Job 15:19
To whom individually, God gave the earth,
When there were no strangers to pass among them.
Unlike another place where my musing bled onto another page, I used the header on this page for this verse. My old training to leave the top and side of the page open still holds fast. My final note was two stars and “I like it”.
‘Individually’ was ‘alone’ seven times and ‘for themselves’ one time. I wrangled over this for awhile before selecting my own word. ‘Gave the earth’ was ‘the land was given’ six times, ‘the earth was given’ once, and ‘granted the land’ once. I inserted God all on my own.
‘No stranger’ was also ‘no alien’. ‘Passed among them’ was used six times with ‘passed in their midst’ and ‘wandered among’. When was only used once but carried an important idea that I incorporated.
The most basic rendering would have been ‘To whom alone the land was given, when no stranger passed among them’ which I assumed meant when all the people were Adam and Eve and their family. I do not disagree with this, so much as believe so much more is being said. I do see the underlying sentiment that the wisdom being referred to has come all the way down from the very first man and therefore must be true. As an engineer in the 21st century, I know that Adam could not have known all that we do today and that relying only on old wives tales is not enough to be attuned to the problems in the world faced by everyday people that Adam simply could not have grasped.
Another possibility I considered was ‘Those who took the land for themselves, when there were no strangers to pass in their midst’. I like this because I know people would move into ‘new’ lands whenever someone was not right there to prevent it. Even more so, because I know people would take land when whoever was there could not fend them off. And no, I am not talking about Russia or China today. But I feel this would be a non-spiritual rendering that ignores the impact of God on the subject of wisdom. I believe wisdom without God is no wisdom at all, but for the sake of argument, even without our God specifically, lots of people reference wisdom as a unchanging ideal bigger than humans.
In the final amalgamation, I believe I have captured key pieces by adding God explicitly as the giver and pointing to a time when at least everyone had an opportunity to know Him through the impact of Adam. With my people out of town, I am watching a lot of Star Trek, and in an episode yesterday, there was some faulty logic about forgetting a day’s events allowing us to focus on the big topics of love and family. I believe that the events of any given day are important. Some friends we met many years ago on a trip reached out to check on us after the tornadoes in the area. This time, none were near our house, but I felt loved by them reaching out.
I believe that the most important aspect of wisdom is using it to reach out to others to let them know that God loves them. Others think it is about how to get people to love you, how to get more money, and how to spend your money to get love or pleasure. God related to Adam in ways that no one else will ever duplicate. But God relates to each of us in a unique way for our own opportunities to relate back to Him. God’s love for us was so great that while we were still sinners, He sent His only Son to die for us. We each have to wrestle with what this means to us individually, and it does not matter how Adam or Cain responded to their own interactions with God, but how we respond to Him.
Written 12/30, Posted 2/10/25, Job 356