Job 12:9

Who among all these does not know,

   That the hand of Yahweh has done this?

 

The best part of this job is that it is not a job. I do it because I want to, and it differs from my hobby in that it has an order that I follow lest my brain explode. Not really, I did some verses from chapter 23 a while back. My other main hobby if I have more than it is often confining in that I pass up on cards that are cheap because I don’t want them, or I already have one (that I most likely paid too much for).

I worked on this verse over two years ago and I see a multitude of word sequences that impact the meaning of ‘these’ and my first thought is “Did I get that wrong?” As it turns out, my favorite source has ‘this’ instead of ‘these’ and I am now sure that I did. My favorite source uses ‘this’ to refer to the fish, the earth, the birds, and the beasts and the others all use these to refer to the people standing around listening. No memory of where I got that, but it is in my writing, so it must be true? Note that ‘know’ was also ‘are aware’ but knowing seemed more appropriate to me.

So now is where it gets funny. Every other source except my favorite uses ‘done this’ in the second verse and is referring to Job’s affliction. My favorite source? It uses ‘made this’ referring to all of creation that the others are trying to point to as the source for wisdom. After all the reading later about wisdom, I feel that I did indeed miss the point of this verse.

I also have that this is a reference to Isaiah 41:20 which reads:

so that people may see and know,
    may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
    that the Holy One of Israel has created it.

As it turns out, my brain tells me the author wanted it to have both meanings. It is after all the word of God. In the pea brain that it is, I think ‘these’ can be used to refer to the people as well as the alternate sources of wisdom and ‘this’ can refer to the affliction of Job or the whole of creation. Maybe I am not so dumb after all.

One of the questions I have for myself is “What opportunities before me are from God and which are just noise?” I have some baseball cards on my desk I have decided I do not want, and I can try to trade them, try to sell them, give them aware, throw them aware, or leave them in a box until some unknown point in time when the question is simpler. Throwing them away is not an option, but the time to sell them for their worth is best spent working right now (unless they are worth much more than I think). Maybe the positive from the effort so far was to limit what I will buy or trade for going forward. I feel my days are filled with many more opportunities to look for God that I recognize and that my real goal should be to see how to focus the questioning off me and onto others. So my new thought is that I need to know that God is working through everything and that I only need to look to Him to find the wisdom to apply to my daily life.

Job 262, written 9/28/23