Job 10:22
A land whose light is darkness,
Deep gloom and disorder,
Where it shines thickest murk.
I must admit the gladness I sense in using darkness and gloom in that last verse. I remember that because I am doing two in one day a number of hours apart. I wanted to finish so I could post Chapter 22 that I just finished. A little gladness goes a long way.
Interestingly, the first source throws all this into only two short stitches. It does not impact the meaning, but it sure pushes away from the poetic form the others present. This first stitch had “gloom and chaos” (that really went in the second stitch), “as dark as darkness itself”, “of darkness as darkness itself”, “whose light is darkness”, “obscure as any darkness”, and “gloom, thickest murk” (where it is repeated by the source in the third stitch). The context led me to the final answer.
“Deep gloom and disorder” was also “gloom and chaos”, “deep shadow and disorder”, “shadow of death without any order”, “gloom and disarray”, “death gloom, land of chaos”, and “death’s shadow and disorder”. I felt gloom was adequate and matched what I had before, and I like chaos better for physical descriptions of the universe rather than spiritual as used here.
The third stitch was impacted by the use of light in the first stitch. “Thickest murk” was also “darkness” and “black”. “Shines” really falls out of the use of light and thickest murk more than really stands out over “is like”, “is as”, and the off base ”You blaze forth in rays of”.
One of the big debates on Job is that the piece has missing parts and that people added stuff here or there afterwards. I still go back to the fact that maybe the entire text that we have is what we were meant to have. And maybe it was cut short as the student had to turn in his paper before he really had time to finish it. In this verse, I see the poet stringing out the description of the land of no return similar to how he went on and on about being removed from history in earlier parts of the text. The text clearly has huge topics and if not strange, then at least uncommon, takes on life from the different characters.
If one were to blindly pull some minute details from the words of Job’s friends and try to build a theology on them, that theology would not match the character of God. The author did not intend that and indeed uses different ideas within the texts to improve the understanding of those ideas he is supporting. When we study Hebrews, we know that the ideas are being presented as truth and we are bound to change our ideas to accommodate the differences. In Job, we have to weigh who is speaking, what they are saying, and then decide if the idea is truth or the falsehood of what everyone thinks should be the way truth, or the way of the world.
The cat seems upset that extra stuff was in its box after the new cleaning person did their thing. Maybe the smell of the box even changed when the new stuff was put there even after I moved it all out for him. We, like the cat, get comfortable with the way things are and tend to want them to remain. It stifles improvement and what is a human, except something (someone) that needs to get better. I am not sure how important this extra verse describing the particulars of where we go after death is, but I know at least that I sure do not want to get stuck there forever. Thanks God for Jesus and salvation.
(Written 1/18, Posted 1/27, Job 230)