July 19

Psalm 80/Job 1 and 2

Psalm 80 is a corporate choral prayer, both a plea and a petition, from a group of people in some kind of grave crisis.  (Indeed, many historians read this psalm as a lament for the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE.)  So it asks both for God to become present with them—an advent prayer—and for God to restore and deliver them.  This second part of the prayer—"Restore us, O God. . ."—recurs in verses 3, 7, and 19 as an ever more urgent, intense refrain, so that by the third instance, we can almost hear the people shouting to heaven. 

 

As is the case with many of the psalms, the wordplay accomplished with the choice and use of the verbs expresses the communal statement of faith that undergirds these people through this bleak situation.  They know that God's anger has been unrelenting, that they are not equipped or positioned to fix the conflict or peril in which they find themselves.  But they also firmly assert that God does have the power to do so, and they ask God to "let your face shine" on them to deliver peace, blessing, and hope. 

 

The psalm writer uses two meanings of the verb "restore" (the Hebrew verb shub).  In the refrain, the word means "restore" in the sense of asking God to put things back as they were, or make them whole again.  In verse 14, however, the word shub also means "turn around, repent," as the people ask God to "turn around or rethink" God's anger towards their circumstance so that God's face will "shine" (the Hebrew word 'ur)  upon them and God will thus "save" (the Hebrew  yashab) them.

 

This psalm also contains two familiar Biblical metaphors to express God's relationship with God's people:  God the Shepherd with the flock (verse 1) and God the Gardener tending the vine (verses 8-13).  Continuing the imagery from Psalms 78 and 79, Psalm 80 begins with a plea to the Shepherd of Israel for guidance and deliverance.  Unlike kings, emperors or religious leaders, God possesses the might to save these people.  Moreover, the image of God as the Great Gardener who has planted and tended the vineyard (God's chosen people) over time expresses  God's continual care and concern for his chosen ones throughout their history, even when God is displeased with them.  In essence, they are asking, "God, why are you allowing us to suffer since you have tended us for so long and for how long will you do so?"

 

This same question will ultimately figure prominently for Job.  The first two chapters function as a prose prologue to the rest of the story, which is related in poetic dialogue, followed by a prose epilogue to bookend the narrative in Chapter 42.  This perplexing question about the suffering of the righteous and the good fortune of the wicked is one addressed frequently in the Psalms and other wisdom texts.  Remember that the conventional Jewish view assumes that one's suffering in life is indicative of one's sin, just as one's prosperity is proportional to one's piety—so undeserved suffering simply does not compute.

 

The prologue contains five "scenes" that alternate between heaven and earth, and the beginning of this story may remind us of folktales or fairy tales—"Once upon a time long ago in the land of Uz (the sandy desert in northern Arabia) lived a really virtuous man named Job (from the Arabic for "one who repents to God" or the Hebrew for "one who is treated as an enemy or is greatly tried") who was quite prosperous but also quite faithful."  Verse 6 shifts the scene to a council of heavenly beings in which the Lord and the Accuser (often translated as Satan) converse about the depth of Job's faithfulness.  After all, Job has been blessed with divine protection and provision, so why wouldn't he be faithful?  This scene ends with the Lord putting Job's fate in the Accuser's hands to test Job's faithfulness with the provision that the Accuser not kill him. 

 

Back on earth, we find, starting in verse 13, that a rapid succession of calamities has come to Job's household, leaving little time for recovery from one before the next calamity occurs.  The Sabeans and Chaldeans both steal his livestock and kill two sets of servants while the "fire of God," a kind of desert fire storm, literally consumes both his sheep and yet another group of servants.  And finally, a great wind sweeps across the desert, blowing down his brother's house and crushing to death his sons and daughters under the debris.  In response to all this destruction, steadfast Job in his grief says only, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

 

The scene shifts back to heaven, where the Lord again praises Job's uprightness and blamelessness to the Accuser.  The Accuser answers that humans will give "skin for skin," in other words, that humans will sacrifice outward and exchangeable goods, but he asserts that if Job himself were afflicted, his view toward God would change in a hurry.  Chapter 2 then takes us back to earth where the Accuser has afflicted Job with a comprehensive skin inflammation similar to leprosy, an inflammation so intense and disgusting that he must take a scratching tool (a potsherd) to scrape his skin.  Since Job is blameless, he doesn't "deserve" this affliction since it does not reflect any sinfulness on his part.  His wife says as much when she urges him to "curse God and die."  Yet Job still refuses to curse God. 

 

The last scene in the prologue pictures his three friends traveling some distance to visit Job when they learn of his troubles.  He is so physically afflicted that they do not recognize him at first, and they too tear their robes and throw dust on their heads as acts of mourning when they see him, certain that he has offended God greatly in some way and is now receiving divine retribution.  They further sit silently with him for seven days, a gesture of deep mourning that shows the seriousness of the situation, expressing a grief that is literally too deep for words.

 

·         Who is this fellow Job?  How do you picture him?  Would he fit into your church or your community?

·         Why does the Lord permit the Accuser to test Job in these ways?

·         Is the power of this story enhanced by knowing that it is a "great man" who suffers immensely? Would the story have the same power if a "lesser" person suffered?