Job 16:5

Encourage you with my mouth,

   Sympathy holding back my lips.

 

So, it’s been a while since I have taken the time to do a piece. I was getting close to completing my Amalgamation of Job and just put this on the back burner. I don’t remember who all I told, but over the last five years of doing this, I was always afraid I would die before I completed it. So, a huge sense of relief has come more than a sense of accomplishment. The goal was to study Job and now it begins in earnest. My new goal is to study Job to see how it might reveal Christ.

‘Encourage’ was also ‘strengthen’, ‘bolster’, and ‘wish for’. ‘Mouth’ was also ‘speech’.

‘Sympathy’ was also ‘solace’, ‘comfort’, or ‘assuage or relieve your grief’. ‘Hold back my lips’ was ‘hold back pain’, ‘spare mumbling motion’, and other such phrases.

The biggest thing missing from most sources was the sense of stitch a or stich b being the action. I left it out also, but only because I understood it from the final sequence. Many sources wrangled in that he was encouraging with his mouth to take away the pain, but he was really torn between helping or just keeping quiet.

After I completed my amalgamation, I ordered a book by my favorite author who describes his method for his translation and notes that I used in the process. The book confirms the understanding I had that he went deeper than the others in understanding the context around the book before doing his translation. He mentions in one of these essays that it was not the author’s intent to make this all easy, but to challenge the reader to think when reading the book and figure out what was missing. My goal was to make the Amalgamation something I could use to study the book, so beyond keeping the intent, I have made little effort to keep the poetry. If someone wants to maintain the poetry, they need to learn the Hebrew of the author.

My new tentative goal is to complete a piece on each verse. Not sure when I started them, but since I only got to chapter 16 by the time I finished the amalgamation, it might be a long-term goal. But maybe it will just be a characteristic of the journey and not a goal to be achieved. One thing I have determined over this break is that I do not really need to weigh in on current events as I have in the past. My goal will be to focus on what the verse says and how it can help me or the reader know God better.

My biggest takeaway from the Amalgamation effort was how poor most translations are. One must be very careful to stand on the words in a particular translation, as God is pretty big and can use any portion of His word to communicate all kinds of things if one is listening with the Holy Spirit. From reading this other book, I solidified my thinking that Job was a great piece of literature. I personally firmly believe it is the living word of God, but seeing how many ‘higher’ level means and methods the author uses to deliver his message, I know that it has value even to those who refuse to believe.

 

Written 6/18/25, Posted 7/21/25, Job 379