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Southern Adventist University

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature

Jan Haluska

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature: Introduction

The following 6 lectures on the Book of Job were presented to Southern Adventist University students in the course Ancient Classics during February of 2014.

A couple of lectures were recorded in my office to make up for snow days.

You should know that each class period began with prayer and a quiz even though the videos mostly skip that part, the ones that are in the classroom.

During the first 13 lectures, the students were studying Homer's Iliad of Odyssey, which served in roughly the same relationship to the ancient Greeks that the Old Testament served to the Hebrews.

The Bible is immensely superior to Homer or any other book though.

There is such a difference between Homer or any other religious books and the Bible.

The Bible is a highly complex narrative, first of all.

It has stories and wisdom literature in it, all telling how God related to his people.

To see 1 reason why it's so unique, we can start by realizing that literary critics look for at least 3 kinds of unity in any top-quality narrative.

And the Bible has at least 3 kinds of unity.

Unity of plot, unity of illusion or reference, unity of theology.

At least those 3, perhaps there are some others, but those 3 are enough.

Well a plot is an account of events having a beginning and an end, according to Aristotle.

Well, for the Bible, Genesis is the beginning, the cross is the thematic center point, and Revelation is the end.

It's a unified narrative, however complex it is.

Unity of allusion or reference is we can illustrate it with the imagine a short story about people out west doing something And in the beginning of the story, somebody says, watch out, bears are a problem around here.

You're going to have some trouble with bears.

And then somewhere around the thematic climax, we have an encounter with a bear and somebody says, see there's a bear here, I told you so.

So it's referring forward to what's going to happen in the action, it's referring backward also to what was predicted.

In fact there are 5 great prophetic epochs in the Bible and each has a prophet at the beginning saying here's what's going to happen here's a prophet at the end saying here's what happened So the Bible prophecy looks forward, later prophecies or references talk about earlier things including prophetic fulfillment Isaiah 53 for example is referred back to in the Gospels, particularly Matthew, and so on.

God is exactly the same in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

People who try to discredit the Bible use that idea of a disunified theology to attack the Bible.

They claim that God changes as things go forward.

God is a God of hatred and sternness in the Old Testament, and a God of love in the New Testament, but nah, it's all the same.

And certainly we're gonna see in the book of Job that that isn't so at all.

Well, it's hard enough for 1 author in a big book to maintain 3 unities of whatever kind.

The Bible was written by a group of perhaps 30 people over a course of well over a thousand years.

Some people say 1300, some people take other numbers of years, but it's over a thousand years.

So this is a bunch of people who never met.

There's an old joke that says a camel is a horse put together by a committee.

It's a unified horse, and no offense against camels, if there are any camel lovers out there, but This is a committee that took place over well over a thousand years and never met and yet you have a thoroughbred racehorse that comes out of this thing.

The Bible is miraculous in its unity and that makes it head and shoulders above every other book on the planet.

If we look just at the book of Job, we're going to find that from the beginning it is far more profound than anything the Greeks had, certainly anything that Homer wrote.

At the start of the Odyssey, the goddess Athena asks her father Zeus, Why are you afflicting Odysseus?

He's a noble, honorable, courageous man and yet you are afflicting him.

That of course is the great question of the ages.

Every culture has noticed that that's true.

And so here's a wonderful beginning of the Odyssey.

But Homer has Zeus say, wait a minute, how could you say that I've forgotten Odysseus, what sentence has passed the barrier of your teeth, he says.

He denies entirely that Odysseus has been afflicted, yet the victimization of Odysseus has gone on for 10 years.

Well, Homer's Zeus doesn't know how to answer that.

He just says, oh no, we're gonna have to get, we're gonna have to restore Odysseus and get him out of there, get him off Calypso's island and all that.

But he dodges the question of why the affliction has happened in the first place.

And nothing else I know of refers to that.

The books of the East, particularly the Bhagavad Gita, for example, say that now there's no such thing as evil and so it's all an illusion and nobody gets it.

But anybody who believes that evil is real has a problem.

Well the book of Job grabs that issue like Jacob wrestling with God and gives the only blessed answer that's ever come up in the history of the world.

Job is therefore, the book of Job, is therefore more profound than anything in the Greeks, anything anywhere else, it's the basement epic of the Bible, and it's well worth reading.

So, Come along with us on our journey in ancient classics to find out the Book of Job.

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 1 (Ch. 1-4)

Good morning, or good afternoon, or good evening, or whatever we're up to today.

This is my first experiment with doing it this way and of course that snow has forced this.

I don't want you to lose another lecture.

Gracious and kind Father in heaven, thank you for the gift of this time together.

Help that even though it's being done electronically, still your Holy Spirit will be with us as a group.

So, the Book of Job is what we're starting out with.

Oral tradition, looks like, probably written down by Moses, that's what the tradition says, around 1300 BC or maybe as early as 1500 BC Depending on the dates for Moses, and if Job lived it would have been perhaps 2, 300 years before that.

The possibility is, 1 possibility is, that Job himself, if he lived, might have authored it himself.

It's set up as a frame story, which means that it's like a picture frame, and that the plot of Job, Job and his friends are inside the frame, and God and the angels and Satan are outside the frame.

Those outside the frame can look in, the people inside cannot look out.

So, we're gonna start with the chapter 1, verse 1 and we're immediately gonna run into trouble.

We can't get past the first 2 words without discussion.

The divide right there produces a great difference in Job criticism.

Those who believe that this is simply a fictional story, and those who believe that Job actually lived and actually said these things.

Oral tradition has been shown to be very accurate.

So it's entirely possible that if Job lived and if the conversation was like this we have the conversations at least substantially.

Was there a Job living in the land of Uz?

Well fiction argues, respectively, there's nothing wrong if you want to think that it's fiction.

But if there is, if it's fiction, it's simply a teaching tale, like a fable, Aesop's fables or something.

And it'll teach how to be a Hebrew, how to be a godly man, how to live in the shadow of God's majesty and mercy.

It illustrates man's eternal situation, especially a good man who's been victimized.

Thus, it's kind of like the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Nonfiction argues also respectively that it did happen and that while there's all that teaching possibility we just talked about, it's enhanced because this is a real story about a real man who had these real experiences, and who, by prophetic insight, perhaps later, began to understand about what had taken place outside the frame.

So as prophecy does the book of Job seen as nonfiction becomes a kind of prophecy and that's kind of important later.

My own view is that it's nonfiction and that These events happened.

I Think it makes better literature that way if nothing else We'll see how that works Okay, there was a man I Believe there was in the land of us.

Nobody knows quite where the land of Uz was.

It looks like it was east of Israel Perhaps to the north perhaps to the south Nobody's sure But it existed pretty certainly around 200 years, maybe more, before Moses, whose name was Job.

You see why it's important for us to come down on 1 side or the other.

If this is fiction, then that word perfect is fiction.

If this is non-fiction, then perfection means what it says.

See, this gets to be very tricky very quickly.

For example, Matthew 5.48 says, Be ye therefore perfect even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.

Now we know that perfection is not possible except through grace.

That is the grace that gives us the power to clean up, be better, and the grace that stands in for us as the righteousness of Christ.

And he was perfect and upright and 1 that feared God.

In the Bible, the word fear sometimes is translated respect.

But the word is yare, and it means scared.

Have you ever been in an academy where there's a week of prayer, and the fellow was talking about, The speaker is talking about how God forgives us.

We needn't worry about all that sin that we've done.

And at the back row there's a standard evildoers back there and they're writing dirty notes in the Bibles.

They don't need to hear for them the idea that God forgives them and they can be comfortable with that is not gonna be very helpful.

They're already not worried about sinning in front of God.

And as the Bible says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

All the way through it says the beginning of wisdom.

How could we not fear the great power of the universe?

If you've ever sat next to a turbine at the bottom of a dam and thought about the thousands of pounds, the tons of water going through that thing to produce this immense amount of electricity that will light a city.

If you stood next to this thing, there's a certain amount of uneasiness next to all that power.

Well, what about the power of an infinite God, an omnipotent God?

We need to understand whom we're dealing with Job feared God and As Jude he avoided evil Okay so far so good if we take grace me for meaning what it says and if we assume that Job lived, then he was rich and that was fine.

There were born to him 7 sons and 3 daughters.

No Doesn't strain the imagination Notice that that's a perfect number 7 is a perfect number 3 is a perfect number and their total 10 is a perfect number.

And then For a number of the rabbis who comment on this we get into trouble believing that Job is nonfiction.

His substance also was 7, 000 sheep and 3, 000 camels and 500 yoke of oxen and 500 sheep asses and a very great household so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east Another indication that the land of us is to the east somewhere of the land of Israel and rabbis and many others say, and the certain rabbis say, well look, what are the odds that there are actually 7, 000 sheep and 3, 000 camels, by the way there's those perfect numbers again, and 500 yoke of oxen and 500 she-ass is also getting to be a perfect number of a thousand.

All those perfect numbers, that's gotta be fiction.

All it means is well, Job was a very Very rich guy.

That's a legitimate and Respectable idea, but is it the only idea possible?

Is it possible that Job had exactly and precisely the number that the Bible gives?

The number of camels, 7, 000, the number of sheep, 3, 000.

7, 000 sheep, 3, 000 camels, got that backwards.

Of course, a yoke of oxen is going to be 2, so that'll be a thousand oxen.

So all these perfect numbers, is it possible, is it likely that Job would have had exactly these numbers.

Would it actually take a miracle to make those numbers?

We need to remember that in some parts of Africa, farmers keep a particular lucky number of animals.

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 2 (Ch. 5-14)

I don't believe in luck, but that's like his lucky numbers.

So anything over that, he gives to his workers and kind of makes them work harder.

I mentioned the lucky numbers because there are people in third world countries who believe in lucky numbers.

Rockefeller and therefore said that's enough, that's right, but how would it be possible to get exactly 500 of these animals?

You simply tell your herdsman, I'm going to have 500 of these things and that's all.

And if you make it a really healthy herd and there's a whole lot more of them besides 500, you get them.

But this illustrates why it's possible for that to happen.

And there are people who say those exact numbers of animals show clearly that this is fiction.

But the truth is that it isn't absolutely necessary for those 500, those thousand, whatever it is, to be, to have been, fictional.

Profit sharing would give the herdsmen the opportunity and the motivation to keep that right at 500, and everything above that goes to them.

So when people say, no, it's not possible, exactly a thousand camels, are you crazy?

And when the Bible says, there was, if we decide to think, well, there wasn't really, What does that say about us?

You see, people say that we read the Bible and they're right, but the Bible also reads us.

And our reaction to a thing like there was tells more about us than the narrative.

Q Can you just say that the numbers themselves are the fictional thing?

Like, it doesn't seem ridiculous to round up or round down by a few or something.

Like, over time, obviously, you can't say exactly at 5, 000 or whatever it is because there's a famine and 10 of them die or something like that.

They use those numbers to show that it must be fiction.

You could say that it's rounded up or rounded down, but I still like there was.

And there was no reason why he couldn't have had exactly that many given profit sharing.

So then our decision to say, well, you know, the Bible doesn't really mean that.

Well, okay, but that's our reaction and doesn't come from the Bible.

So as I say, the Bible reads us as to how we respond to it.

And if we say dogmatically, and in fact even in an extreme, I believe it was exactly 1, 000 camels.

Somebody else can't say, well, then you're a stupid idiot who doesn't understand literature.

And the Bible is more than literature who's actually on trial in the book of Job as we said Job is being tested.

Yes, but is he the defendant in the trial?

He's a witness he's being asked to testify under torture who's on trial God is That trial is about God.

So you can say that Job is on trial, but not really.

Because Job is presented as a witness, and he is, of course, tried as a witness.

That's what happens when a regular witness in a courtroom comes in, the guy cross-examines him.

Sometimes we hear the question, what do we live for?

And people want to say, well, to get to heaven.

Tell everyone about Christ so they can be in heaven too.

Okay, tell everyone about Christ so they can be in heaven too.

Yes, we want as many people joining us in heaven as possible.

I'm sorry, this is 1 of those little times when can you guess what the teacher is thinking?

But what the teacher is thinking is actually well-established theology.

To be an example of Christ, yes, to others, to witness to them, so they go to heaven, yes.

Not just witness, but like, be an example of Christ.

To be an example of Christ for what purpose Christ way is better.

The purpose of a Christian life, finally, is to vindicate God's character.

He needs character witnesses who will stand up for him like the 3 Hebrew children and say We don't know whether God is going to save us or not, but we know 1 thing.

We're not going to bow down to that idol.

And then in the story in Daniel 2, I guess it is, maybe 3, I've forgotten.

In the story, they are joined by the Son of God in the fire.

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 3 (Ch. 19, 21, 27, and 28)

We need to go to the end of chapter 2, And I hope you brought your Bibles.

We need to recognize that these vilified people really rag on Jones comforters.

But until the end of chapter 2 they're doing better than most of us would.

Let's imagine that a father and his 2 children, taking his 2 children to school, this morning got hit by a train and all 3 are dead.

And let's imagine that sometime today you're in the village market and the wife who this morning was a wife and mother and now is a widow and bereft.

She's just turning the corner down by the milk.

You're by the produce, she's by the milk.

Just turning the corner, she doesn't see you.

You're glad she doesn't see you and you leave it at that and you make sure that you're somewhere else in the VM Than she is Most of us would react that way Why we hate her?

In a situation like that, You don't know what to say.

I mean, if somebody breaks his arm, it's not that big a deal to say, wow, sorry about your arm.

But when something this enormous happens, when something this absolutely devastating happens, we don't know what to do.

We're afraid that anything we say is going to be inadequate.

As I say, it's better than most of us would do.

Just going to that woman with tears and embracing that woman, if you're a woman.

Otherwise, weep with her a little, wordlessly.

A family lost their little baby, 3 months old or something.

The lady came up to the church and said, do you know what happened?

That little baby was so perfect that God wanted to have that little baby with him right now.

This lady is trying to do good, but she has opened her mouth and done some theology.

There's another answer we'll see in the book of Job, an even better answer.

But to begin with, what these men do is better than what most of us would do.

And then, chapter 3, Job opens his mouth and curses his birthday, the day of his birth.

Doesn't curse God, but curses the day of his birth.

And he said, let the day perish wherein I was born and the night in which it was said there is a man child conceived.

He wants not to have been conceived, certainly not to have been born.

If you look at it mathematically, he's had a pretty good go But at this moment All taken away he feels severe depression Let darkness Let that day be darkness Let there not have been a day there at all.

Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it.

As for that night, let darkness seize upon it.

Let it not be joined unto the days of the year.

Let it not come unto the number of months.

Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their morning." really wishes he had never been born.

Have you ever wished you had never been born?

And if we open to that blessing, That day of our birth will have been a blessing.

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The Book of Job as Sacred Literature

The Book of Job as Sacred Literature- 2 (Ch. 5-14)

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