When you decide to read the Bible -- not parts of it, but the Bible -- you obviously should go straight to Exodus after finishing Genesis, right? After all, Genesis is the first book and Exodus the second.
Or should you instead skip ahead to the 18th book, Job? At first glance that doesn't make sense, for the obvious reason that it means leapfrogging past 16 books and multiple hundreds of pages.
In my NIV, Genesis ends on page 73, Exodus starts on page 74, and Job doesn't begin until page 591. Skipping to it would be like starting a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, but upon coming to the first road-crossing a few days later you decide to hit your Uber app and have somebody drive you all the way to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. That would mean you wind up on the trail well into Virginia without having to hike there through North Carolina and Tennessee and without having to labor up and over the Old Dominion State's highest peak, Mount Rogers.
In my NIV, Genesis ends on page 73, Exodus starts on page 74, and Job doesn't begin until page 591. Skipping to it would be like starting a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, but upon coming to the first road-crossing a few days later you decide to hit your Uber app and have somebody drive you all the way to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. That would mean you wind up on the trail well into Virginia without having to hike there through North Carolina and Tennessee and without having to labor up and over the Old Dominion State's highest peak, Mount Rogers.
On second glance, however, skipping to Job might make sense and might even be the opposite of cheating on the AT.
Job is an enigmatic tome for several reasons, one of which is that it does not even pretend to try to tell you when its title character lived. Since it is positioned so far into the Old Testament, it's natural to assume he lived long after Moses, after 10 of the 12 tribes got scattered, even after the Babylonian exile. However, some of the actual information in the book suggests that he lived before Moses and perhaps even at the same time as the patriarchs from Genesis.
Nobody knows for sure who authored Job, but some scholars believe it was written before Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch. Others believe Moses himself wrote the Book of Job, that God revealed its contents to him just like he revealed to him most of the information in the Pentateuch. Meanwhile, others believe Moses "wrote" Job either by recording what had been passed down orally from before or by transcribing something written by an earlier author.
So if chronology is your thing, there is something to be said for perusing this book right after Genesis; and since chronology is usually my thing, that is precisely what I did this month.
Nobody knows for sure who authored Job, but some scholars believe it was written before Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch. Others believe Moses himself wrote the Book of Job, that God revealed its contents to him just like he revealed to him most of the information in the Pentateuch. Meanwhile, others believe Moses "wrote" Job either by recording what had been passed down orally from before or by transcribing something written by an earlier author.
So if chronology is your thing, there is something to be said for perusing this book right after Genesis; and since chronology is usually my thing, that is precisely what I did this month.
My April 26th post contained some of my thoughts about Genesis fresh off of having read it from start to finish. Today's post contains some of my thoughts about Job, fresh off of having read it from start to finish.
* * * * *
Some of the reasons for believing Job lived in extremely early times are delivered right out of the gate. The book's opening paragraph defines his wealth by livestock, not money, declaring that "he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys." This is how wealth was measured in the patriarchal days of Genesis.
The second paragraph adds that Job made animal sacrifices to God, in particular when he feared that his children had gone astray by partying too much and were in need of mercy. 1:4-5 says that his sons held "feasts in their homes...and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, 'Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.'"
Besides that passage and another one near the end of Job, depictions of animal sacrifices are confined largely to Genesis's accounts of Noah and the patriarchs. Sacrifices are also listed prominently in the Mosaic laws laid out in Leviticus, which is the third book in the Bible; and the fact that the Book of Job never makes a single mention of any of the Mosaic laws, yet still describes its title character as offering sacrifices, seems to indicate that he lived earlier than you would be led to believe by looking only at the Table of Contents.
* * * * *
Most people, even the biblically illiterate, can tell you that Job was a man who underwent great suffering through no fault of his own yet maintained his faith.
What some people don't realize is that Job's agony was a direct result of God setting him up to suffer. That phrasing makes the Almighty sound bad, and it removes context, and it blurs the big picture -- but the phrasing sure seems to fit as the book's first two chapters unfold.
God asks Satan where he's been. The latter replies that he's been roaming the world, presumably looking for souls to steal, to which God responds by asking: "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." (On a side note, if this was a person speaking instead of God, we would find it irritating that he speaks of himself in the third person.)
Satan retorts that Job is not all he's cracked up to be, that he acts good simply because God has blessed him with wealth and comfort. According to Satan, if Job was to experience hardship he would show his true colors by turning on God and "will surely curse you to your face." Upon hearing this, the Almighty accepts the challenge and informs the Dark One that he is free do whatever he wants to inflict agony on Job, so long as he does not physically touch "the man himself." (On another side note, this makes it seem like Einstein was wrong when he claimed that God "does not play dice with the universe.")
Having been granted a green light, Satan gleefully proceeds to destroy Job's life by: 1) murdering all his sons and daughters by causing the house in which they are feasting to collapse on top of them; 2) raining fire down on his sheep herds, killing every last sheep; 3) dispatching a band of Sabean raiders, who steal all of his oxen and donkeys; and 4) dispatching a band of Chaldean raiders, who steal all of his camels. Despite learning of each of these calamities within a span of mere minutes, Job responded with "worship" and "did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing."
Not ready to concede that perhaps Job is all he's cracked up to be, Satan ups the ante by telling God to "stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face." God accepts the essence of this new challenge by loosening the reins and granting Satan permission to assail Job physically, the lone caveat being "you must spare his life."
Given this updated green light, the devil plagues Job with a skin disease that covers his entire body "with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head." The pain is so bad that he scrapes himself with broken pottery while sitting in ashes, and the sores so disfigure him that when his friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar come to check on him, they barely recognize him -- in fact, they "weep aloud" and sit with him for seven days before saying a word "because they saw how great his suffering was."
Distraught and angered by her husband's lot, Job's wife mocks him for "maintaining your integrity" and says he should "curse God and die!" But he refuses to do this and responds by saying: "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?"
The book asserts that "in all this, Job did not sin in what he said." I don't know about you, but I find that impressive when you think of everything that had befallen him.
Then Chapter Two ends and things get really hard to follow. The next 35 chapters consist of an intense, far-reaching, back-and-forth dialogue between Job and his aforementioned friends, plus an intense, far-reaching interjection by a younger man named Elihu, who suddenly starts talking in Chapter 32 despite not having been mentioned before.
This dialogue is not a normal conversation in which one person speaks a sentence or two and then the next person speaks a sentence or two. Instead they converse in poems and the poems are long, each one sprawling across an entire chapter or more before the next person opens his mouth. Elihu's interjection is five chapters all by itself.
And these poems do not rhyme like Westerners tend to expect. This being the Bible, they are delivered in the Near Eastern style with meter utilized across an extended succession of verses to weave one idea into another, and that one into another, etc.
These exchanges are, to put it mildly, a challenge. They call for protracted, slow, onion-peeling reading. They call for sometimes flipping back to a passage you already read, just to make sure you were right about it -- or to consider changing your mind about it, in light of something that got expressed in the verse you just finished reading.
People have spent years poring over these exchanges to glean theological and philosophical insights from them, and I do not feel qualified to wade into those particular waters and start opining after one full perusal of my own -- but there are several non-theological and non-philosophical things in the exchanges that made the budding apologist in me lean forward and take note, and I most definitely am going to comment about those.
I already knew that Genesis is not the only book in the Bible to speak of creation, and that Job is one of the others that weighs in on the topic. In reading Job on my own and without a study guide, the first time my brain registered a mention of creation was when I came to Chapter Nine, Verse Nine and saw the words "he is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south."
Though just one sentence in an enormous book, it stood out because it identifies God with specifics of the vast universe, not "just" the world. And what does it mean when it mentions "constellations of the south" without identifying them by name? Does it mean the author knew there were constellations he could not see because they are visible only in the Southern Hemisphere?
In hindsight, the verse right before that (9:8) also touches on the topic of God and the universe by remarking that "he alone stretches out the heavens." Is that just a turn of phrase? Perhaps, but it's also an apt way of saying the universe is not static, but expanding -- a fact that was not considered in any other ancient writing and was not identified by science until the twentieth century.
I especially took note when Chapter 26, Verse Seven said "he suspends the earth over nothing." Think about that for a moment. It is a perfect description of our planet floating in the emptiness of space, written at a time when such a concept was foreign to the mind of man. Back then, everyone believed either that Earth was the firm floor of everything and the sky was the ceiling (for lack of a better analogy) or that Earth sat on top of something else that was firm but unseen. Yet the author of Job spot-on declared the truth that our planet is "suspend(ed)...over nothing."
The very next verse, 26:8, neatly sums up the cycle of evaporation and condensation by saying that God "wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight." Remember that this might have been written 3,000+ years ago, and might even have been transcribing what was passed down by Hebrew orators for centuries before that; but in any event, even the most recent estimated date for its authorship (circa 590 B.C.) would mean it was composed 250 years before Aristotle "first" theorized that clouds are water vapor, in his essay Meteorologica (circa 340 B.C.).
Then comes 26:10, which states: "He marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness." This seems to indicate knowledge that there is another side of Earth that is dark during one's own daylight hours; and I have to mention that in the original ancient Hebrew, the word khug appears in this verse and khug's definition happens to be "circle." It seems to me that Job's author was aware that Earth is not flat, which would have made him unique at that point in history (although in fairness, ancient Hebrew did not have a specific word for "sphere," as opposed to a flat circle like a coin, so there is room for debate).
Moving forward, 28:5 says Earth "is transformed below as by fire." Does this imply knowledge of subterranean volcanism?
And six chapters after that, we get an even better description of the evaporation and condensation cycle than the one I quoted above, for 36:27 states: "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams." And again, this was a minimum of 250 years before Meteorologica, and very possibly 700 or more years before it.
The exchanges between Job and his friends and Elihu conclude with Chapter 37, then God arrives on the scene and begins speaking to Job out of a whirlwind. Among the many things he says, there are more a few references to creation.
While reading, I jotted down that 38:18 implies that the world is bigger than humans realized, for God says to Job: "Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this."
Then I jotted down that constellations are mentioned again in 38:31, when God alludes to his own acts and power by rhetorically asking: "Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion's belt?"
A few nights later I had insomnia, and was scrolling through some YouTube videos, and clicked on an address given by J. Warner Wallace. Its title gave no indication that the Book of Job would get mentioned, but not only did Wallance mention it, he brought up the exact passage I just quoted and he offered some intriguing insights.
The Pleiades (which happen to be the logo of Subaru, and are sometimes misidentified as the Little Dipper) are comprised of what are known as open star clusters. This means that the individual stars you see in the Pleiades are not actually individual stars, but are instead groups of stars positioned in such a way, all those many light years in the distance, that they appear as a single star to the naked eye. Because the stars in each cluster are bound by mutual gravitational attraction and are of the same approximate chemical composition, they move perpetually in unison, in the same direction and at the same rate, neither drifting apart nor otherwise changing their alignment to each another as is the case with most heavenly bodies. Thus, modern science tells us we can rest assured that those clusters will continue to appear as single stars and that the Pleiades will continue to look precisely the same in the night sky, from now until the end of time. In other words, the Pleiades are chained and bound together, just like the Book of Job said thousands of years ago.
On the one hand, it might be easy to dismiss the phrase "bind the chains of the Pleiades" as a fortunate accident made by an author who didn't mean much, but it's harder to dismiss when you consider that it is immediately followed by that phrase about "loosen(ing) Orion's belt." As it turns out, the three points of light which currently form the line of Orion's belt are not moving in unison and will ultimately change position, with the left-hand star (Alnita) drifting off to the east while the middle and right-hand ones (Mintaka and Alnilam) draw together and appear as one. In other words, modern science tells us that Orion's belt will ultimately loosen, just like the Book of Job said thousands of years ago.
There is something about passages like those I just mentioned that always fascinates me and piques my interest: Words from antiquity that touch on aspects of science and get it right, despite there being seemingly no way for a person in that era to have known what he was writing about.
If the author of Job got those things right by sheer luck, he sure did manage to get awfully lucky an awful lot of times.
There is plenty more to say about the Book of Job, but I will save those for another post.
What some people don't realize is that Job's agony was a direct result of God setting him up to suffer. That phrasing makes the Almighty sound bad, and it removes context, and it blurs the big picture -- but the phrasing sure seems to fit as the book's first two chapters unfold.
God asks Satan where he's been. The latter replies that he's been roaming the world, presumably looking for souls to steal, to which God responds by asking: "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." (On a side note, if this was a person speaking instead of God, we would find it irritating that he speaks of himself in the third person.)
Satan retorts that Job is not all he's cracked up to be, that he acts good simply because God has blessed him with wealth and comfort. According to Satan, if Job was to experience hardship he would show his true colors by turning on God and "will surely curse you to your face." Upon hearing this, the Almighty accepts the challenge and informs the Dark One that he is free do whatever he wants to inflict agony on Job, so long as he does not physically touch "the man himself." (On another side note, this makes it seem like Einstein was wrong when he claimed that God "does not play dice with the universe.")
Having been granted a green light, Satan gleefully proceeds to destroy Job's life by: 1) murdering all his sons and daughters by causing the house in which they are feasting to collapse on top of them; 2) raining fire down on his sheep herds, killing every last sheep; 3) dispatching a band of Sabean raiders, who steal all of his oxen and donkeys; and 4) dispatching a band of Chaldean raiders, who steal all of his camels. Despite learning of each of these calamities within a span of mere minutes, Job responded with "worship" and "did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing."
Not ready to concede that perhaps Job is all he's cracked up to be, Satan ups the ante by telling God to "stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face." God accepts the essence of this new challenge by loosening the reins and granting Satan permission to assail Job physically, the lone caveat being "you must spare his life."
Given this updated green light, the devil plagues Job with a skin disease that covers his entire body "with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head." The pain is so bad that he scrapes himself with broken pottery while sitting in ashes, and the sores so disfigure him that when his friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar come to check on him, they barely recognize him -- in fact, they "weep aloud" and sit with him for seven days before saying a word "because they saw how great his suffering was."
Distraught and angered by her husband's lot, Job's wife mocks him for "maintaining your integrity" and says he should "curse God and die!" But he refuses to do this and responds by saying: "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?"
The book asserts that "in all this, Job did not sin in what he said." I don't know about you, but I find that impressive when you think of everything that had befallen him.
* * * * *
Then Chapter Two ends and things get really hard to follow. The next 35 chapters consist of an intense, far-reaching, back-and-forth dialogue between Job and his aforementioned friends, plus an intense, far-reaching interjection by a younger man named Elihu, who suddenly starts talking in Chapter 32 despite not having been mentioned before.
This dialogue is not a normal conversation in which one person speaks a sentence or two and then the next person speaks a sentence or two. Instead they converse in poems and the poems are long, each one sprawling across an entire chapter or more before the next person opens his mouth. Elihu's interjection is five chapters all by itself.
And these poems do not rhyme like Westerners tend to expect. This being the Bible, they are delivered in the Near Eastern style with meter utilized across an extended succession of verses to weave one idea into another, and that one into another, etc.
These exchanges are, to put it mildly, a challenge. They call for protracted, slow, onion-peeling reading. They call for sometimes flipping back to a passage you already read, just to make sure you were right about it -- or to consider changing your mind about it, in light of something that got expressed in the verse you just finished reading.
People have spent years poring over these exchanges to glean theological and philosophical insights from them, and I do not feel qualified to wade into those particular waters and start opining after one full perusal of my own -- but there are several non-theological and non-philosophical things in the exchanges that made the budding apologist in me lean forward and take note, and I most definitely am going to comment about those.
* * * * *
I already knew that Genesis is not the only book in the Bible to speak of creation, and that Job is one of the others that weighs in on the topic. In reading Job on my own and without a study guide, the first time my brain registered a mention of creation was when I came to Chapter Nine, Verse Nine and saw the words "he is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south."
Though just one sentence in an enormous book, it stood out because it identifies God with specifics of the vast universe, not "just" the world. And what does it mean when it mentions "constellations of the south" without identifying them by name? Does it mean the author knew there were constellations he could not see because they are visible only in the Southern Hemisphere?
In hindsight, the verse right before that (9:8) also touches on the topic of God and the universe by remarking that "he alone stretches out the heavens." Is that just a turn of phrase? Perhaps, but it's also an apt way of saying the universe is not static, but expanding -- a fact that was not considered in any other ancient writing and was not identified by science until the twentieth century.
I especially took note when Chapter 26, Verse Seven said "he suspends the earth over nothing." Think about that for a moment. It is a perfect description of our planet floating in the emptiness of space, written at a time when such a concept was foreign to the mind of man. Back then, everyone believed either that Earth was the firm floor of everything and the sky was the ceiling (for lack of a better analogy) or that Earth sat on top of something else that was firm but unseen. Yet the author of Job spot-on declared the truth that our planet is "suspend(ed)...over nothing."
The very next verse, 26:8, neatly sums up the cycle of evaporation and condensation by saying that God "wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight." Remember that this might have been written 3,000+ years ago, and might even have been transcribing what was passed down by Hebrew orators for centuries before that; but in any event, even the most recent estimated date for its authorship (circa 590 B.C.) would mean it was composed 250 years before Aristotle "first" theorized that clouds are water vapor, in his essay Meteorologica (circa 340 B.C.).
Then comes 26:10, which states: "He marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness." This seems to indicate knowledge that there is another side of Earth that is dark during one's own daylight hours; and I have to mention that in the original ancient Hebrew, the word khug appears in this verse and khug's definition happens to be "circle." It seems to me that Job's author was aware that Earth is not flat, which would have made him unique at that point in history (although in fairness, ancient Hebrew did not have a specific word for "sphere," as opposed to a flat circle like a coin, so there is room for debate).
Moving forward, 28:5 says Earth "is transformed below as by fire." Does this imply knowledge of subterranean volcanism?
And six chapters after that, we get an even better description of the evaporation and condensation cycle than the one I quoted above, for 36:27 states: "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams." And again, this was a minimum of 250 years before Meteorologica, and very possibly 700 or more years before it.
* * * * *
The exchanges between Job and his friends and Elihu conclude with Chapter 37, then God arrives on the scene and begins speaking to Job out of a whirlwind. Among the many things he says, there are more a few references to creation.
While reading, I jotted down that 38:18 implies that the world is bigger than humans realized, for God says to Job: "Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this."
Then I jotted down that constellations are mentioned again in 38:31, when God alludes to his own acts and power by rhetorically asking: "Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion's belt?"
A few nights later I had insomnia, and was scrolling through some YouTube videos, and clicked on an address given by J. Warner Wallace. Its title gave no indication that the Book of Job would get mentioned, but not only did Wallance mention it, he brought up the exact passage I just quoted and he offered some intriguing insights.
The Pleiades (which happen to be the logo of Subaru, and are sometimes misidentified as the Little Dipper) are comprised of what are known as open star clusters. This means that the individual stars you see in the Pleiades are not actually individual stars, but are instead groups of stars positioned in such a way, all those many light years in the distance, that they appear as a single star to the naked eye. Because the stars in each cluster are bound by mutual gravitational attraction and are of the same approximate chemical composition, they move perpetually in unison, in the same direction and at the same rate, neither drifting apart nor otherwise changing their alignment to each another as is the case with most heavenly bodies. Thus, modern science tells us we can rest assured that those clusters will continue to appear as single stars and that the Pleiades will continue to look precisely the same in the night sky, from now until the end of time. In other words, the Pleiades are chained and bound together, just like the Book of Job said thousands of years ago.
On the one hand, it might be easy to dismiss the phrase "bind the chains of the Pleiades" as a fortunate accident made by an author who didn't mean much, but it's harder to dismiss when you consider that it is immediately followed by that phrase about "loosen(ing) Orion's belt." As it turns out, the three points of light which currently form the line of Orion's belt are not moving in unison and will ultimately change position, with the left-hand star (Alnita) drifting off to the east while the middle and right-hand ones (Mintaka and Alnilam) draw together and appear as one. In other words, modern science tells us that Orion's belt will ultimately loosen, just like the Book of Job said thousands of years ago.
* * * * *
There is something about passages like those I just mentioned that always fascinates me and piques my interest: Words from antiquity that touch on aspects of science and get it right, despite there being seemingly no way for a person in that era to have known what he was writing about.
If the author of Job got those things right by sheer luck, he sure did manage to get awfully lucky an awful lot of times.
There is plenty more to say about the Book of Job, but I will save those for another post.
