On-Line Study Group - The Book of Job

Post by **JewelSong** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 12:48 am

Voronwë mentioned this and I think it might be enlightening and kind of fun to do an on-line study of the Book of Job.

I have found a pretty good study-guide that might help direct our conversation and give us sort of a time-line.

Here it is.

I think in order for this to work, people would have to be pretty committed! But we would only need a few people to make it interesting and to have some decent dialog! And actually, people could come in and out as long as they kept up with where we were in the discussion.

So...I thought maybe people could take a look at the study guide and see if this is something they might like to participate in. We could do one "lesson" a week and I would take the responsibility of keeping the thread "on track" and changing the thread title to denote the particular lesson.

What say you? Anyone up for it?

Post by **Jnyusa** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:01 am

I would like to be up for it, Jewel! RL may intervene, as my good intentions of reading the Sil have not yet been fulfilled either, but I'll try.

My take on the message of Job is quite simple, but the book has been analyzed so many ways, it will be interesting to become familiar with other people's views.

And thanks for undertaking this! Really, it's quite a venture.

Jn

Post by **Impenitent** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:08 am

Very interested but I'm not putting my name down here - as they say, the spirit is willing but the flesh is over-committed.

I'll read along and suck it up, if you don't mind - stealing nuggets of insight as they fall. And should there be some unexpected and totally unique insight of my own that I'm just bursting to share I guess I'll do it. Seems unlikely though - I don't really have rumination time and I'm not exactly known for my incisive interjections.

Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:23 am

Wow, I hadn't really anticipated anything quite so organized (or so soon), but I will certainly try to participate to the extent that I can (as long as I don't have to lead the discussion).

Post by **vison** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:23 am

I, too, am up for it, but cannot promise to be here all the time.

I have to find my bible now. I just sorted out a big huge enormous mess of books and now I can't find anything. Nothing.

I hope it won't make a difference which bible we have? Mine is, of course, the King James Version.

Post by **Impenitent** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 2:01 am

Mine is the Plaut Tanach.

Post by **Cerin** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 3:07 am

Well, I tend to over-commit myself, too. But I think one lesson a week sounds manageable. Job has always been rather opaque to me with those lengthy exchanges of the 'friends', so just about any enlightenment will be an advancement. Can't guarantee I'll have anything worthwhile to say!

Post by **truehobbit** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:19 pm

I have the deepest mistrust of study guides, I must admit.

Have you read it through and seen whether is has any bias or agenda?

I'd of course be interested to read the text, because I never have. I know the story only as far as it is popularly known, and I read some parts cursorily after finishing the fabulous novel "Job" by Joseph Roth (which I might take the opportunity to recommend once again

), in order to find out how much of it was parallel to the biblical Job.

Post by **Jnyusa** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 6:05 pm

It probably does have bias, but we're diverse enough here to catch the bias where it appears. I don't particularly care is a source is biased as long as I know what the bias is, and there is someone who knows enough about the competing view to point out where bias has colored the text.

Jn

Post by **vison** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:22 am

Can I ask this question, right at the start?

Job, Chapter 1, verse 6: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them."

Leaving Satan aside for now, who were "the sons of God"?

I haven't read this for a long time. I didn't remember this part at all.

Post by **Cerin** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:17 am

I don't know, vison. I've heard it said that the book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible, so it's happenings could coincide with the early chapters of Genesis, where these 'sons of God' are also mentioned (Chap. 6) as taking wives from among the daughters of men, whose offspring it says were mighty. Angels maybe?

Post by **anthriel** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:56 am

Actually, my bible (NIV) interprets that word as "angels".

It says One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them.

I have a study bible, and the footnotes (which I dig in a really big way) say:

1:6 the angels. Literally, the sons of God. This phrase is used of angels elsewhere in Scripture (38:7; see note on Gen. 6:2). This interpretation harmonizes with the fact that Satan, himself an angelic being, joined them on this occasion.

Post by **Frelga** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 6:14 am

The Hebrew text says "b'nai ha-el", sons of God, as far as I can tell, and the translation from Hebrew reads "Now it fell upon a day, that the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them." Which is subtly different from "came with them" in that it seems to imply that he didn't just show up uninvited but did indeed have a place among the "sons of God".

Post by **Jnyusa** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 6:15 am

I believe 'sons of God' does refer to the angels ... but this is also a colloquial expression in Hebrew meaning someone blessed or protected by God. In the context of Job the colloquial Hebrew can probably be ruled out. 'Sons of man' would be the descendants of Adam, i.e. us.

Cerin, I was googling last night about the date of this book. Speculation seems to be all over the map. There are scholars who date it with Abraham, others with Moses, and others with David. But the consensus seems to put it no earlier than the 6th nor later than the fourth century BCE. That would mean it probably originated during the Babylonian exile, and the present form was fixed in the 4th ce around the time of Plato and Aristotle.

There's also a later Greek version which is different from this one.

There are nice long articles about the historicity of Job in Wikipedia and The Jewish Encyclopedia,

One of the interesting things I found - I think it was in the Jewish Encyclopedia - was the that book is believed to be a composite from two sources. Scholars believe that the beginning and the end were authored and placed like bookends around an earlier tale to give it new context. This fits my own (admittedly dilletante) view of the story, though I did not know about this when forming my opinion. My own opinion is that the point of the story is contained in the very last scene, in the conversation between Job and God. If there is any analysis that has treated this conversation as non-rhetorical I'm not aware of it; but it seems to me that the book only make sense if this conversation is not rhetorical. If the appearance of God at the end was indeed added to an existing tale about the arbitrariness of Divinity (and a front end would have been needed then for narrative consistency), I would feel bolstered in my opinion about the point of the story.

Jn

Post by **vison** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:19 pm

Thanks for the explanation. It's about what I figured.