What I just now found odd about this whole path is that, generally speaking, I do not appreciate poetry. It was always something made up by a weirdo about girly stuff and I wanted nothing to do with hearing it, reading it, writing it, or, heaven forbid, memorizing it. I know there is a musical element to some poetry, but since I am musically challenged, that never helped me. I do actually like reading Dr Suess to the kids, but I never imagined that to be poetry until just now. Maybe I am just an uneducated idiot?
Blot out the day of my birth
This is a pretty strong sentiment to start out the ‘beauty” of the book, but it carries at least three things to talk about. In my mind, blot has always been associated with what God did to sin by erasing it from our history when we stand before Him in Judgement cleansed by the blood of His Son and clothed in His righteousness. Annul was a pretty close second choice for blot, but I always associate that with divorce, and I prefer skipping that when possible.
The day of my birth made me think back to the discussion of whether Job’s sons held feasts on their birthdays or not. Job is obviously talking about his birthday as a single day when he was born and not the anniversary each year when it comes back around. I may never get comfortable with what the poet intended, but I do lean closer to that concept after reading this verse.
The last piece is obviously the fact that Job is in such bad shape, he is wishing he was never born. That all the joy he had before was not worth the pain he is experiencing. My brain just floating the phrase “on a cosmic scale” and I am reminded of the book “Contact” by Carl Sagan. I enjoyed reading that book, but no memory of how it played out. He seemed to me the face of science at the time after his TV show and book “Cosmos”, but I never read or even watched anything he did. I see that he published at least one piece on the search for God. Maybe I should read that some day.
God is the part of Job’s life that makes this string of “end my misery” requests feel odd. My life is not my own and I see it as an opportunity to do something positive for others on Christ’s behalf. Job’s life as revering God should have been focused on building up his kids and those around him to have better relationships to God. I have no desire to out live my kids, but I know that my life has more meaning to it than them or my stuff as I have (at times better than others) tried to pour into the lives of others and that impact out weights any pain or suffering that has been in my past or could be in my future.
One of the many thoughts I gained comfort with so far studying Job is that the book has a partial purpose of encouraging us to have conversations with God. To ask the hard questions and seek answers to those things we do not currently understand. Job asked the hard questions. He wanted to get answers. And as we find out later, he got some. Maybe not exactly the ones he wanted, but the ones God was willing to share.
And the night that announced: “A man is conceived.”
This goes one step further and carries a few topics of its own to address. First of course is the addition of the night to the day that is being requested to be blotted out. But not really. The night that is being requested to be blotted out is the night he was conceived as opposed to the night of his birth. It is the ultimate wiping away if you were not even conceived. But I do like the day/night balance/completeness.
The personalization of the night as something that could attest to when the child was conceived. No one else can know or be a witness of something like that. Maybe by deduction or something, but the natural part cannot be seen. I thought this was an interesting twist. Not sure what to think about it though.
The part I agonized the most over this verse was “man”. The sources had boy, male, male child. I thought about “human male”, but that seemed over the top. I considered trying child, but in the end, man was both accurate and generic enough.
In the end, Job is acknowledging that only God could grant his request. No one else can know when he was conceived much less blot out a day or a night. Even in his misery, he revers God.
I still really like looking at this verse. I started comparing the versions by what was different with this verse. Now that I write out each of the eight verses each day, I wish I had started that way. Looking back at the different versions after the amalgamation helps me appreciate the wide variety of thoughts that went into the original translations. I can see day by day that while each verse has its own sense of harmony, the context has a role to play in picking words for each verse and I am sure that once I have made it all the way through 42 chapters, my next step will be to go back through each verse and revisit my word choices to see what I change knowing the details of what comes later.
Considering where I started, I was only three verses in after this verse, with 1067 to go. I am about half way through chapter 6 now and while this is only part of my daily routine, I do really enjoy it.