Massoretic period several centuries after the birth of Jesus. But Hartley, 94, prefers the Hebrew with the second line defining or intensifying the first. Leviathan is the crocodile or mythical sea-monster who personifies primordial chaos, that is, all the forces that resist God’s rule. That Job is calling on those who can “rouse up Leviathan” indicates that he is “seeking to invoke the most clandestine powers to accomplish his own annihilation.” Hartley, 94. The mode of soliloquy is “a mode of speech in which the solitary self is both speaker and first listener. Other listeners do not so much hear as overhear.” Janzen , 69. Janzen, 67, Hartley, 101. The designation goes back to the researches of Michael Fishbane. “Jeremiah 4:23-26 and Job 3:3-13: A Recovered Use of the Creation Pattern,” Vetus Testamentum 21 (1971), 151-167. See Hartley, 101. Ibid, 101-102. Ibid., 102. Janzen, 68. Hartley., 99. Find statement by Teresa of Avila on why God has so few friends! Marvin H. Pope, Job, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1965), 27. Janzen, 70. Ibid. See the Lament Psalms, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 22, 25, 26, 28, 35, 38, 39, 41-43, 51, 53-57, 59, 61, 69, 71,`77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 90, 102, 109, 120, 123, 130, 137, 139-143, and portions of other psalms. Hartley, 101. See Janzen, 68. Hartley, 101. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5. Quoted here from The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, introduced and edited by R. S. Thomas (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 112.
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Frank G. Carver San Diego, California