The Book of Job Commentary - Research Paper Example

The Book of Job Commentary In the book of Job, the story is told of a man who must endure terrible hardships and illness all as a means of proving to Satan that he is a good man worthy of God’s belief in him. The story appears to be historical because it is structured in the same way other historical elements of the Bible are structured and it provides contextual clues that hint at the time period in which the story took place (Copeland, 2009). Chapter 22 mentions a great flood, placing the story after the time of Noah and allusions are made that a mediator between God and man would be coming, placing it before Jesus. “Job functions as a priest in offering sacrifices for his family (1:5), similar to what we find with Abraham. His longevity is typical of the patriarchs” (Copeland, 2009), all of which suggest the time of the story to be somewhere around 2000 BC. The purpose of the story is most commonly interpreted as a means of answering the question why does God allow righteous people to suffer. This is because the story of Job is one in which the protagonist of the story is seen to be a righteous man but, because of a taunt from Satan, he is permitted to be put through a number of terrible trials to prove his holiness and adherence to God’s will. However, as Copeland (2009) points out, this question is never actually answered. Instead, Copeland suggests the purpose of the book is to answer how the righteous should suffer. With the book viewed from this perspective, the verses contained in Job 14: 1-6 become particularly significant as a clue to Job’s enduring faith even during adversity. The six short verses contained in the selection are part of a much longer appeal made by Job to God. At this point in the story, he has already turned away from his friends as a source of comfort. In previous chapters, Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar have arrived to comfort Job in his numerous losses. As they discuss the disasters that have fallen on Job and his household lately, they continue to suggest that Job is suffering because of his sins, which must be much greater than theirs because his suffering is so much greater. As they point out the hardships and losses he’s experienced, these friends argue that all of Job’s wealth is gone, his children destroyed and his body afflicted because he refuses to confess his great sin. As Job challenges them to find where his sins have been so much greater than their own, they reveal that they are unable to see why he should have greater suffering. Although the passage in the present discussion occurs at the end of the first of three such debates, the discussion held between the living men reveal a strong belief that the only way to relieve the sufferings of man is to fully confess one’s sins so that God might take it in his heart to forgive (McKenzie, 1965). In other words, Job’s sufferings were caused by his sins, so they can only be relieved once he confesses these sins. This passage sets up the structure of the book as it shifts the attention from the considerations and ideas of men to the possible, and fallible, human understanding of God. As the action shifts from the human men to Job’s one-sided conversation with God, the ideas contained in this passage are echoed by Elihu later in the book when he points out that moral authority belongs to God alone and even later by the appearance of God himself in his restoration of his faithful servant. By the end of Chapter 13, Job is turning away from his friends and beginning to focus attention on those things that are truly important to the soul. Verses 1-6 introduce the 14th chapter in which Job makes this transition by renouncing the values and beliefs of his friends. He does this by saying “Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure” (Job 14: 1-2). From this point forward, Job reflects on the short life span and impure nature of mankind, frequently fluctuating between lamenting man’s frailties and begging repentance and an end of suffering. Although Elihu later comes closest to understanding things from God’s perspective, as is evidenced later in God’s affirmation of his approach, Job captures the heart of the debate in these verses. It is, contextually, his response to his three friends. The contextual element of this speech is that Job is recognizing the weakness of man and pleading God for mercy, but he is, at the same time, focusing attention on the reality that God’s concerns are not man’s concerns and it is only in God’s time and in God’s way that these sufferings will be relieved. Although he pleads for mercy, he does not exactly plead for death nor does he indicate that he finds tremendous fault with God’s punishing of him. He is not aware, as the audience is, that it is truly Satan inflicting the punishment or that this is done to prove the strength of the man’s faith in his beliefs. The chapter reflects Job’s despair at his losses not because of the material things that his friends lament for him, but because of the pain that has been inflicted on his soul. Yet he remains adamant in his belief that his God is a good and just God and must have his reasons for allowing Job to suffer in this way. In doing so, he demonstrates for others who might experience imperfect understanding of events in their lives of how they, too, might cling to their faith as their only comfort. Having determined the contextual base of the passage under discussion, it is necessary to examine whether this particular passage is justified in being treated as an individual unit in and of itself. When seeking any type of Bible commentary on the book of Job, it is common to see these first six verses discussed as a unit, offering the first justification for its treatment as an individual unit. This is the case with John Gill (1748-1763; reprint 2010) and Matthew Henry (1708-1710; reprint 2010) among others. Matthew Henry illustrates how these six verses capture the essential meaning of the text as a whole by carefully outlining the messages involved. These include injunctions to the audience to think about “the original of human life (God) … the nature of human life (transient) … the shortness and uncertainty of human life … the calamitous state of human life … the sinfulness of human life … [and] the settled period of human life” (Henry, 2010). In bringing each of these considerations to light, these first six verses serve as a type of introduction into the rest of the chapter, offering both instruction and summary of what’s to come. Considering these issues, it is necessary, Henry argues, for the individual to place his faith in the greater power that has infinitely greater understanding and infinitely greater longevity, all of which are emphasized in this passage. As he laments his position, Job is illustrating the reasons why it is essential to have faith in God rather than the interpretations of man – any man – as all men share these limitations. The passage is neatly divided from the rest of the chapter as well by a tighter focus starting with the seventh verse on the limited experience of man as compared to that of a tree. While the first six verses focus on the man, the next verse shifts attention to those elements of the world that do not have such a limited period of existence on the planet. However, there are several who would insist that the chapter should be taken as a whole in order to convey full meaning. A.R. Faussett (2004), for example, wrote in 1871 about the most important element in this chapter not arriving until the 14th verse: “If a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my struggle I will wait Until my change comes” (Job 14: 14). This single verse again focuses the attention on the extremely human perspective in which Job realizes he is trapped at the same time that it acknowledges his lack of understanding and trust in God as a higher power who knows the answers to his questions. It pulls out the hope and faith of Job that many find lacking in the gloomy earlier verses and the pessimistic later ones. This singling out of verse 14 has been a popular approach to this chapter even into the present day. Pastor Alan Gardner used it in a sermon in 2006 to illustrate the promises of God from the Old Testament to the New without mentioning much more of Job than this single verse. A listing of the 100 most important verses in the Bible includes several quotes from the book of Job including the first two verses of chapter 14, but the end of verse two is where the unit is divided (Ziegler, 2010). While John T. Willis (2009) agrees that the individual unit should be considered to end at Job 14: 6, he disagrees as to the appropriate start. In his analysis of the book, Willis suggests that the passage under present discussion, Job 14: 1-6, is the ending of the first segment of Job’s speech, begun in 13: 20. In this portion of his speech, Willis illustrates how Job is working to challenge God to answer for himself as if in a court of law. In breaking down this portion of Job’s argument, though, Willis perhaps unintentionally supports the treatment of 14: 1-6 as a unit. Regarding this, he says, “Job agrees with his friends … that all human beings are ‘unclean’ before God. But Job’s losses and suffering are far [more] severe than Job’s sins. Life is too short for Job to have to suffer like this. The brevity of life is like ‘a flower that withers’ or a ‘fleeing shadow.’ So, if God is going to continue to make Job suffer like this, Job reverts to his plea … Let me die now” (Willis, 2009). Having sufficiently placed the contextual importance of the passage within the book and justified the textual choice for the passage, it is possible to undertake an analysis of what the passage actually says. For most of history, the passage has been understood as an expression of suffering and a wish, even a begging, for death. John Gill (2009) comments verse by verse on this chapter. He highlights Job’s emphasis on the impurity of man ‘born of woman’, man’s frailty and his suffering in verse one then he points out how each of the following verses work to build on these concepts, insinuating that God’s judgment is both heavy and unfair in holding Job to standards beyond his abilities. Matthew Henry’s (2010) assessment of this passage is similar to Gill’s in asserting that it is focused entirely on the punishment of Job and his call for justice. Both of these individuals interpreted the passage as being Job’s argument that God is judging him using an unfair scale. This is proved by his consistent emphasis on the impure nature of mankind and the impossibility of any ‘man born of woman’ to overcome this impurity through sheer force of will as reason why God should not judge too harshly and on Job’s emphasis on the brevity of human life as a reason why God should show mercy. Within the argument, both of these commentators indicate that Job is suggesting the reason his punishment is so severe is not because he has sinned so greatly, but because God’s eyes were so heavily laid upon him. Yet both of these writers were making their observations more than 100 years ago. Susan Schreiner has undertaken a modern study of the work and its understanding through history and expresses what she understood based on these traditional concepts: “When I first started the study, I really expected it to be strictly on questions of suffering – unjust suffering. That was how I was brought up to read Job. Except that in the tradition of commentaries on Job, the suffering isn’t really unjust – it can’t be, because God is inflicting the suffering” (cited in Makos, 1994). However, as she studied the book in greater detail, as well as the commentaries that have been made on it, she began shifting her perspective on the story, realizing that the information in the book is given from a variety of perspectives in terms of speakers. As she studied each of these speakers, she realized that none of them, except God, really understood the perspectives of the others. This gave her a new way of thinking about the story that opened up entirely new meanings. “I began to see how it is really a text about the relationship between wisdom and suffering. And then I began to see how, for early writers on Job, wisdom is a term that brings out the issue of perception – that which you perceive while suffering” (Schreiner cited in Makos, 1994). In other words, Schreiner began to realize that Job’s suffering was essential to give him the depth of understanding of being able to see things from another perspective that was necessary to his understanding of his own source of faith. Given these interpretations offered, it seems clear to me that the respected elders of yesteryear were missing levels of meaning within the text that are only in recent decades coming to greater light. The passage needs to be looked at with an understanding of the book as well as a passage in and of itself from multiple angles. In reading through the passage, I can understand why the focus would be on the argument presented by Job. He does go through the reasoning process detailed by Gill and Henry and seems to be sincerely wallowing in his own pity. However, in making his argument, it seems to me that he is actually working his way through a thought process that will lead to his own better understanding. He is arguing that he is imperfectly made at the same time that he realizes God already knows this. He argues that God is being too harsh on him, but he is also accepting that God has already numbered his days and has determined what is to come. If God has made this determination, Job is coming to realize that there may be a method behind his present suffering. Although he pleads for an end to his misery, he is not pleading for death but only for God to make his reasoning known so that Job might suffer a little less. Taking an observer’s perspective, rather than an analyst’s, enables one to see the learning process at work as Job works his way through his speech. This kind of understanding of Job in the process of learning throws a clearer light on the rest of the book as well. Perhaps it does offer an answer as to why God allows suffering after all. As Job interacts with his three friends, it becomes clear that they are focused on the rites of worship, the goods of success and the application of human law. None of these concerns are within the consideration of God – they are the concerns of men. As Job works through his speeches, he is starting to realize that these interpretations are the suppositions of man rather than the words of God. Of his friends, only Elihu seems to have grasped this alternative perspective and articulates it in the second portion of the book, reinforcing the idea that it is closer to the correct perspective. Finally, God reinforces the idea that the depth Job has gotten, and Elihu by association, has been the result of the suffering experienced. Without it, this deeper and more considered approach had not been possible. This is seen in the continued lack of understanding of Job’s other friends. Works Cited Copeland, Mark A. “The Book of Job.” Executable Outlines. (2009). April 21, 2010 Faussett, A.R. The Book of Job Commentary. Biblos. April 21, 2004 Gardner, Alan D. “Searching for Hope.” Christian Standard. (April 9, 2006). April 21, 2010 Gill, John. “Job.” John Gill’s Commentary on the Whole Bible. (2009). April 21, 2010 < http://www.freegrace.net/gill/> Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. Biblos. April 21, 2010 Makos, Jeff. “Job’s Story: Centuries of Analysis.” The University of Chicago Chronicle. Vol. 14, N. 3, (September 29, 1994). April 21, 2010 McKenzie, John L. Dictionary of the Bible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965. Willis, John T. “If Mortals Die, Will They Live Again? – Never – Job’s First Response to Zophar – Job 12-14.” (October 3, 2009). April 21, 2010 Ziegler, Oliver. “100 Important Bible Verses.” Nobochamp. April 21, 2010 Read More