Job and spiritual formation and job 3:4 and genesis 1:3 and Job 7:17-18 and Psalm 8:3-4

9. The basic problem of the Book of Job results because and not inspite of the fact that Job believes he has a "personal relationship" with God. The problem of the Book of Job is that Job tries to hold two incompatible ideas in his mind at the same time, and the pain of the antimony or apparent contradiction is overwhelming for him. On the one hand, he believes in a good God, a God who is just and powerful, who has created the world in goodness and maintains it in justice. Job was a judge in the gate of his town; no doubt he felt he was dispensing justice on behalf of God. He had every reason to believe that if he continued faithfully in serving this God that God would keep blessing him. Job felt he knew not only the attributes of God but how God worked in the world. In this sense, then, he had a "personal relationship" with God. And, the fact that when Job's distress hit him he wanted to go from "third person distance" in Job 6 to "second person intimacy" in 7:11ff. meant that Job believed all along that God was as close to him as hands and feet, and as near to him as breathing.

But, on the other hand, Job knew his pain. He may have denied it or played it down at first (1:20-21), but once we get to ch.3, we see how he began to feel the full extent of his physical and emotional anguish. The friends tried to explain, and explain away, his pain by a variety of strategies, but Job would be deaf to their explanations. He knew his pain, and he would not give it up. He was "allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me" (7:3). But his pain and his "personal relationship" with God were incompatible in his mind. He had done nothing remotely bad enough to have deserved this treatment from God. No explanation could satisfy him. He could not give up his pain. But, on the other hand, he could not give up his understanding of God. He wasn't like the modern interpreters of Job who emphasize the limited power of God. They say that God's goodness is there but God's power is constrained. Job will hold the two incompatible ideas in his mind and be unable to know how to resolve them. That is his problem.

10. Job's anguish is intensified not inspite of but because he knew the Scriptures so well. I need to dispose of one issue quickly, and that is the date of the Book of Job. Some scholars have tried to argue for an "early" date for Job, making it possibly the earliest book of the Bible. Their reasons for this, as far as I can tell, are that Job seems to assume a "patriarchal-type" world in its language and social arrangements. But two observations are appropriate. On the one hand, the fact that the prose sections may reflect an "early" time (if it fact that is true) has nothing to do with the date the book was written. I could write a story about troubadours and courtly love in 2005 and, despite the fact that those individuals and themes arose 900 years ago, it doesn't mean that I wrote about them in the 12th century. Second, there are several indications in the poetic sections of Job that the author is acquainted with the Hebrew Bible, and especially with some Psalms. We don't know precisely when the Pslams were collected, but an exilic date for that process is easily understandable. Thus, I propose that Job is written in the exilic period, when the issue of unjust suffering is on the minds of everyone.

Let me give two examples of Job's knowledge of Scripture. In both instances he turns the Scripture upside-down, so to speak, in making his point. When he explodes with anger and anguish in Job 3, he curses the day of his birth and says, "Let that day be darkness" (3:4). Anyone familiar with the Scriptures would hear in those words an exact reversal of the good words of the creating God in Gen. 1:3, "Let there be light." Job is not only trying to undo his birth, as it were, but he is doing so in language that would imply the overturning of all of creation. Remember, Job is a "big guy." Sometimes when big guys suffer disaster they want the entire world to be brought down with them. It is as if their pain is of such magnitudinous proportions that they feel the whole world should suffer with them.

Second, in Job 7:11-21, Job first approaches God in the second person. Prior to that time, he felt that God was responsible for his distress ("For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison"--6:4)), but he did not address God directly. Now, in 7:11f., he says "Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I the Sea, or the dragon, that YOU set a guard over me?" Now that Job is addressing God personally, he makes an appeal to Scripture. In 7:17-18 he says,

"What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?"

You don't have to be a Scripture whiz to hear the words of Ps. 8:

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them" (8:3-4)?

Job has precisely reversed the language of the Sciptures. The Psalmist is lost in wonder and praise as he says his lines. God is so big and we are so little. Why would God, under these circumstances, pay us any heed? But Job cynically reverses the langauge and meaning of Scripture. 'Why are we so valuable, God, that you intervene into our lives at every moment, testing us, finding us wanting, punishing us?' That is what Job is trying to say. 'Why do you care so much about us, God, to torture us so?' That this is how to understand Job's reversal of Ps. 8 is confirmed by the next verse in Job.

"Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle" (7:19)?

There is much more that can be said on this topic--Job's use of Psalm 139 is among the most brilliant uses of Scripture by Scripture that I know. Echoes of other Psalms are also there in Job. You have to know your Bible very well to be able to do what Job does to it.

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