July 22

Job 7 and 8/Psalms 81 and 82

Job the human being emerges even more clearly in the first six verses of Chapter 7 as his emotions rise to the surface.  He emphatically insists that he cannot be patient because the strand of his life is finite.  He endures emptiness and misery day after day as he feels the thread of his life (tiqwah—Hebrew for both "thread" and "hope") running out.

 

As he moves to address God directly in verse 7, we can see under his language an alternate logic beginning to take shape.  Whereas his friends repeat the conventional  reasoning that since God is just and suffering comes from God, the person experiencing the suffering must be guilty of sin in equal measure to the suffering meted out, Job starts in the same place, but shifts the reasoning to focus on God's justice.  His reasoning proceeds in this way:  Suffering comes from God.  I am upright and innocent of any sin or wrongdoing to warrant suffering.  Therefore, God is unjust. 

 

In directly addressing God, whom he still deeply loves and whom he still believes is wise and all-knowing, Job points up, first, that human life is both brief and finite, and, second, that he is not a grand, cosmically evil entity like the Sea or the Dragon and thus does not merit the intensity of force that God is employing against him.  Finally, in an ironic parody of Psalm 8, he flips the idea of human insignificance in the psalm ("What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?) to ask God why he is the subject of God's daily focus despite his human insignificance and why God's care is not manifested by God's pardon of whatever Job's transgression may be.

 

In Chapter 8, we meet the second of Job's friends, Bildad the Shuhite, who introduces a narrative pattern in which speeches begin with a criticism of the previous speaker's words, a common pattern in ancient wisdom literature that creates a kind of debate or dialogue.  Bildad continues to uphold conventional orthodoxy, questioning how God could possibly pervert justice and asking Job if he has considered that his children may have committed some offenses against God (which he has in chapter 1, verse 5) for which he is being punished.  He situates authority in the past, in the "bygone generations" and "ancestors" he mentions in verses 8 and 9 while Job relies on the authority of his own experience, an experience that Bildad dismisses as too recent to be of any weight or worth.  True to his perspective, Bildad ends his speech with a number of traditional sayings employing plant metaphors to illustrate cause and effect for those who are righteous versus those who are wicked, ending with the general platitude that "God will not reject a blameless person, nor take the hand of evildoers" (verse 20), a view that assumes that God will use God's power responsibly and fairly. 

 

·         But what if God does not do so? 

·         Is it even possible for God to be unfair?

 

One example of the ancient authority that Bildad speaks of is found in Psalm 81, a hymn of praise composed for the celebration of the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles described in Deuteronomy 16: 13-15.  This feast, also called Sukkot and celebrated in late September or early October, begins at the full moon and lasts for seven days with the first one or two days devoted to festivals of prayer.  Families build sukkot (Hebrew for "booths") in which they live and sometimes sleep during this week.  The sukkah is intended to remind the Jewish people of the fragile dwellings in which the ancient Israelite people lived during their 40 years in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt.

This prayer is part of the larger prayer festival in which the covenant with God, referred to here as God's "statute with Israel" and "ordinance of the God of Jacob" (verse 4) expresses gratitude for God's deliverance of God's chosen people from slavery and oppression in Egypt, and, in God's voice, reminds them to heed the First Commandment (You shall have no other Gods before me); that God will nurture them continually because they are God's people; and that they are, as Moses had said, a "stiff-necked" people, but that if they would be obedient, God would provide victory over their enemies and an abundant harvest of crops. 

 

In this psalm the major focus is placed upon fidelity and obedience to God as the essential covenantal terms to merit God's blessing.  Just as Job's friends have asserted, God's chosen people bring about their own sufferings and difficulties by the disobedience and lack of faithfulness to the covenant made with God.

 

Psalm 82 specifies this theme even more by exhorting judges to dispense justice fairly and equitably to the weak, the orphan, the lowly, the destitute, and the needy.  This psalm expresses a prophetic vision of the divine judge, like those found in I Kings 22 and Isaiah 6, a vision of a heavenly trial in which deities subordinate to God are sentenced to death and descend to Sheol because of judicial improprieties or their inability to ensure justice to the needy.  The prophetic voice in this psalm concludes with a prayer that God, acting ultimately as the sole judge, will provide justice among the nations.

 

These two psalms raise some interesting questions in relation to the story of Job as it has unfolded thus far:

·         If God prioritizes fidelity and obedience as essential aspects, then why does God cause suffering to the one human whom God acknowledges is most faithful and obedient?

·         How does the exhortation in Psalm 82 to judge fairly and equitably apply to Job's case?   Is Job receiving a raw deal here?