Job 5:13

Who entraps the crafty in their own cunning,

   The schemes of the perverse go awry quickly.

My immediate response to reading this verse again was how I just debated whether to use craft or cunning in the previous verse and now I used them both in this verse that immediately follows. Makes me wonder if the original Hebrew had the same word as well.  In this verse, “wise”, “clever”, and “shrewd” were the terms from my sources. These all had positive connotations, so I stuck with “crafty”, and I now doubt the same Hebrew term was used for this first word. My Christian sources used “craftiness” and my Jewish sources used “wiles” or “cunning” for the second term. This second term does not mean a person but a characteristic of a person, so again, I wonder if indeed the same Hebrew word was used. I do see why I picked crafty for the person and cunning for the characteristic to match the first verse. The “entraps” came from my Jewish sources where my Christian sources had “takes” or “catches” and I felt the entraps was much better alignment with crafty and cunning.

The second stitch had “counsel” and “plans” as alternatives, but I went with negative connotation of “schemes” which is apparent in American English, but not in “The Queen’s English”. “Wily” (x2), “cunning”, “froword”, “crafty”, “schemers”, “crooked”, and “perverse” were options for the noun. With so many options, I knew the each had to be picking at an unknown or maybe to replace a pronoun. I think I must have picked the most negative of these and moved on without a real feel for the nuances between the words. “Are brought to a quick end”, “are swept away”, “comes quickly upon them”, “is carried headlong”, “go awry”, “seem like rashness”, “proves hasty”, and “come to a speedy end” were the various outcomes. I carried the impact of timing and failing from the options and tried to pick a combination that captured both in as few words as possible. I am not sure I got the message exactly as intended, but it seemed each source made a singular choice, and they were split between the two options.

I have a television show that I have found and look forward to watching each year when a new season “drops”. The villain is my vision of the crafty in this verse. The last episode had two plans of his go amazingly wrong; it was if he only planned a single step. The episode had a comment from another character about how the second character left strategy to the generals. The villain is of course the general he was meaning and the irony of the general doing stupid stuff was amusing.

My basic view of a scheme is a get rich quick scheme and it is balanced by the idea of the millionaire next door who saves a little at a time over the long haul and ends up with more money than they can spend. People have a sense of get it all as fast as you can and yet, life is much better when blessings come along spread apart so they can be enjoyed individually. The twelve days of Christmas seems to have twelve days of getting one gift. Our cultural Christmas is a frenzy of opening every single present with barely time to register what each one was.

One of the outcomes of this verse could be to take your time planning and not be so focused on yourself that you do not see the consequences of your actions on those around you. Plan, but not only for your success, but the opportunity to glorify God in delivering it. What else is a plan of man, but an opportunity for God to do better.