As I march through the Amalgamation of Job at roughly a verse a day, I plan to go back and “study” the output to see what I have learned and share it. Since the publishing of this piece coincides with the beginnning of a new calander year, I figure “starting” with 1:1 had a certain appeal to it. This is the 12th piece on Job and the sixth “study” so far. I worked on Job 5:22 this morning and feel pretty good about my progress since I started on January 16, but took six months to really get going.
As noted before, I am fascinated by the beauty within Job and the “meat” to be had from studying it. I’ve published my amalgamation of each of the first four chapters and hope to complet eh next chapter pretty soon. This year looks like a great opportunity to enjoy the journey of being a Christian. Feel free to subscribe to the blog to get it in your email inbox and to post comments.
The amalgamation of Chapter 1 Verse 1 of Job includes the terms Uz, blameless and upright, revered God, and turned away from evil.
Uz is the name of the “lost to eternity” land that Job lived in and ruled over. It must have been a large land as Job was so wealthy, but the point of Job’s life and its inclusion in the Bible is not for us to worship a flawed man who God used to teach about Himself. If Job and Uz could be identified, then people would seek him out, seek that place out, and the truth of his sinful life could spoil the story. As only Christ was sinless, we know that Job was only blameless and upright because God wanted to use these characteristics.
Blameless and upright came out of a list of possibilities that include innocent, perfect, honest, and of absolute integrity. As indicated above, perfect and innocent are not appropriate as Job lived under original sin and was not perfect and he lived beyond the age of innocence and sinned.
As an engineer, my brain likes to sort things into known, assumed, and possible. Known is like a definition, steel is one thing, cement is another, and concrete is a mixture of a whole lot of stuff of varying degrees. Assumed is making a variable a fixed value for the sake of getting something done. The temperature is 56 right now, but it could be 120 tomorrow, or 20. To calculate the length of a steel bar, I have to assume a temperature as the length changes based on temperature. Possible is something I can dream up, but follows all the limits of known variables. A hurricane can happen tomorrow, and the tide can be high from both the sun and the moon, but the wave can only be so high before physics breaks it up. I can dream a 200’ wave, but physics will not allow it, and therefore it is not possible.
A man being honest is a concept, but sin makes it impossible. Absolute integrity falls by the wayside as well. Therefore, we are left with blameless and upright that are possible (by definition).
Revered God is a nod to my dislike of the phrase “Fear of God” having a positive connotation. Everyone fears the context that the term hell conveys, but this is not the fear that is meant in the Hebrew word traditionally translated as fear. We have the correct term of revere and it should be used in this context. Of course, maybe revere is a word developed after 1611 and not available to the authorized translators, but it most certainly is available to me now.
Turned away from evil could have been avoiding, shunning, keeping apart from, or eschewing. The best term is probably eschewing, but since I am not confident in its meaning, I skipped it without looking it up. The others seemed too reliant on chance or too uncertain in meaning. Maybe my English is not what it could be, but it is what it is.
Something totally me is that I skipped 1:2 and went right to 1:3 when working verse by verse. Not really confidence inspiring I know. I touched on verse 2 in study 8, so I skip it here as well.
Verse 3 Chapter 1 contains a list of very round numbers of things and a claim of being very wealthy. I read discussions on how seven was “completeness,” and therefore seven thousand was more like “more than enough” than a real number. The three added to the seven became ten which was somehow even more complete, so maybe three thousand was more like “more than enough camels to carry all his possessions”. I was initially thrown by the oxen as I did not realize they plowed so much, but I am not an agrarian history buff. I also do not get how the oxen as working animals relate to cattle for making hamburgers from or pigs to make bacon from, or cows to make cheese from, but maybe I am confused on the importance of bacon cheeseburgers. I understand the wealth aspect, and the East, but no big concepts to dig into today.
I did have flashbacks to the summer of 1990 and studying the basics of logic and how “if a, then b” relates to “if not b, then not a”. Seems like I should find a way to make money from that.
The last topic of the day is slaves. The sources I used had household, slaves, and servants here in verse three, and young men, boys, and lads in later verses. Assuming I did not cover this earlier, I got the impression newer versions were not using the term slaves to present Job as sinless thinking that owning slaves was a sin. Alternately, they just wanted to give dignity to the individuals. In my opinion, the term was meant to be slaves and indicated the characteristic that they were indeed Job’s property and were all taken from him as part of the process being described. All the people in the region would have been dependent upon Job’s wealth and protection, and yet only this particular group was taken. Anyway, slavery is not thought to be a viable part of a civilized society, yet it is a part of the reality of history and needs to be discussed when appropriate or at least not ignored. It also lends more drama to the story.
Probably nothing of great significance, but digging into these terms helped make the story real to me. Later in the process I feel like I will try to locate Uz on a map, but now that seems like a reach. This is why I liked the prospect of studying Job. Even the first verse had rabbit trails to follow. The goal of learning more about God is definitely something this book can help with.