Job 6:7
My soul refuses to touch them,
They are as the sickness of my flesh.
When I read Job 16:13 this morning I had two realizations: 1) This would all be easier if I were to indicate the differences. 2) I have different colored pens and highlighters that I could use for this. In my work, I have often used colors. Part of this goes back to drafting markups that were red for new, green for delete, and yellow for ok as is. Part of this is that I just think better in color. Why I have never applied this to Job is beyond me, but tomorrow I have a better plan.
As with Job 16:13, the word selections in this verse can have duplicate meanings in a spiritual sense or a physical sense. The choices I made were in an attempt to retain the dual meaning while highlighting the spiritual. “My soul” was chosen over “my appetite”, “I”, and “my throat”. Soul came from the King James version and I feel the Hebrew word carried a sense of the part of “I” that is closer to “soul” than “appetite”. Beyond the ordinary “them” or “it”, the object was suggested as “food”. I agree we are talking about food from the previous verses, but leaving this generic allows for the spiritual aspect not as evident in the word ”food”.
The second stitch had a number of sources again using “food” or “meat” explicitly, but I chose consistency without either. “Are as” was used instead of “like”, “such”, and “resemble”. “The sickness of my flesh” component was much less straight forward and seems fairly colorful language.
Of the competing concepts, the first I read was “is loathsome to me”. Simple, I do not like tasteless food. The next source used “makes me ill”. Different, but still about the personal response. A following source had “when I am sick” to indicate how one loses a sense for taste when sick. Still about the personal response. The last three sources all had something totally different with “nauseous as my flesh”, “the sickness of my flesh”, and “as if it were diseased”. This made it more real to me as Job is sitting in dung and has nasty open sores all over him. Who could possibly want to eat something like that? It makes me want to puke just thinking about it. I chose to follow the reference to himself and chose sickness over diseased (as it does not seem like it was contagious).
So, saying tasteless food is as bad as his flesh is pretty bad. It reminds me of Jesus talking about spitting out lukewarm water. Our lives are not to be bland and neutral. We are to be on fire for God based on the love He showed us and the power He gives us to live for Him.
Once again, I get a sense that Job is introducing topics that he will pull together and dig deeper into as this discourse goes on. I just hope I am open to understanding when that point comes. Maybe my colors will help me.