00:00:01:10 – 00:00:21:04
Clint Loveall
Hey everybody. Happy Tuesday. Thanks for joining us. As we, not really get into the book of job, but prepare to get into the book of job. We spend most of this week kind of doing some background work and some conversation about the book, so that hopefully next week we’re kind of ready to jump into the first section.

00:00:21:09 – 00:01:01:41
Clint Loveall
Yesterday we gave a little bit of background on some of the themes of job and what makes job interesting. Today, I think, a focus on the difficulty of job and interestingly, for several reasons, job has a deserved reputation of being a hard book. It is structurally difficult. It’s hard to categorize this book. It’s hard to say that it’s history or that it’s philosophy or that it’s verse or narrative.

00:01:01:46 – 00:01:45:54
Clint Loveall
It is kind of all of those things. It’s hard to date this book date ranges. Dates range from pretty early to most scholars thinking probably relatively late, like post exile, fourth or fifth century BC. There are some people that say maybe it’s both parts of job appeared, perhaps to be older than other parts. So at a scholarly level, Michael, there are things about job that are very challenging in terms of understanding the book as a whole.

00:01:45:59 – 00:02:20:48
Clint Loveall
Translating the book to language is difficult. Categorizing the book, some of those things don’t necessarily affect us as a reader, at least not in ways that would be obvious to us. But they don’t teach job in beginning Hebrew classes. This is not a book that comes first. This is very much Old Testament. 501 and the people that are going to go on and dig into the language and structure and syntax of job, those are pretty serious people about biblical scholarship.

00:02:20:52 – 00:02:47:42
Michael Gewecke
So we got to be careful not to go so far into the weeds that we lose you or lose interest in this. But I do think that this does show up in our attempting to settle into this book and understand what it’s going to do, because generally, like when we were reading just recently, when we were going through Philippians, the the letters that Paul’s writing, the churches, yes, there’s differences and those become interesting.

00:02:47:49 – 00:03:13:04
Michael Gewecke
But you know what it is. You have the genre. It’s a letter. It’s, theological pastor, a mentor. He’s writing to a congregation, encouraging, sometimes challenging, teaching all of these things. Right. So we the genre helps us orient to some of the things that we would expect to see. I’m looking for a introduction and address. I’m looking for what the problems might be that were being addressed in the letter.

00:03:13:04 – 00:03:35:58
Michael Gewecke
I’m looking for how the ending is. We get that right. So let’s say for a minute, Clint, well, we’re going to land on what’s the genre of Joe? What can it show us about how we should read this book? In the Old Testament? We said we talked yesterday. Go back. If you didn’t hear that, a conversation about how it fits into books like Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.

00:03:35:58 – 00:04:05:37
Michael Gewecke
But suffice it to say, if you want to nail job down to the genre, it’s going to resist that. Because within this book, there are many genres represented. You have things like lament in it, which we have in the Bible. You know chiefly that we have lamentations, which includes lament. You’ve got hymns in it, specifically in some of the speeches, you’ve got proverbs, you’ve got poems, you’ve got sayings I hate.

00:04:05:42 – 00:04:28:58
Michael Gewecke
You have multiple layers. And scholars can pull out and say, well, this fits another kind of genre subgenre over here, and this is this kind of thing over here. And then they’ll say, so that’s what makes it a playground. To your point, that’s what makes it playground for scholars. That’s what makes it difficult for us, is because you might walk into it looking for, okay, yeah, pastors, but what’s the central crimson read through line?

00:04:28:58 – 00:04:51:16
Michael Gewecke
And if that’s what you’re looking for in the rest of the study, you’re going to be floundering. Because, Joe, I think the way plays with genres intentionally, it’s trying to have something to say, which is by definition, keeping you flat footed. And I think that’s represented even in the way it makes categorization difficult.

00:04:51:28 – 00:05:18:37
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think depending on where you land in the book of job, if you were reading at various places, you could say, this is a story. You could just as easily say, this is a poem. You could say, this is theology, this is philosophy. I think there is a lot happening throughout this book. The other difficulty is the book itself doesn’t give us a lot of clues.

00:05:18:37 – 00:05:50:40
Clint Loveall
You know, some books tell us in the year, Isaiah, in the year that King Uzziah died and that gives us job starts off more like the equivalent of in a land far away a long, long time ago. Like there’s that, there’s that almost fable like character. And then as it comes to the language itself, job is notoriously difficult to translate.

00:05:50:45 – 00:06:15:57
Clint Loveall
This book has the highest number. If you ever read through your Bible, sometimes you’ll see a footnote, and if you follow that footnote, you’ll look down and it will say the meaning of this Hebrew word is uncertain. In other words, there’s no clear consensus on what the word means. So, for instance, in the story of Joseph’s many color coat, if you read that in your Bible in Genesis, you will have, should you?

00:06:15:57 – 00:06:36:14
Clint Loveall
If your Bible is telling you the truth, there should be a footnote. And if you look at that footnote, it will say, we’re not exactly sure what this word means. Somebody took a guess along the way of multicolored robe or coat of many colors, and it’s stuck. But we don’t. We don’t, with full confidence, know that that that’s what it means.

00:06:36:14 – 00:07:05:48
Clint Loveall
So you run into those. There are more of those in the book of job than any other book in the Old Testament, also in translation. And there’s a a phrase for it. But essentially there are words in the Old Testament that are only used one time and, and only in that one place you find them. Job has more of those than any other book of the Old Testament, and it’s not particularly close.

00:07:05:52 – 00:07:34:57
Clint Loveall
There are 145 instances where we don’t know the root word, or the root word of that word is not used anywhere else in the Old Testament. And then there are almost 400 cases where the form of the word is used only that one time. Now, with a language that is dead like Hebrew, that becomes incredibly difficult to with confidence say, oh, this word means that, and this phrase means that.

00:07:34:57 – 00:07:52:57
Clint Loveall
And so before we even get to the difficulty of reading job, those who do the work of putting it in front of us and translating it, this is possibly their most challenging book to work with in what we call the Old Testament.

00:07:53:02 – 00:08:14:59
Michael Gewecke
I love commentators sometimes that’s the best way of saying things. Numerous Aram isms and vocabulary and grammar suggests the poet’s native language may have been Aramaic, with Hebrew as a learned literary language. In other words, we’re dealing with many crossovers that we don’t exactly know what to do with.

00:08:15:00 – 00:08:40:30
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and if and if you were with us in our Genesis study, you’ll know that names matter in Hebrew to the Israelites, names often told something of a person’s story. Well, we can agree in the Book of Job whether these are Israelite names, whether these are Aramaic names, or that these are Hebrew name. So job just has lots of questions that we haven’t yet had firm answers to.

00:08:40:35 – 00:09:23:48
Michael Gewecke
And so I want to just pause here. You might say that’s an interesting factoid. So I’m going to store that on the way for the next trivia night and hope that ancient Hebrew Aramaic texts are the category. Yeah. Or you might say, how does this impact the study as we go through it? And I think, Clint, one of the things that that we should, you know, just sort of put out there from the start is that in a book that’s dealing with the intersection between life’s greatest sufferings and our humans search for meaning and doing so under the umbrella of the divine, the question of God, why is this happening to me?

00:09:23:52 – 00:09:53:38
Michael Gewecke
I think one of the important things that we need to remember is that while we, as I think one could argue job is in this book, while we are searching for the answer to our question, the genre, even the language, even the language of the original writing of this book may have been challenging for the people receiving it, because it is at a a critical, broken juncture.

00:09:53:43 – 00:10:14:58
Michael Gewecke
In other words, they’re reaching for words to describe things that even in the original language, the words would have been a mishmash of ideas and cultures and influences. In other words, I think one of the things we take away from this, Clint, is, once again, we should be careful to not oversimplify the meaning we’re looking for in job.

00:10:14:58 – 00:10:39:13
Michael Gewecke
Don’t come to job looking for the binary. Well, is it this or this, pastor? No. Instead, come to this book with the awareness that it has that poetic quality with words that the world’s best scholars on ancient languages are telling us, hey, we’re having to do some reaching here for context to to best give to you our best idea of how it was probably functioning.

00:10:39:18 – 00:11:11:31
Clint Loveall
Yeah. I think it’s helpful to realize that as we approach a book like job, we do so with some gaps and some limitations. The great irony of that, as you sort of said, Michael, is that in a book that is mining some of the absolute depths of human experience and looking full on in the face of suffering and questions of why we suffer, particularly when we don’t deserve that suffering.

00:11:11:36 – 00:11:52:04
Clint Loveall
A 150 or so times. We are not sure what the word that the author wrote means in our language. And so there is, not only is job dealing with the mysterious, there are mysteries within the text itself that we have to struggle with to even try to get behind the words to understand the meaning. And so, if at some point Jobe feels frustrating, overwhelming, confusing, please know that you are not alone.

00:11:52:04 – 00:12:36:15
Clint Loveall
This is this really is in some ways that the top of the peak of biblical interpretation and struggle. Having said that, it’s also clear that the writer of Joel is amazingly skilled. The right part of the reason this book is so difficult is because it’s so advanced. It’s it’s so good. It is so well thought out. And somebody, some, some person more than wrote this, some very gifted person or people created this narrative and built this presentation of it.

00:12:36:19 – 00:12:50:25
Clint Loveall
And there is it. It’s not easy to get to, but if you’re willing to struggle with it, the payoff is is great and the treasure is worth it. I would argue.

00:12:50:27 – 00:13:20:47
Michael Gewecke
We don’t talk about this very frequently in the study, but I think this is an appropriate time. Clint. In textual groups, scholars who study this deeply, they’ll often look at books and they’ll talk about, was this whole book written at once, or was there a thing written? And then there were components that might have been added, or a section that might have been included, and you have something like the story of Jesus and the woman, caught in adultery in the book of John, where the earliest manuscripts don’t have that text.

00:13:20:47 – 00:13:39:28
Michael Gewecke
And so if it’s in your Bible, it’ll say, you know, that this only appeared in the later manuscripts. That’s them trying to tell you that kind of thing. Clint. I’m not, scholar of Jobe. I can’t speak with any authority here, but I know there is debate in the community about is this whole thing was it all written at once?

00:13:39:28 – 00:14:09:46
Michael Gewecke
Was the center of it written at a different time than the than the ends of it? I think there’s a lot of questions about that. If if you’re willing to allow that. Clint, I think it’s really helpful for us to remember, it’s possible that that you could have someone who who wrote a thing that was passed down through generations, people engaging it in really meaningful ways and then framing it, in later times and say, hey, you know, I think that this helps us understand a component of the story.

00:14:09:59 – 00:14:22:50
Michael Gewecke
Not saying that’s the way it was. Though I know some scholars argue for that. I think you’ve got to look at some of these books and recognize that they can be very complex, communal efforts, is my point.

00:14:22:55 – 00:14:53:36
Clint Loveall
Yeah. I think and again, I don’t want to take us too far off. But scholars have noticed that the language of the beginning of job and the end of job, the narrative sections are distinct in some ways from the language in the middle of the dialog section. So the words used of God in the front and back of job are not the words used of God in, or the titles used of God in the middle of the book, the substantial.

00:14:53:51 – 00:15:20:15
Clint Loveall
And it is theorized by some scholars that there was an old story that at some point people added the dialog stuff too, and again tried to mine the depths and and follow the implications of the beginning and the end of the story. And if that’s a troubling way to think, we we do that all the time with Scripture.

00:15:20:15 – 00:15:46:55
Clint Loveall
We don’t then put it in the Bible. But whenever we whenever we try to preach or teach a text, you take something that is old and you try to insert in it something that helps it be heard and helps it be thought about in our in our current moment. And so, it’s possible something. The other thing you have to say about job is for every person who thinks it’s one way.

00:15:46:55 – 00:16:07:00
Clint Loveall
Yeah, somebody else thinks no, it was written all at the same time, and they just change the words just because they wanted to distinguish the two parts of the story. And that may be true. So that the scholarly community as, as you know, Michael, they like the things that aren’t ordinary because the ordinary are kind of easy for them.

00:16:07:04 – 00:16:17:28
Clint Loveall
So they’re very attracted to a book that’s full of questions and no answers, like Joel, that the difficulty of that, of that makes it appealing to them.

00:16:17:33 – 00:16:48:14
Michael Gewecke
And while we don’t know the exact date, let’s say it’s let’s say this sometime mid post 500 BCE, I mean, or Clint, I think we can say reasonably confidently, the people who wrote this, the person who wrote this, the people who who took this seriously, I suspect that they were not skipping down the road humming tunes. I bet they weren’t in the most positive, easy life experience.

00:16:48:14 – 00:17:09:14
Michael Gewecke
Often times, the moments when we come to deal with the topics of job. Why God, are you allowing this suffering to happen? Why are you letting it happen to a good person? The this this core content, you can imagine it flowing out of the person, out of a people who were in great struggle. This resonates with people when they’re in the dark Valley.

00:17:09:14 – 00:17:33:14
Michael Gewecke
If you know someone or if you yourself are there or have been there. I think Jobe has a particularly poignant way of touching the human soul today because of the excuse. I don’t know if this is the right word, but the authenticity, the the vulnerability of what this book portrays. I mean, it, it’s real suffering. And because of that, I think it does give us some insight.

00:17:33:14 – 00:17:51:25
Michael Gewecke
It whoever wrote this and the people who have cherished it have all been people who have found in it wisdom for those who are struggling. And I think that’s a marathon that’s passing the baton from one sufferer to another through thousands of years, saying, there’s something in this for us. I think.

00:17:51:30 – 00:18:11:13
Clint Loveall
I, I think I’d make a case, Michael, that in some ways the time to study job, if you’re going to dig into the issues and you’re going to try and understand the genre, if you’re going to bring academics to the book of job, the best time to do that or when things are going.

00:18:11:18 – 00:18:11:43
Michael Gewecke
Yeah.

00:18:11:43 – 00:18:53:33
Clint Loveall
Pretty well. Sure. The beauty and the power of job is that when none of that’s true and the bottom is falling out and and you’re just struggling to hang on, that’s when I think you understand job. I mean, it’s one thing to study job. It’s another thing to walk in job’s shoes and this book, maybe more than most, allows a space for those who come to it with their own struggles, with their own brokenness and pain.

00:18:53:38 – 00:19:24:41
Clint Loveall
Again, job is not going to be in the practice of offering you trite, simple answers for those experiences. But job is going to not only tell you that others have visited that land before you, it’s going to give you some language that helps express the depths of that experience. And I think, you know, in some ways that’s the real power of job.

00:19:24:41 – 00:19:51:24
Clint Loveall
All this other stuff is interesting, but when you get to the very core of it, I think in some ways that’s what makes this book so interesting and appealing. Is that there there are limited number of things that join you in your suffering and walk a mile with you. And I think job I think job is one of those.

00:19:51:28 – 00:20:09:19
Michael Gewecke
It’s a good word and it’s the last word. We’re glad that you’re with us here today. Certainly hope in the midst of us trying to not rush headlong into job. Hope there’s something in this that is interesting, something new, something that you can say, I didn’t know that before, but also something that maybe encourages you to stick with us through the length of this study.

00:20:09:19 – 00:20:15:10
Michael Gewecke
There’s a lot to come, so certainly subscribe to. You’ll miss those like this or others. Find it in their own study and friends. See you all tomorrow.

00:20:15:12 – 00:20:15:45
Clint Loveall
Thanks everybody.