job
- Victor Hugo said, “The book of Job is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the human mind.”
- Tennyson called it “The greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature.”
- Thomas Carlyle wrote, “I call this book… one of the grandest things ever written… There is nothing written, I think, of equal literary merit.”
dead sea scrolls, UZ edom southwest jordan southern israel? possible location.
agriculture economy
Consider this insightful statement from the Prophet Joseph Smith: “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” And this one from Brigham Young: “All facts are proved and made manifest by their opposite.”
did the duetoronomists write the frame and someone else write the poem?
job the patient (frame)
job the inpatient (poem)
Daniel H. Ludlow wrote: "Interpretations to the book of Job have been so varied and extreme that it has been claimed that Job has suffered more from the hands of the critics than he ever did from the hands of Satan.
relationship.
Job and his three friends start with shared assumptions and a common understanding of the nature of God, man, and the cosmos. They are in confessional unity. This quickly breaks down as Job, as a result of his suffering, begins to question previously shared assumptions. Most of the disputes in the book of Job are related to the idea of retribution. The friends (and Job initially) conceive of a rigid order in the cosmos, created and maintained by an all-powerful and perfectly just God, where the righteous prosper and the wicked are brought to ruin, after perhaps being given a time to repent. Therefore, they reason, if a person suffers, he or she must have sinned.' Having previously thought the same, Job comes to know by his bitter suffering that rigid retribution is false. He realizes that he is suffering innocently (suffering out of proportion to any sin), along with many others, whereas the wicked frequently thrive. Job holds ferociously to this truth, destroying the previous unity with his
friends. Job is forced to entertain probing questions about the nature of God, man, and the moral order, questions that lead to his transformation. He comes to understand that salvation cannot be adequately encompassed by categories of sin and retribution and that truth is more important than confessional unity based on false premises. Irony abounds in the book of Job. By irony, I mean a text that is intended to mean something different from what it seems to say. Thus, the important meaning is different from, even contrary to, the superficial or obvious meaning. For example, Job asks, "Who will say to [God], 'What doest thou?'" Job 9:12, Rsv). Here Job seems to say that no man would venture to question God's actions. Yet, questioning God is precisely what Job does. As another example, God asks Job, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Job 38:4, R5V). This appears to portray an overbearing God intimidating Job with His awesome majesty. Ironically, however, God may actually be inviting Job to a deeper understanding of and participation in creation. Superficially, this text seems to suggest that Job could not have been present at creation, whereas ironically he may well have been (Abraham 3:22-25). Irony functions to invite the reader into a creative and profound engagement with the text and to subvert conventional understanding. Central to my analysis of the book of Job is the concept of the existential question as described by Janzen. " Existential questions are not posed to be answered by facts or information. They are related to a process of growth and becoming, with the question posing
a goal to be lived toward. The answer to the question is the transformed self, it having been given the power to move toward the goal by the question itself. The disclosure of one's own existential questions to others admits them to the sphere of one's own being and becoming.
To share existential questions is to offer to share being. Janzen views covenant as a
relationship in which participants share existential questions toward a shared outcome. In this light, the creation of earth by God for man is a covenantal act wherein God shares existential questions with man: (1) Is it worthwhile to worship God for His own sake apart from material gain? (2) Can man, by coming to earth and worshipping God, enter into a process of becoming that allows him to participate in God's life and being?
The book of Job can be understood as Job's spiritual journey in response to questions posed by God. Existential questions arising within God in the Prologue are shared with Job, eventually stripping him of everything dear to him. Job internalizes these questions in his
darkened and bitter state during the Dialogues. He holds on, evolving toward a transformed understanding of God and man, and finally reaches God's presence and experiences redemption. We will now consider Job's journey in detail.
Many scholars don’t even believe that Job was a real person. But there is reason to believe that is not so as Job is referenced as real historic person in other books in the bible Ezekiel 14:14, 20; James 5:11.
The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers—a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward. Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct both lexically and imagistically from its biblical counterparts. Despite all these anomalous traits, it was quickly embraced by the framers of biblical tradition: extensive fragments of an Aramaic translation found in the caves at Qumran suggest that by the second century B.C.E. the Dead Sea sectarians (and no doubt others) already regarded Job as part of the incipient canon of sacred texts.
The Book of Job belongs to the international movement of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature in its universalist perspective—there are no Israelite characters in the text, though all the speakers are monotheists, and there is no reference to covenantal history or to the nation of Israel—and it is equally linked with Wisdom literature in its investigation of the problem of theodicy. The troubling phenomenon of the suffering of the just is addressed in roughly analogous texts both in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but any direct influence of these on the Job poet is questionable. Scholars have often assumed that there were Wisdom schools in ancient Israel and elsewhere in the region where disciples guided by teachers mastered, and in all likelihood memorized, instructional texts and imbibed the general principles for leading a just and prudent life. It is hard to imagine that the Job poet could have been part of any such institutional setting, given the radical nature of his views. One should probably think of him, then, as a writer working alone—a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.
The Job poet dared to critique, and dismantle, the most powerful religious orthodoxy of his culture by confronting it with a set of facts that it could not accommodate. But beyond refuting this one particular orthodoxy, the poet demonstrated for us in excruciating detail how rigid orthodoxies of any kind can cause us to renounce both overwhelming evidence and basic human decency before abandoning our most cherished beliefs. The most profound readings of Job, I believe, recognize that the great poem is not just about suffering, or retribution, or God, or Satan, or knowing that Redeemers live; it is about how rigid orthodoxies can destroy our relationships and, thereby, our humanity.7 Under the law, with its jealous and demanding God, all bonds of family and friendship must be sacrificed to ideology when a conflict between them occurs… This aspect of Deuteronomistic religion would eventually become the focus of the intense critique that we now call the Sermon on the Mount. There and elsewhere, Jesus argued that we cannot separate our relationship with other people from our relationship with God.
Human beings matter, even if they are women taken in adultery, or prodigal sons, or members of foreign tribes- all of whom, according to the Deuteronomist, had to be put to death. Jesus begged to differ (see Matt 25.40). This was perhaps the most important theme of Christ’s earthly ministry.8
https://www.ldsscriptureteachings.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Job-Outline-CFM.pdf
Job-Outline-CFM.pdf
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