Job 13:17

Listen carefully to my words,

   Let my declaration be in your ears.

 

I just worked on Job 34:2 this morning and it basically says this same thing. Just in response to this I imagine. My mother would have turned 82 today, so I can back calculate that it’s been over five years since she passed. My niece is moving into my mom’s old room here (for visits) and it was kind of cool to find it lands about on my mom’s birthday.

‘Carefully’ was also ‘diligently’, ‘closely’, ‘attentively’, and in what I imagine is the right translation a repeat of the action akin to ‘Listen, Listen’ that was used in the language to represent ’I really mean it’. ‘Listen’ was actually also ‘hear’ a couple times. The two are similar, but not the same. ‘Words’ was also ‘speech’.

‘In your ears’ was also phrases like ‘let your ears take in’, ‘with your ears’, and ‘give ear’.  ‘Declaration’ was also ‘discourse’ and ‘utterance’ or ‘what I say’.

As I probably indicated before, I have a tendency to be very selective with my word use and order to get my meaning out there. I am also not great about making sure the listener will understand it. So, I have this want for people to actually hear what I say so that I do not have to repeat it. This characteristic is very frustrating for me in a loud space with a bunch of people, so I rarely speak in those conditions. I wondered if my reading of verses like this impacted this aspect of me.

One of my sister’s goals for me this summer is to teach my niece how not to be like my sister. As mother and daughter, they share a lot of characteristics, some of them learned and some of them by nature. I personally know I have none of my sister’s faults and she has none of mine. (That was some use of English with a name that I do not know to say the exact opposite without being a liar.) I know I have characteristics of my mother and I tend to be dramatic in making sure I do not repeat some of her mistakes. I have enough faults and make enough mistakes on my own to not learn from others when I can.

Like Elihu in 34, Job here in 13 is taking the stance that they know something and want to pass it on. As I continue to study, it seems odd that many point at Elihu as speaking out of turn and do not give great credence to what he says. I have seen that a lot of his speech is filled with aspects of our relationship with God that is fulfilled with Christ and the Holy Spirit. Job is not seen as this big prophetic book, but I think God used it to pave the way for ideas that the books of the Law did not. God’s love for us is beyond understanding that I think He used every bit of the Bible to teach us as many things about Him as He could squeeze in and used both Elihu and Job to do so.

So it looks like this is my 300th piece on Job since I started late 2020 (44 months) and my 551st piece overall since I moved to this website over four years ago (51 months). At this rate, it’ll be along time before I finish.

Written 5/9/24, Posted 8/7/24, Job 300