The Poetry. I have been looking forward to going back through my study of Job 3 for a while now. I started Job 3:1 back on August 31 and it is now January 17. If anything, as I get older, my tasks seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Big D told me that she agrees I should write a book. Maybe this will be it, but I still think the Italian detectives may hold promise. With all the places making movies these days, maybe I can come up with a story worth watching.

Of course, the chapter starts with prose:

“Afterward, Job began to speak, and curse the day of his birth, Job raised his voice and said:”

 I thought it was ironic that after all that befell him, he chose to curse the day of his birth and not God. Just as Job had no control over what Satan did to him, Job had no control over the day of his birth. We come into this world totally dependent on others. We forget this as soon as we are able and struggle our whole lives to gain control.

One of the studies I am using denotes that Job’s first speech has nothing in it to acknowledge his friends who came to see him. They have come all this way and sat for seven days waiting to be acknowledged, and then he says not one word to address them. Seems pretty rude. Or weird. But as we see later, Job is not yet in conflict with his neighbor. He is mad at God. Job knows that that is not right to be mad at God and he is desperately trying to understand (or gain control) over his own situation. He has been sacrificing to God, maybe everyday, to avoid anything bad happening to him, and it has gone wonderfully for his whole life. Until now when it all goes horribly wrong.

This same study guide refers back to a theory covering the evolution of human reasoning and logic. It points out how the poetry of Job transcends the three phases he references. I love the opportunity to address logic and human reasoning, but my one intro to logic class probably does not give me the background to follow his quick summary based on the work of some genius PhD.

The first of these theories was Associative: rooted in emotion and expressed in music, art, religion, and literature. The second was Empirical: based on experience and observation and expressed in science and magic. The last was Logic: rooted in facts and philosophy. The trick for me is that all three are always working and sound more like a child growing up than a species evolving.

The point from the author of the guide is that our thoughts are first impacted by the culture we grow up in and then by the civilization that developed from that culture stabilizing. “Logic” is not strictly “truths” as it is based on “imaginative constructs”, and “following philosophy” is not the same thing as “logically demonstrable”. Job is sometimes boxed in as a work of logic, but in reality, it is a mishmash of culture (poetry/music/religion) and free association and intuition (philosophy).

To me, trying to define Job as an exacting representation of logic in a strict poetic form is like putting God in a box. God is bigger and greater and grander than all we can imagine. Job is the Word of God and no less complex than He intended. I have marveled again and again as I study Job and read other pieces of various translations of the Bible at how limiting the words on a page can be when contemplating the meaning of life. From a discussion of what does turn the other cheek mean to what inheritance do we leave our kids, it is all fraught with individual perspectives as we seek to control our lives in this world created by God to glorify Him.

Maybe poetry next time.