Friday, October 19

Galatians 4:1-20: Not least among the striking features of this text is the apostle’s use of exactly the same verb to speak of the sending forth of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. In each case he says, “God sent forth His Son . . . God sent forth the Spirit of His Son.” This is a summary of how we know God: We know Him because He has revealed Himself by His sending forth of His Son and Holy Spirit. God’s double sending forth is thus related to two orders of knowledge: the categorical, empirical order–the historical events of the salvific ministry of His Son—and the internal order of immediate perception—the gift of the Holy Spirit. These are the two dimensions of the knowledge of God, two inseparable aspects of the Gospel: the sending of the Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

In the revelation given to us in His Son, God transforms the knowability of the empirical, historical, categorical order, and all of God’s speaking in history is determined by, and to be interpreted with reference to, his revelation in the Son. From the very first time that he uttered a human word, God started to become incarnate. By speaking this word in history, God transforms the knowable structure and content of history.

Of the Revelation God has given to us in the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul had already written in the very first chapter of the earliest of his epistles: “For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit, and in complete certainty (plerophoria polle)” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). In context, this expression descriptive of Christian knowledge, plerophoria polle, is contrasted with “in word only.”

That is to say, this “complete certainty” in the Holy Spirit is not described as information about but as knowledge of. It is not merely referential; it is real, not only notional. It is not merely nominal (“in word only”). It consists, not simply in discerning the meaning of the words proclaimed, but in perceiving the truth of that meaning. It is not simply an assent to what is declared, but the reality of what is perceived.

Nehemiah 6: The local opposition to Nehemiah’s building project next took a new and unbelievably clumsy tack, which he resisted with high disdain (verses 1-4). Failing this, his opponents then sent a letter with an implicit threat of denunciation (verses 5-7), but Nehemiah remained unimpressed (verse 8).

The story found here in verses 10-13 is not necessarily part of the chronological sequence but may have been put here because of its affinity to the two preceding stories.

Even before Shemaiah was in the employ of his opponents, Nehemiah smelled something wrong. He sensed that he was being invited to take a step he would regret. We observe him here, nonetheless, maintaining his composure under pressure, controlling his emotions, especially the emotion of fear, so as not to obscure his assessment of the situation (verse 14).

The wall, begun in the late summer, was finished fifty-two days later, in mid October (verse 15). About six months had passed since Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem, and less than a year since his friends had come with sad news to Babylon. Once again, Sanballat and his friends learned of the wall’s completion only by rumor (verse 16).

Saturday, October 20

Nehemiah 7: Here is the largest census in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (verses 6-72). For its compilation Nehemiah used an earlier source (verse 5), probably to be identified with that in Ezra 2. The difference between that earlier list and the present list is one of purpose and context. The list in Ezra 2 established the continuity with Israel’s past, especially with a view to validating the claims of the returning exiles with respect to their possession of the Holy Land. In the present chapter, however, the list is set in the context of Jerusalem’s new enclosure. It is the census of a city, not a mere list of returning exiles. It is a municipal instrument, which will serve as a format for taxation and civic service. It is a document of the community’s restoration and renewal. Consequently, it is included between the completion of the walls (verses 1-3) and the ceremony of renewal (chapters 8—10).

The long census transcribed in this place, precisely because it says so little that engages the imagination, allows the reader leisure to reflect on these more interesting aspects of Nehemiah.

All through this memoir we find Nehemiah a most engaging man. His steady, cool demeanor sat atop the cauldron of his emotions which, on occasion, found brief expression (cf. 1:4; 5:12; 13:8,25). Surely, however, those emotions did much to drive his highly effective style of energy, skill, and organization. Nor was Nehemiah entirely free from tooting his own horn from time to time (2:10,18; 5:15; 6:11).

Trained as an executive and diplomat, Nehemiah’s rhetorical skills were economic, efficient, and to the point (2:17; 5:7; 13:25). Whatever his fears, they were under control; we never find him acting in panic. He was also a reflective man, much given to short, frequent, and fervent prayers that are interspersed in the narrative (2:8,10,20; 3:36-37; 4:9; 5:13,19; 6:14,16; 13:14,22,31,39).

Although the walls of Jerusalem were completed in record time, Nehemiah did not rush things. Before ever arriving at Jerusalem, he had made the proper arrangements for the materials to be used in the construction, and before even calling a meeting for the project, he inspected the site in detail and formulated a plan.

In the next chapter our attention will turn once again to the figure of Ezra, who had arrived in Jerusalem earlier than Nehemiah. Ezra was a priest and scholar, Nehemiah a practical man of affairs. Both together were responsible for the spiritual maintenance of Jerusalem in the fifth century before Christ. In this respect, their joint vocation mirrored that of Zerubbabel and Jeshua late in the previous period.

Sunday, October 21

Galatians 5:1-15: According to Paul—verse 14—all the Christian’s social obligations may be summed up in the love of one’s neighbor as one’s self. Paul later elaborates this thesis in Romans:

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (13:8-10)

Nehemiah 8: We come now to the renewal of the covenant (chapters 8—10). The story begins with the public reading of the Law.

In modern church parlance this chapter describes a “revival,” or a “parish renewal,” or even a “Life Alive Weekend.” We are apparently still in October of 445 (7:73), the season associated with the Feast of Tabernacles. While Nehemiah has only recently arrived, Ezra has been in Jerusalem for thirteen years, and maybe he figured that the place could use a good dose of “old time religion.”

Ezra, as we reflected earlier, had been engaged in editing the Torah, and the people wanted to hear it (verses 2-3). They gathered to the east of the city (verse 1), not a normal place for gathering. Given the mystic symbolism of this site (the panorama of the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives) in two of Israel’s most recent prophets (Ezekiel and Zechariah), their choice of this place to gather was surely significant. It was morning, and the sun was rising over the Mount of Olives when they began.

There was a lengthy proclamation of the Word (verses 4-5), along with prayer and devotion (verse 6). As Ezra read the text in Hebrew, which by now was only a scholar’s language, running translations were provided in the common spoken language, Aramaic (verses 7-8). Such Aramaic (and later Greek) translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament are known as Targumim or Targums, which in modern biblical research constitute a special area of study.

It was a scene of great emotion, with the experiences of conversion, remorse, and rejoicing mixed together (verses 9-12). All of this took place in the context of the Feast of Tabernacles (verses 14-18; cf. John 7:2). The observance of this feast was an initial act in the maintenance of the Law.

Monday October 22

Nehemiah 9: Most of this chapter is filled with a long “narrative prayer” similar to several psalms that recount Israel’s formative history (e.g., Psalms 78 [77], 105 [104], 106 [105]). One will likewise observe sustained similarities to Deuteronomy 32, the Canticle of Moses, which immediately preceded Israel’s entrance into Canaan. From the perspective of textual history these similarities are hardly surprising, if we remember that Ezra was an editor of the Pentateuch. The great bulk of the narrative in the present chapter is devoted to the themes from the Exodus, the desert wandering, and the conquest, but the period of the Judges and some of the later history are also treated.

The prayer here is important in the context of the later events with which the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are preoccupied, namely, the events connected with the nation’s re-founding. For both men, Ezra and Nehemiah, the restoration of Israel was precisely that — a restoration. Israel could not be started again from scratch. The new Israel would go nowhere unless it came from somewhere, and the present prayer serves as a reflection on where Israel had come from.

From Israel’s earlier history, furthermore, the nation was to learn important lessons about historical causality, particularly the relationship of later events to earlier decisions. Israel would be instructed on how infidelity and punishment are tied together by history. Israel, according to this prayer, was to learn its history, not so much that the people might imitate their fathers, but in order to discourage them from imitating their fathers! They were to reflect on the mistakes of the past so as not to repeat them in the future. Such meditation on history is an important aspect of biblical prayer, as we see in so many of the Psalms devoted to that theme.

Indeed, there is considerable irony in the idea that the fathers are to teach their children in order that the children do not become like the fathers: “For He established a testimony in Jacob, ?/ And appointed a law in Israel,? / Which He commanded our fathers,? / That they should make them known to their children; / That the generation to come might know them,? / The children who would be born,? / That they may arise and declare them to their children, / That they may set their hope in God,? / And not forget the works of God,? / But keep His commandments; / And may not be like their fathers (Psalm 78:5-8).

Tuesday, October 23

Nehemiah 10: This chapter, which begins with a fragmentary archival record (verses 1-27), goes on to mention certain features of social and religious discipline that would serve to make Israel a clearly distinguishable people, distinctive by reason of its special customs and rituals—to be, in fact, a people very different from every other. These customs and rituals included a prohibition against marriage with outsiders (verses 28,30), strict adherence to the newly edited Torah (verse 29), observance of the Sabbath (verse 31), financial and other support of the prescribed worship (verses 32-34), sacrificial offering of first fruits (verses 35-37), strict tithing (verse 38), and other offerings (verse 39). We will find Nehemiah dealing with these very matters all the way to the last chapter of this book.

Israel, now returned to the Holy Land, would strive to become what Israel in Babylon, if it wanted to survive, had been forced to be–namely, a people set apart, distinct, and very unlike its neighbors by reason of its special consecration to God. God’s distinctive people, that is to say, really had to be distinctive. That adjective had to be a reality, and not just a word.

This fact may be read as the guiding motif of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the very reason why both of these books go to such lengths to describe the building of walls, whether the walls of the temple in Ezra, or the walls of the city in Nehemiah. By their very nature, walls divide the world into inside and outside. Walls stand as a sturdy barrier between the two. This image of walls, therefore, as giving shape to an exclusive space, serves as an ongoing model for the great theological preoccupation of these two books: the holiness, the separation of the people of God.

This emphasis was needed. Prior to its recent re-education during the Captivity, Israel had largely lost that sense of exclusive dedication. Its separation from the world had massively disintegrated over the centuries. Instead, by endeavoring to become just like the nations round about them, Israel’s spiritual walls had been badly penetrated—by idolatry, by syncretism, by compromising political alliances. These last were sometimes sealed by marriages joining the people’s leadership to the very worst qualities represented in the other nations.

The building projects described in these two books, therefore, were the external manifestations of Israel’s recently rediscovered self-understanding. The renewed Israel was determined to be exclusive, building walls, establishing clear lines of separation on top of firm and unshakable foundations, uncompromising and unbending about its own identity.

Wednesday, October 24

Nehemiah 11: We have already seen the theological significance of the sort of census data that we have in this chapter. The present list comprises the names of those within the walls that have been constructed. They are the separated people, the “insiders,” symbolic of the inner identity of the holy nation.

All through these two books we have watched the outsiders trying to get inside–or at least to have access to the inside–exercising a sustained harassment of those inside. We saw the response of Zerubbabel, for instance, to the suggestion, in Ezra 4:1-3, that there be no distinction between insider and outsider, because Israel’s pre-captivity history had already taught him the dangers of not insisting on that distinction. The outsiders, thus rebuffed, have spent the rest of these two books trying to prevent the separating walls from being constructed. As the enemies of Jerusalem’s walls, they were attempting to keep Israel from being Israel. They perceived that the walls symbolized exclusiveness, and they resented being outsiders.

This is a curious phenomenon. Why, after all, should they care? If Israel wanted to be exclusive, why should that preference bother anybody else? In fact, nonetheless, Israel’s exclusiveness was deeply resented. Israel’s claim to be a special and holy people, a claim that laid special moral responsibilities on Israel, was simply more than other people could endure. Consequently, Israel’s adversaries have spent much of these two books in a genuine and aggressive snit.

The one place where Israel was truly threatened, however, was not in its building programs, but in the construction of its families, the formation of its homes. Thus, intermarriage with outsiders, which so incensed both Ezra and Nehemiah, was the single path by which Israel could be most effectively led astray.

These lists of Jewish families, therefore, are very pertinent to the general preoccupation and theme of these two books. These genealogies are spiritual walls, designed to protect the identity of God’s chosen people.

The provision permitting one-tenth of its citizens (chosen by lot) to live in the Holy City established a kind of tithe, as it were, of the entire nation. Those who otherwise chose to live there represented a corresponding “free will offering” of the nation.

Thursday, October 25

Luke 16:19-31: In this parable Jesus names one of the characters. I believe this is the only time Jesus ever does this. He gives the poor man the name of his friend Lazarus, whom He did, in fact, raise from thee dead. This is significant.

In the parable, the rich man asks Abraham, “I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.” To this, Abraham answers, “‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.”

This is exactly what happened when Lazarus was, in fact, raised from the dead. St. John tells us: “Now a great many of the Jews knew that [Jesus] was there; and they came, not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might also see Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead. But the chief priests plotted to put Lazarus to death also, because on account of him many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus.”

The Jewish leaders were religious, God-fearing men, but they had lost the correct perspective about what God expected of them, and this loss led them to unbelief and hardness of heart. Indeed, it led them to perfect foolishness. They actually plotted to kill someone who had already been raised from the dead! This is insane. The insanity stands forever as a warning. It informs us just how far gone it is possible to go! This story warns us about what sorts of thoughts we must not permit to find refuge in our heads. One avoids insanity by not thinking insane thoughts.

Nehemiah 12: This chapter, which begins with another genealogical list of priests and Levites (verses 1-26), indicates the importance that proper and verifiable “succession” enjoys in the biblical theology of institutional ministry (as distinct from prophetic ministry).

Next comes an account of the solemn dedication of the wall (verses 27-47) and all that that wall represented by way of the symbolisms we have been discussing.

It is reasonable to understand the narrative’s return to first person singular in verse 31 as an indication that we are once again dealing with the memoir of Nehemiah, on which so much of this book is based.

According to 2 Maccabees 1:18, the event narrated in this chapter took place, not in September, but in December, falling very close in the calendar, in fact, to the date of the Maccabees’ own purification of the temple (recorded in 1 Maccabees 4:60). Both events—the dedication of the walls under Nehemiah in the fifth century and the purification of the temple under Judas Maccabaeus in the second century—are called “Hanukkah,” meaning inauguration or dedication (verse 27; John 4:22). (Only the latter event, however, was incorporated into the Jewish liturgical calendar and is celebrated by Jews each December even today.)

Nehemiah saw to it that the city was ritually circled by two simultaneous processions conducted on top of the walls, complete with trumpets. The dedication of the walls is portrayed, therefore, as an event of worship. The simultaneous procession of the two groups, marching in opposite directions, constituted what one commentator calls “a stereophonic presentation.”

Friday, October 26

James 1:1-11: James, in a series of apparently unsystematic exhortations, begins with patience, prompting the careful reader to recall that St. Paul, too, when he commenced his description of Christian love, began with the succinct thesis, “Love is patient”–Charitas patiens est in the Vulgate. James’ word for “patience,” hypomone–verses 3,4) will later appear when James speaks of the example of Job (5:11). He begins and ends this work, then, on the need of patience in the time of trial (verses 2,12,13,14).

The English reader, as he reads “when you fall into various trials,” may not suspect the skillful play of sounds in James’ original Greek: perasmois peripesete poikilois. In fact, James displays such verbal flourishing right from the start, going from “greetings” (verse 1) to “all joy” (verse 2)–chairein pasa charan.

The theme of rejoicing in times of trial is a common one in the New Testament (Matthew 5:10-12; Acts 5:41; 1 Thessalonians 1:6). This active attitude toward the experience of trial, as distinct from a merely passive endurance, brings about a kind of perfection, an ergon teleion (verse 4), perfection being a quality of great interest to James (verse 17,25; 3:2).

Nehemiah 13: The dedication of the wall was the occasion for some more reading from the Torah, including the prescription found in Deuteronomy 23:4-5, which excluded the Ammonites and Moabites from the congregation of Israel (verse 1). As long as Nehemiah was on the local scene, such exclusions were taken seriously (verses 2-3). When he left to make a brief visit back to Babylon (verse 6), however, events turned for the worse. On his return to Jerusalem Nehemiah learned all sorts of unpleasant things.

He learned, for instance, that a member of the priestly family had become the son-in-law of his old foe, Sanballat (verse 28). In former days, when Sanballat tried to impede the construction of the wall, Nehemiah had held him off. Now, nonetheless, Sanballat was suddenly inside the walls! What he had been unable to do by force of arms, he managed to accomplish by the simple means of marrying his daughter to a priest! This serious breach in Jerusalem’s spiritual wall once again put at peril Israel’s very existence as a holy nation, a people set apart.

In addition, Nehemiah discovered that the high priest himself had provided lodging within the temple for one of those who had opposed Nehemiah’s very mission (verses 4-5). Other things had gotten out of hand, as well, such as the failure to observe the Sabbath, whether by Jews themselves or by pagans who came to sell their wares in the city (verses 15-22).

Nehemiah set himself to put everything straight again (verses 7-13). The major problem, however, continued to be the disposition of the people to intermarry with non-Jews (verses 23-27), in contravention to the Torah (Exodus 34:16; Deuteronomy 7:3). Nehemiah found it a very tough job to maintain those walls!

Recalling those great efforts, Nehemiah prayed that God would not forget them, “Remember me, O Lord” became his refrain (verses 14,22,29,30).

Friday, October 12

Luke 13:10-17: In this story we find “the ruler of the synagogue,” a singularly unattractive, grumpy person who objected to Jesus’ healing of a crippled woman on the Sabbath.

In the midst of the spontaneous praise of God that ensued upon that gracious deed, this particular bellyacher felt it his duty to sound a warning to the congregation about liturgical proprieties: “There are six days on which men ought to work,” he declared, “therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day” (Luke 13:14).

This story serves to warn us against hardness of heart. Hardness of heart can be found even in the house of God.

Quick to pass judgment on others and blinded by his own vicious, miserly spirit, this religious leader was unable to recognize the divine presence and the outpouring of grace.

Devoid of mercy, we notice, he was also without courage. Consequently, instead of confronting Jesus directly, this coward had recourse to what had always worked for him in the past—he harangued the congregation about the woman herself!

It is often said—and it is said, I think, more often than is true—that churches are full of hypocrites. Here was one occasion, however, when the Lord really did use that noun to describe someone in the place of worship. Jesus turns his not-amused attention to this so-called ruler of the synagogue: “Hypocrite! Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it?”

The Lord gives here an example of the proper response to situations in which an individual apparently comes to church for the purpose of making other people in church miserable. Such folk need either to repent or to stay home. Coming unrepentant to the house of God does not improve a man, but it can make everyone else utterly miserable.

Ezra 9: As the story continues, Ezra has been living in Jerusalem for four months, during which time he has been busy in a variety of pressing matters. He had conveyed a great deal of wealth to Jerusalem and had done so, in fact, without armed guard. Along the way he had recruited more Levites to augment the Levitical staff at the temple, which at this time was fifty-seven years old. The journey itself had lasted from April 8 to August 4 of the year 458 (7:9).

Therefore, the events of this chapter, four months later, occurred in late December of that year; it was a dreary rainy season (10:9), the sort of atmosphere that might depress the human spirit anyway.

This was not a good time for bad news, but bad news is just what Ezra received. He learned of a serious spiritual problem in Jerusalem, the widespread intermarriage of priests with non-Jews, a thing unthinkable among the Jews back in Babylon.

Ezra did not take the news calmly (verse 3). He prepared himself to deal with the problem, but he would not address the people about it until he had taken it up with the Lord. He made his prayer with uplifted hands at the time of the vesperal sacrifice (verse 5), at which it was usual to pray with uplifted hands (cf. Psalms 141 [140]:2).

We should especially note in his prayer that he did not separate himself from this sin of the people, even though he himself had not committed it; the sin pertained to “us” (verses 6,7,10,13,15). Ezra was an effective intercessor, in part because of this solidarity he maintained with those for whom he prayed.

Saturday, October 13

Psalm 137 (Greek and Latin 136): This is a psalm of two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem.

The exiles in Babylon have hung up their musical instruments on the weeping willow trees, sad, homesick, and dejected. Apparently, moreover, they were being taunted by their captors: “For those who took us captive sought from us some lyrics, and they who enslaved us asked to hear a song. ‘Sing for us,’ they said, ‘from the canticles of Zion.’”

And just how can this be done? That is, “How shall we sing a song of the Lord in a land far away?” Impossible? Well, not entirely. It is a striking irony of Psalm 137 that, having asserted the impossibility of singing a song of Jerusalem in the foreign land of Babylon, we nonetheless go on to do so! “Should I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be enfeebled! May I choke on my tongue, if I fail to think of you! If I do not hold Jerusalem as the wellspring of my joy.”

This is a psalm of two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem, nor were Ezekiel and Daniel the last visionaries to write of them. The beloved John likewise beheld both of these cities in mystic vision. The first, Babylon, he describes as the “great harlot who sits on many waters” (Rev. 17:1), the source of her great wealth and power. “The waters which you saw,” he was told, “where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues” (17:15). Such are the rivers where we sit and weep, when we remember Zion.

Ezra 10: Word got out, evidently, that Ezra’s spirit was disturbed, because he found quite a crowd of distressed people waiting for him when his prayer was over (verse 1). What ensues in this chapter is best ascribed to what must have been the singular moral stature and authority of Ezra. It was surely not the “mob psychosis” that one modern commentator ascribes to the scene. The dynamics had to do, rather, with the towering moral presence of Ezra himself, standing forth among the people, fortified by his fasting and his prayer on their behalf.

He was thus able to persuade them to take steps deeply repugnant to very deep instincts and warmly cherished preferences. From a concern for the purity of Israel’s faith, he was able to convince them to relinquish their wives and children. He did not do this, moreover, in an impassioned or imperious tone. On the contrary, his words to the people were more restrained than the words he used when speaking to God.

All the returned exiles were gathered at Jerusalem for a “command appearance” (verses 7-9), assembling in the rain, cold, wet, and doubtless a bit discouraged. Ezra then read them the riot act. Under this barrage of rain and prophetic invective, the men became cooperative. Understandably, nonetheless, their moral situation, their “case of conscience,” was more than slightly complicated, involving many details that could not be settled immediately (verse 13). Consequently, a commission was established to work out the particulars associated with the dissolution of all those marriages.

It is reasonable to assume that the work of the commission had to do with the disposition of property claims and rights of inheritance. In those days, after all, couples did not simply fall in love and get married. Pre-nuptial agreements, in the form of inter-family contracts, were the rule, not the exception. Virtually all of those marriages, therefore, involved complex financial arrangements, in the form of dowries and transferred inheritances. If the people were to conform to the strict rules laid down by Ezra, all such matters had to be adjusted. In the lengthy list of the offenders (verses 18-44), we observe many family names that we saw in the census record in the second chapter.

Sunday. October 14

Nehemiah 1: Nehemiah’s mission is easy to date. It began in the twentieth year of the Persian emperor, Artaxerxes I (465-425), therefore 445 (verse 1). The month was December. This book is mainly a collection of Nehemiah’s own memoirs.

Nehemiah is called the royal cup-bearer, but this term should not make us think of a simple domestic servant. That bearing of the cup at the king’s table was but the symbolic function of an individual of great important in the realm. The term “royal chamberlain” comes closer to the more recent idiom, for this was no menial position. In the Persian art of the period the cup-bearer ranked second, right after the crown prince, in the gradations of the royal court.

Archeology demonstrates that sometimes cup-bearers were buried in the same crypts as the emperor’s own family. Nehemiah the Jew, then, was a high official of the realm, the ancient equivalent to our “prime minister” or “secretary of state.” All important matters of business with the crown passed through his hands.

One day some fellow Jews came to see Nehemiah (verses 2-3) with the sad news that local opposition, evidently implementing an official decree, had put a stop to the construction of the walls around the city of Jerusalem. It is impossible that the highly-placed Nehemiah did not know this already, but the first-hand report gave him a strong new impression of the full tragedy of the situation. It threw him into a depression for days, a depression accompanied by fasting and prayer (verse 4).

The lengthy confession that follows is our first example of Nehemiah in prayer; we will have frequent occasion to observe this recourse to prayer as an habitual and sustained practice on his part. Nehemiah’s prayer in the present case (verses 5-11) is full of Deuteronomic vocabulary, a characteristic shared with other late books of the Old Testament, such as Ezra and Daniel. Nehemiah based all his hope on God’s fidelity to Israel, manifested during the Babylonian Captivity. Such prayers may be described as doxologies of judgment. As in the prayer in Ezra 9 (and later on in Nehemiah 9 and in Daniel 9:4-19), this prayer identified Nehemiah with the people for whom it was offered.

Monday, October 15

Nehemiah 2: Fortified by prayer and fasting, Nehemiah prepared to argue his case before the king. He bided his time until the following spring, during Nisan, the month of the Passover. Doubtless Nehemiah was waiting for the most opportune and advantageous moment, watching the movement of government, carefully observing the emperor’s moods and attitudes.

He resolved finally to display his feelings; it was not an inadvertent dropping of his guard, but a calculated move (verse 1), and the emperor, as expected, noticed (verse 2). There was a sudden tense moment, because Persian emperors liked to be surrounded by happy, healthy faces (cf. Daniel 1:10-13!). Nehemiah stated the matter quickly and succinctly, for Persian emperors were also efficient men, not famous for their patience. In addition, they were notoriously fickle and capricious (cf. Esther 4:11).

Nehemiah knew all this, and even while he spoke to Artaxerxes, he continued to speak to God in his heart (verse 4). As always, his brief prayer was efficacious, because he managed to make his complaint without criticizing either the emperor or anyone in the Persian government.

Nehemiah was ever the consummate diplomat, schooled in all the arts of a large, international court. Throughout this book we shall find him playing a cool, deft hand, maintaining strict control over the cards held close to his chest. In every instance we shall see him disclosing only as much information as was needed to accomplish what he had in mind. If anyone wants to witness what it means to be as cunning as a serpent (which Jesus our Lord commands us to be), he will discover no better example than Nehemiah.

For example, we readers of this memoir will know that everything Nehemiah did was done on the authority of a private imperial edict that was handed to him, but we will also observe that he never permitted his enemies to know this. That is to say, he did not show his cards. His opponents would always be obliged to guess what hand he was holding, so they would be ever acting in the dark. Nehemiah knew very well that a privately-issued instruction could always be privately withdrawn, so he was extremely careful not to let that happen. His opponents could never challenge something which they were not even sure existed! Nehemiah preferred to bluff his way through, laying down a card here and there, taking up another, never showing his hand. He kept his winning hand intact. Thus, we will observe that he never spent all his force on a single confrontation. There was ever more in his reserve.

In the present scene, for example, Nehemiah only answered the emperor’s question. He made no request until the king explicitly asked for one, and we observe that the request, made at precisely the moment when it should have been made, was immediately granted. Similarly, Nehemiah did not disclose, even in this memoir, how much time he had at his disposal to complete the project (verse 6). Armed with papers of authorization, he crossed the Euphrates and cleared his mission with the satrapy authorities in the area (verses 7-10). When he arrived at Jerusalem, no public information was available to his opponents. Hearsay, of course, would reveal that he came from the capital. Certainly everyone knew his high standing in the Persian Empire. He lay low, nonetheless, for three days (verse 11), keeping the opposition off-guard, letting their discomfort mount, but without saying anything. Their growing curiosity and impatience would work to his advantage, and he knew it. Then, in the deepest secrecy, he made a quiet, nocturnal inspection of the city, riding on a sure-footed donkey around the ruins of the walls, an inspection recorded in this memoir in minute detail. We may call it The Midnight Ride of Nehemiah (verses 12-16).

Encouraged by this inspection, he summoned the proper people to promote public interest in the project (verses 17-18), while his opponents, learning of it only by rumor, were reduced to mere reaction (verses 19-20). Questioned on the matter, Nehemiah spoke only of trust in God. He breathed not a word about the papers in his breast pocket, leaving his opposition to guess and blunder.

Tuesday, October 16

Nehemiah 2: This chapter describes the organized building of the wall, a task that could only be undertaken while those opposed to the project were caught off-guard, uncertain of its authorization.

From the beginning of the Book of Ezra, we have seen numerous examples of the resistance of the native population of the Holy Land, those who had not gone into exile. That opposition expressed their resentment at being excluded from the inheritance of Israel, and now, in the Book of Nehemiah, we observe that their resentment has not abated. It is grown stronger, rather, over the ensuing decades. It will greatly increase with Nehemiah’s construction of the city walls. More than any other project, those walls symbolized their exclusion from the inheritance of Israel.

Nehemiah had already arranged for the building material (2:8); by late summer they were ready to start. For a man accustomed to dealing with the administration of an empire that stretched from the Khyber Pass to Macedonia, the modest organization required for this work was hardly much of a challenge.

Sections of the wall were apportioned to various families, villages, and professions. Nehemiah’s distribution of the work was not only an efficient use of the labor force, it also subtly encouraged rivalry among the builders, each team endeavoring to surpass the efforts of the others. (Some commentators have also observed the curious similarities of this description to the wall construction of Themistocles in Thucydides, History 1:89. There should be nothing surprising in this similarity. There are only so many ways to build a wall.)

Five of the building groups were composed of families listed in Ezra 2, while several others were based on various localities in the region. Merchant groups (verse 32) and certain guilds were also represented, such as apothecaries and goldsmiths (verse 8). The entire organization bore no slight resemblance to an urban softball league, in which various merchants or other organizations sponsored the different teams. The various teams of builders appear to be listed counterclockwise around the city wall. The priestly team, not unexpectedly, consecrated the parts of their sections as they were finished.

Wednesday, October 17

Nehemiah 4: Meanwhile the frustrated opposition party was holding an impromptu powwow about what to do next (verses 1-2). Sanballat was aware that the emperor had forbidden the building of the walls, but here was the highest non-royal official in the realm, with full knowledge and cooperation of the governing satrap, doing that very thing. The situation left him angry and confused. He dared not complain to the capital, of course, because Persian monarchs tended to react in dangerous ways if stimulated by incautious questioning (cf. Ezra 6:11), to say nothing of deliberate provocation (cf. Esther 7:10).

Nehemiah was completely familiar with the workings of the imperial court, whereas Sanballat and the opposition folks were a bunch of bumbling yokels. They found themselves now completely out of their political depth.

Their frustration could be expressed only in ridicule (verse 3), but their mirth rang hollow, because the wall in question was growing huge. Dr. Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations show it to have been 2.75 meters thick—roughly nine feet—and in Chapter 12 we will read of a lengthy dedicatory procession conducted on top of the wall!

Since Sanballat’s people could do nothing in the open, their opposition took the form of surprise raids by small gangs. The list of opponents in verse 7 indicates that Jerusalem was literally surrounded by enemies. There follows (verses 13-23) an account of how the builders, like Minute Men, simultaneously prayed and defended themselves during the construction. Verse 10 seems to be a snatch of a song that they sang while working.

Much of this chapter is resonant with the themes and vocabulary of Israel’s ancient warfare stories from the Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges: the threat of the enemies (verses 7-8), the strategic disadvantage of Israel (verses 10,13), the preliminary prayer before arming (verse 9), the arrangement of the forces by families (verse 13), the declaration of divine help (verse 20), the summons to bravery and fidelity (verse 14), the Lord’s frustration of the enemies (verse 15), and the bugle call to battle (verses 18-19).

Thursday, October 18

Nehemiah 5: This chapter, which is out of historical sequence, serves partly an apologetic purpose: Prior to narrating the attacks that his enemies were to make on his moral character, he inserts this incident (from a later time) in order to demonstrate his integrity and sense of justice. In this incident, the problem faced by Nehemiah was an internal one, the exploitation of the builders during this time of crisis. Profiteers were taking extreme advantage of the situation (verses 1-5).

Contrary to the radically selfish principles of Utilitarian, Libertarian, and Objectivist philosophies, a healthy society cannot be founded solely on private enterprise and individual rights; government has appropriate functions, after all, beyond those of the common defense, domestic safety, and the safeguarding of private property. It is also a biblically warranted function of government to discourage greed, rapacity, and the taking of undue advantage. The evil we see in this chapter indicates that ancient Jerusalem had its own equivalents of Jeremy Bentham, Ludwig Von Mises, and Ayn Rand. Unbridled greed was producing once again the social order of Cain, as described in Genesis 4.

Nehemiah faced the crisis resultant from a completely selfish atmosphere, aggravated by the extra burden of the labor on the walls and a crop failure. Loan sharks, prohibited by the Mosaic Law from taking interest, were requiring exorbitant rights of usufruct and a disproportionate collateral, which, in the end, enslaved the children dispossessed by such abuses. All of this activity, unfortunately, was within the letter of the law, a form of “legal injustice.”

Nehemiah’s first reaction was visceral (verse 6), but he gave himself time to cool down and reflect (verse 7), pondering which path might be the most effective to take. Then, skipping steps one and two in the procedure listed in Matthew 18:15-17, he jumped immediately to step three in the procedure. Since the offense was public, the confrontation would have to be public (cf. Galatians 2:11-14). Nehemiah summoned a general assembly, in which to face the offenders with a larger group of people rallied on his own side. He easily reduced the offenders to silence (verses 7-8), not by appealing to the letter of the law (for the letter of the law in this instance was not on his side), still less by invoking something so nebulous as “the rights of the poor” (because the poor usually have more needs than they have rights), but by the experience of brotherhood (“your brethren”).

Having reduced the offenders to silence, he proceeded to shame them into doing the decent thing (verses 9-11). He used his office, that is to say, not to maintain the letter of the law, but to establish justice. Clearly he regarded government as responsible for setting right certain economic wrongs born of an excessive and oppressive system of private enterprise that was able to stay legal while remaining unjust. In this respect, Nehemiah was clearly acting on impulses spawned of the great social prophets three centuries earlier: Hosea, Isaiah, Micah. Those powerless men decried economic injustice, but Nehemiah, himself in a powerful position, was able to do something about it. His efforts were successful (verses 12-13).

Nehemiah stayed on at Jerusalem until 433 (verse 14), informing us that he was not a half-bad governor (verses 15-19). The next chapter will jump back to the sequence expected at the end of the incident with which the present chapter began. Having demonstrated his integrity in the present chapter, he is now ready to speak of the calumnies of his enemies.

Friday, October 19

Galatians 4:1-20: Not least among the striking features of this text is the apostle’s use of exactly the same verb to speak of the sending forth of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. In each case he says, “God sent forth His Son . . . God sent forth the Spirit of His Son.” This is a summary of how we know God: We know Him because He has revealed Himself by His sending forth of His Son and Holy Spirit. God’s double sending forth is thus related to two orders of knowledge, the categorical, empirical order—in the historical events of the salvific ministry of His Son—and the internal order of immediate perception—the gift of the Holy Spirit. These are the two dimensions of the knowledge of God, two inseparable aspects of the Gospel: the sending of the Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

In the revelation given to us in His Son, God transforms the knowability of the empirical, historical, categorical order, and all of God’s speaking in history is determined by, and to be interpreted with reference to, his revelation in the Son. From the very first time that he uttered a human word, God started to become incarnate. By speaking this word in history, God transforms the knowable structure and content of history.

Of the Revelation God has given to us in the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul had already written in the very first chapter of the earliest of his epistles: “For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit, and in complete certainty (plerophoria polle)” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). In context, this expression descriptive of Christian knowledge, plerophoria polle, is contrasted with “in word only.”

That is to say, this “complete certainty” in the Holy Spirit is not described as information about but as knowledge of. It is not merely referential; it is real, not only notional. It is not merely nominal (“in word only”). It consists, not simply in discerning the meaning of the words proclaimed, but in perceiving the truth of that meaning. It is not simply an assent to what is declared, but the reality of what is perceived.

Nehemiah 6: The local opposition to Nehemiah’s building project next took a new and unbelievably clumsy tack, which he resisted with high disdain (verses 1-4). Failing this, his opponents then sent a letter with an implicit threat of denunciation (verses 5-7), but Nehemiah remained unimpressed (verse 8).

The story found here in verses 10-13 is not necessarily part of the chronological sequence but may have been put here because of its affinity to the two preceding stories.

Even before Shemaiah was in the employ of his opponents, Nehemiah smelled something wrong. He sensed that he was being invited to take a step he would regret. We observe him here, nonetheless, maintaining his composure under pressure, controlling his emotions, especially the emotion of fear, so as not to obscure his assessment of the situation (verse 14).

The wall, begun in the late summer, was finished fifty-two days later, in mid October (verse 15). About six months had passed since Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem, and less than a year since his friends had come with sad news to Babylon. Once again, Sanballat and his friends learned of the wall’s completion only by rumor (verse 16).

Friday, October 5

Job 40: This chapter, unlike the two preceding, permits Job to put in a word of his own. He uses the occasion simply to confess his vileness and to state his resolve to remain silent before the Lord (verses 3–5), sentiments that will be expanded in the book’s final chapter.

Job has no plans to debate God. He will say nothing further. His earlier aspirations have really been answered, after all, because God has now spoken, and this is essentially what Job had sought. God continues, then.

As the two preceding chapters dealt with the mysteries of God’s activity in the realm of nature, the first part of this chapter turns to God’s presence in the order of conscience (verses 8–14). If Job understood next to nothing about the first, he knows even less about the second.

This revelation, too, comes min sa‘arah, “from the whirlwind” (verse 6; 38:1). Once again, as well, Job is commanded to gird up his loins like a man (verse 7; 38:3). Job is queried about who, on the evidence, is more righteous: himself or God (verse 8)? Does Job really desire a forensic setting to determine this question? Is Job capable of dealing with the myriad moral dilemmas involved in every man’s life, as God must do (verses 9–14)? In short, Job is trapped in his own subjectivity, unable to see the world from God’s perspective. There is no place where he may stand to indict the Lord.

Then, dramatically, the divine discourse goes from the realm of ethics and conscience to a consideration of two symbols of apparent chaos, both of them fearsome and incomprehensible: Behemoth and Leviathan.

Although “behemoth” is simply the plural of the Hebrew word for “beast” or “animal,” its description here seems largely to be drawn from the hippopotamus (hippos = “horse” and potamos = “river”—so “river horse”): huge, strong, invincible, even unchallenged, rightly afraid of nothing (verses 15–24). Other commentators have variously argued that the behemoth is really the crocodile, or a wild ox-buffalo, or some other kind of wild bull.

This is one of those questions that it is important not to decide. The reason for this has to do with the symbolic value of the description. The Behemoth, though portrayed with features recognized in animals already well known, represents simply “the beast.” This is the general sense that the Hebrew plural form “behemoth” has in several places in Holy Scripture (cf. Psalms 8:7; 49 [48]:10; 73 [72]:22; Joel 1:20; 2:22; Habakkuk 2:17).

That is to say, this Behemoth is a great deal more than any particular beast. It represents, rather, the wildness of untamed animal existence. It conveys in symbolism the truth that the world is not made according to man’s own measure. This Beast is irrational in the sense that it does not make rational choices. Yet, its behavior is not irrational, not chaotic, because it obeys the integral instincts placed in it by its Creator. It is not tame, but it is not really chaotic. In its own way, it declares the glory of God.

Saturday, October 6

Job 41: The second beast, Leviathan, is a water monster mentioned elsewhere in Holy Scripture (Psalms 74:14; Isaiah 27:1). Although it represents any sort of water monster (sharks, for instance), its description here seems to be drawn largely from the crocodile.

This latter animal obviously served as a chief model for the classical picture of the idealized fearsome dragon—the Dragon of all dragons, as it were—because of its very large mouth (resembling, in this respect, the hippopotamus), its many sharp teeth, its impregnable hide, and a tail so large and powerful that one can easily imagine it knocking down the very stars in heaven (cf. Revelation 12:4). Only a little imagination is required to think of this creature as breathing fire (verses 19–21). Leviathan, in short, makes for man a rather unsatisfactory pet (verses 4–5) and an even worse conversationalist (verse 3).

All of this goes to say that man cannot domesticate Leviathan. He is resistant to all human efforts to control him and thus remains in this world the symbol of everything in existence that is recalcitrant to man’s ability, especially his rational ability, to take it in hand.

It is worth remarking that, just as the Book of Job links father.kyrillos@gmail.comBehemoth and Leviathan in this section, we know from Herodotus and Pliny that Egyptian traditions tended to pair the hippopotamus and the crocodile as two most dangerous animals.

But there is another consideration here as well. Both Behemoth and Leviathan are God’s household pets, as it were, creatures that He cares for with gentle concern, His very playmates (compare Psalms 104 [103]:26). God is pleased with them. Job cannot take the measure of these animals, but the Lord does.

What, then, do these considerations say to Job? Well, Job has been treading on very dangerous ground through some of this book, and it is about time that he manifest a bit more deference before things he does not understand. Behemoth and Leviathan show that the endeavor to transgress the limits of human understanding is not merely futile. There is about it a strong element of danger. A man can be devoured by it.

It is remarkable that God’s last narrative to Job resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale, or at least that darker part of a fairy tale that deals with dragons. Instead of pleading His case with Job, as Job has often requested, the Lord deals with him as with a child. Job must return to his childhood’s sense of awe and wonder, so the Lord tells him a children’s story about a couple of unimaginably dangerous dragons. These dragons, nonetheless, are only pets in the hands of God. Job is left simply with the story. It is the Lord’s final word in the argument.

Sunday, October 7

Job 42: The Trial of Job is over. This last chapter of this book contains (1) a statement of repentance by Job (verses 1–6), (2) the Lord’s reprimand of Eliphaz and his companions (verses 7–8), and (3) a final narrative section, at the end of which Job begins the second half of his life (verses 9–17). The book begins and ends, then, in narrative form.

First, one observes in Job’s repentance that he arrives at a new state of humility, not from a consideration of his own sins, but by an experience of God’s overwhelming power and glory. (Compare Peter in Luke 5:1–8.)

When God finally reveals Himself to Job, the revelation is different from anything Job either sought or expected, but clearly he is not disappointed.

All through this book, Job has been proclaiming his personal integrity, but now this consideration is not even in the picture; he has forgotten all about any alleged personal integrity. It is no longer pertinent to his relationship to God (verse 6). Job is justified by faith, not by any claims to personal integrity. All that is in the past, and Job leaves it behind.

Second, the Lord then turns and deals with the three comforters who have failed so miserably in their task. Presuming to speak for the Almighty, they have fallen woefully short of the glory of God.

Consequently, Job is appointed to be the intercessor on their behalf. Ironically, the offering God prescribes to be made on behalf of the three comforters (verse 8) is identical to that which Job had offered for his children out of fear that they might have cursed God (1:5). The Book of Job both begins and ends, then, with Job and worship and intercession. In just two verses (7–8) the Lord four times speaks of “My servant Job,” exactly as He had spoken of Job to Satan at the beginning of the book.

But Job, for his part, must bear no grudge against his friends, and he is blessed by the Lord in the very act of his praying for them (verse 10).
Ezekiel, remembering Job’s prayer more than his patience, listed him with Noah and Daniel, all three of whom he took to be men endowed with singular powers of intercession before the Most High (Ezekiel 14:14–20).

The divine reprimand of Job’s counselors also implies that their many accusations against Job were groundless. Indeed, Job had earlier warned them of God’s impending anger with them in this matter (13:7–11), and now that warning is proved accurate (verse 7). Also, ironically, whereas Job’s friends fail utterly in their efforts to comfort him throughout almost the entire book, they succeed at the end (verse 11).

Third, in the closing narrative we learn that Job lives 140 years, exactly twice the normal span of a man’s life (cf. Psalm 90[89]:10). Each of his first seven sons and three daughters is replaced at the end of the story, and all of his original livestock is exactly doubled (Job 1:3; 42:12). St. John Chrysostom catches the sense of this final section of Job:

His sufferings were the occasion of great benefit. His substance was doubled, his reward increased, his righteousness enlarged, his crown made more lustrous, his reward more glorious. He lost his children, but he received, not those restored, but others in their place, and even those he still held in assurance unto the Resurrection (Homilies on 2 Timothy 7).

Monday, October 8

Ezra 5: By separating its Wisdom literature from its prophetic books, the Bible also hints at a distinction between the vocations of the prophet and the sage. Without exaggerating this distinction—because in principle both callings may be found in a single person—it is worth inquiring, I think, in what way the prophet and the sage are different.
Let me suggest that at least part of the difference between them is the way they handle time and the events that take place within time.
Generally speaking, the prophet must deal with time on the move—as it approaches, so to speak. His hands touch time in the present and at those points where the future promises to become present. His words are burdened with the moral imperative of the instant, the kairos, where a decision is required. Events are taking place, or at least about to take place, which require the prophet to proclaim God’s understanding of them. Normally, the mind of the prophet is seized and preoccupied by the dynamisms of the active moment.
It is different with the sage. Not usually caught up in time as it passes, the sage enjoys the leisure to reflect on time that has elapsed and to ponder things that have already come to pass. For this reason, one does not expect to find in Wisdom literature the pressing energy and sense of immediacy that are normal in the prophetic books. Although the sage may counsel some moral decision on the part of the reader, it is not customary for him to demand it with the urgency of the prophet.
As an event in biblical history that illustrates this difference, let me suggest the 18-year delay in the construction of the second temple.
When Israel’s exiles returned from Babylon in 538 B.C., they carried an official decree, issued by Cyrus himself, that their ancient temple should be rebuilt. Indeed, the materials necessary for that rebuilding were quickly procured. For various reasons, nonetheless, chiefly opposition from local folks inimical to the returning exiles, the reconstruction was delayed until 520. Five years were required to finish it, and the temple was at last completed on March 12, 515.
Now it happens that that recorded delay receives two different interpretations in Holy Scripture, one in the Book of Ezra and the other in two prophetic books: Haggai and Zechariah.
Let us start with the prophets, the two men alive and active in 520, the very ones who inspired the resumption of the project. The preoccupation of Haggai and Zechariah was immediate, determined, and of an entirely moral impulse. Those prophets blamed the prolonged delay on a lack of resolve on the part of the returning exiles, whom they accused of losing their vision. Instead of building God’s house, the returned exiles had spent nearly two decades building their own houses. They were reprimanded, therefore, for failing to seek first the kingdom of heaven. Thus, Haggai and Zechariah took charge of the “moment” and required the proper moral resolve from their countrymen. This is the sort of thing prophets do.
When we turn to the Book of Ezra, on the other hand, the outlook is completely different. Here we find the approach of the sage, the man of cultivated pondering, who sets his sights from a larger and more reflective angle. His is a perspective almost completely uninterested in an immediate moral concern. Thus, the author of Ezra utters not a word of reproach for the returning exiles with respect to the delay in the temple’s reconstruction.
He endeavors, rather, to examine that 18-year postponement from the viewpoint of divine providence. After all, the sage reflects, no more could the building of the second temple be just the execution of a decree of Cyrus than the building of the first temple was simply a project mandated by David. It was significant that both these kings died before the construction was even begun. Truly, who among kings is authorized to build a house for the Lord? The Lord will see to the building of his own house at such time as he sees fit!
Consequently, our sage perceives another correspondence in the two cases: Each construction project had to await the Lord’s command, conveyed in the prophetic word—that of Nathan in the case of David, that of Haggai and Zechariah in the case of Cyrus.
The approach to time and events in the Book of Ezra, then, is very different from that of the prophets. It is the perspective of the theological sage, who surveys with serenity what great works the wise Lord of history has caused to come about.

Tuesday, October 9

Ezra 6: In his response to the inquiry put to his court, Darius refers to the empire as “Babylon,” a name that was retained even after its conquest by the Persians.

The emperor’s letter (verses 3-12) reports on the search in the imperial archives (verse 2) and contains the earlier decree of Cyrus, authorizing the rebuilding of the temple nearly two decades earlier. These pagan documents are incorporated into the narrative here and become, thus, integral to God’s inspired Word.

In spite of Cyrus’s requirement that the temple be completed at royal expense (verses 4,8), we know that it was the Jews themselves who paid for the work and supplies (2:68).

Five years were required to finish this work, and the temple was completed on March 12, 515, which was a Sabbath day that year. It was solemnly dedicated that same spring, on Friday, April 1 (cf. 1 Esdras 7:5; Josephus, Antiquities 11.4.7 §107). There seems to have prevailed the idea, already clear in Solomon’s dedication of the first temple (cf. 1 Kings 6:1; 2 Chronicles 3:2), that such a dedication was appropriately associated with the Passover (verses 19-22). This association will prompt Christian readers, surely, to remember that in the Gospel of John Jesus is identified both as the New Temple and as the Lamb of God.

The second temple was a humble structure, as we have seen, because the circumstances of the people were humble. Whereas Solomon had offered a thousand bulls at the dedication of the first temple, these returned exiles could afford only a hundred (verse 17).

We may also note at this point that we hear no more of Zerubbabel, who is not mentioned at all in regard to the temple’s completion. One suspects that he returned to Babylon to live out his remaining years.

The chapter’s final verse refers to the Persian Empire as “Assyria,” so persistently do conquered territories tend to retain their more ancient names.

Wednesday, October 10

Ezra 7: Now we come to the ministry of the man for whom this book is named. There are two parts to this chapter. The first (verses 1-10) is a summary of Ezra’s journey, and the second (verses 11-26) the original letter of authorization for his mission.

Our treatment of this section will follow the traditional view that Ezra arrived at Jerusalem in 458, thirteen years before Nehemiah. Those historians who date his arrival thirty or even sixty years later are obliged to presume that there are mistakes in the transmission of the text, along with other hypotheses that seem improbable to me. I believe that the traditional date, 458, is the safest and most likely date for the events narrated in the present chapter. Accordingly, we are going to presume that the Artaxerxes in these texts is Artaxerxes I (465-425), not Artaxerxes II (404-358). Thus, the “seventh years of Artaxerxes” was 458. Thus, there is a lapse of 57 years between chapter 6 and chapter 7.

Ezra, raised in a priestly family in Babylon (verses 1-5), had evidently never before been to Jerusalem. We shall see him to be a resolute sort of person, the confident and forceful leader who sees things in black and white, a man little given to carefully nuanced views, a person who inspires trust because he conveys a sense of certainty. It may be reasonably argued that Ezra would not have made a good discussion leader or talk-show host.

He surely was, however, a persuasive and decisive speaker. He is called a scribe (sopher, perhaps more accurately translated as “bookman”), an expert in the law of Moses (verse 6). Indeed, there is a fairly strong tradition, which includes the scholarly Saint Jerome, that Ezra was an important editor of the Pentateuch (and author of the closing chapter of Deuteronomy, which records the death of Moses) while he was still living in Babylon.

Ezra came to Jerusalem with a retinue of clergy for the temple worship (verse 7), authorized by a letter from the emperor (verses 11-28), as well as arrangements for finances and appointments for the temple. Ezra was not the high priest, but he was of a priestly family. He was, in fact, a descendent of Seriah (verse 1), the last high priest to die at Jerusalem prior to the Captivity. His own son, Jehozadak, was deported to Babylon 120 years before Ezra’s journey to Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 6:14).

It is clear from this letter of Artaxerxes that the Persian government expected Judea to be ruled according to the law of Moses (verses 25-26). An important and explicit item in that authorization exempted the temple and its clergy from royal taxation (verse 24). This should not surprise us, because we know that Darius made a similar exemption for the priests of Apollo at the temple in Magnesia.

Throughout the present chapter Ezra acts alone. In the next chapter he will be joined by other leaders, who will accompany him.

Thursday, October 11

The Epistle of Jude, 1-13: This brief epistle was written to meet a certain peril to the Christian faith brought on by immoral and heretical teachers (verse 4).

Their teaching and behavior fell under the heading “antinomian,” meaning “against the law.” That is, they manifested a moral attitude that took to an illegitimate extreme the sound principle that Christians are justified by grace, not by the works of the law. Their extreme application of that principle led to a lack of adherence to any moral law. Thus, those extremists became progressively bolder in the libertine pursuit of their own appetites and passions, all the while proclaiming the liberty of Christian justification.

It has proved impossible to identify exactly the congregation to whom Jude wrote this epistle, nor is it any easier to fix the date of the epistle with precision. The reference to the apostles in the past tense (verse 17) makes it difficult to fix the date earlier than the 60s, but it does not require us to fix it any later. Jude testifies, at so early a date, a determined doctrinal standard, “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (verse 3).

The word “delivered” indicates the authority of the Tradition (as in 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:13). Jude goes to some lengths to describe the punishment awaiting those who pervert that Tradition. He likens them to those who apostatized during the desert wandering (verse 5; 1 Corinthians 10:1-11; Hebrews 3:7—4:11), to the fallen angels (verse 5; Genesis 6:1-11), and to the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (verse 7; 2 Peter 2:4-6). While all three examples indicate sexual sins, the last example indicates homosexual vice, for which these heretics are seeking the approval of other Christians. The participation of such people in the Lord’s Supper is, for Jude, particularly offensive (verse 12).

Ezra 8: We come now to what appear to be the memoirs of Ezra himself, beginning with a list of the companions who accompanied him from Babylon to Jerusalem (verses 2-14). They are listed according to twelve families, a number reminiscent of the original twelve tribes of Israel. He lists his own family first (verse 2, compared with 7:5). We observe that the total number (1151) includes only men, but we are justified in thinking that at least some women and children accompanied them, perhaps to a number equal to the men themselves.

Ezra, when he gathered this assembly together for the trip to Jerusalem, was disappointed that no Levites had joined them, so he immediately took steps to remedy that shortage (verses 15-20).

A time of prayer and fasting would prepare them for the journey (verses 21-23). The sacred vessels, destined for the service of the temple, were handed over to the priests for safekeeping (verses 24-30).

With so large a retinue, the journey to Jerusalem required a hundred days (verse 31, compared with 7:8) and was followed by a respite of three days (verse 32). This rest by the waterside puts the reader in mind of the three days Israel spent beside the Jordan prior to the entrance into the Holy Land (Joshua 3:2).

Verses 35-36 shift the account to a writer other than Ezra.

Friday, October 12

Luke 13:10-17: In this story we find “the ruler of the synagogue,” a singularly unattractive, grumpy person who objected to Jesus’ healing of a crippled woman on the Sabbath.

In the midst of the spontaneous praise of God that ensued upon that gracious deed, this particular bellyacher felt it his duty to sound a warning to the congregation about liturgical proprieties: “There are six days on which men ought to work,” he declared, “therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day” (Luke 13:14).

This story serves to warn us against hardness of heart. Hardness of heart can be found even in the house of God.

Quick to pass judgment on others and blinded by his own vicious, miserly spirit, this religious leader was unable to recognize the divine presence and the outpouring of grace.

Devoid of mercy, we notice, he was also without courage. Consequently, instead of confronting Jesus directly, this coward had recourse to what had always worked for him in the past—he harangued the congregation about the woman herself!

It is often said—and it is said, I think, more often than is true—that churches are full of hypocrites. Here was one occasion, however, when the Lord really did use that noun to describe someone in the place of worship. Jesus turns his not-amused attention to this so-called ruler of the synagogue: “Hypocrite! Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it?”

The Lord gives here an example of the proper response to situations in which an individual apparently comes to church for the purpose of making other people in church miserable. Such folk need either to repent or stay home. Coming unrepentant to the house of God does not improve a man, but it can make everyone else utterly miserable.

Ezra 9: As the story continues, Ezra has been living in Jerusalem for four months, during which time he has been busy in a variety of pressing matters. He had conveyed a great deal of wealth to Jerusalem and had done so, in fact, without armed guard. Along the way he had recruited more Levites to augment the Levitical staff at the temple, which at this time was fifty-seven years old. The journey itself had lasted from April 8 to August 4 of the year 458 (7:9).

Therefore, the events of this chapter, four months later, occurred in late December of that year; it was a dreary rainy season (10:9), the sort of atmosphere that might depress the human spirit anyway.

This was not a good time for bad news, but bad news is just what Ezra received. He learned of a serious spiritual problem in Jerusalem, the widespread intermarriage of priests with non-Jews, a thing unthinkable among the Jews back in Babylon.

Ezra did not take the news calmly (verse 3). He prepared himself to deal with the problem, but he would not address the people about it until he had taken it up with the Lord. He made his prayer with uplifted hands at the time of the vesperal sacrifice (verse 5), at which it was usual to pray with uplifted hands (cf. Psalms 141 [140]:2).

We should especially note in his prayer that he did not separate himself from this sin of the people, even though he himself had not committed it; the sin pertained to “us” (verses 6,7,10,13,15). Ezra was an effective intercessor, in part because of this solidarity he maintained with those for whom he prayed.

Friday, September 28

Job 33: Like the other components in the complex discussions of the Book of Job, Elihu’s contribution is a critique, not a final answer. For him the overriding discussion is not reducible to an either/or. Elihu disagrees with, and criticizes, both Job and the three comforters.

The material in the present chapter is directed to Job. The latter, says Elihu, has gone too far in his demands for a trial between himself and God. Elihu confronts him on the point (verse 5).

Job’s three friends remained aloof from him, assuming a morally superior attitude. Elihu will do no such thing. He confesses himself at one with Job in their human solidarity, their descent from Adam (verses 4, 6). He will not talk down to Job as the comforters have.

That matter established, Elihu begins by summarizing Job’s protestations of innocence (verses 9–11), a claim advanced repeatedly throughout the book (cf. 9:21; 10:7; 13:18, 24, 27; 23:10; 27:5–6; 31 passim). This claim is pretentious, says Elihu, because “God is greater than man” (verse 12). That is to say, God owes man no explanations at all (verses 13–14), nor will Elihu attempt to act as God’s defender.

Then, like Eliphaz near the beginning (4:12–15), Elihu refers to dreams (verse 15), presumably the nightmares of Job himself (7:14). Such dreams, Elihu asserts, are providential. God employs them to draw men back from rash, dangerous, and unwarranted decisions (verses 16–17).

Elihu, displaying a compassion absent in the comments of Job’s three comforters, suggests that Job may have failed to recognize the true significance of his nightmares. Perhaps God intended them to pull him back from a reckless path.

The parallel between the dream of Eliphaz, Job’s first interlocutor, and the dreams mentioned by Elihu is not accidental. There is a deliberate correspondence between them and a contrast. Both men, in answering Job, start with dreams, but we are struck by a great difference of tone between the two. Eliphaz appealed to his own dream as the point of departure for establishing a moral judgment on Job. Elihu does not. He suggests to Job, rather, that his dream may have been the voice of God speaking to him in concern and warning. That is to say, Job’s nightmare, far from indicating God’s absence from his life, may have indicated the very opposite.

This approach will be operative in all of Elihu’s discourse. The three friends have understood Job’s sufferings to be simply punishments. Is there no other rational explanation? asks Elihu. Why presume that all suffering is by way of punishment?

Before putting that question to the three friends, Elihu first puts it to Job. Why not consider that these terrible sufferings, of which Job has so bitterly complained, represent God’s effort to preserve Job from the powers of death and darkness (verses 22–30)? Why not regard them, in fact, as a “chastening” (verse 19)? That is to say, is it really so obvious that suffering is always a punishment?

We readers, of course, instructed by the first two chapters of the book, are aware that Elihu is much closer to the correct answer than anyone who has spoken hitherto.

Saturday, September 29

Job 34: Elihu, having addressed Job, turns now to the other three characters in the story. These have not, Elihu believes, answered Job’s challenges to God in a proper way. That is to say, Job’s friends have made an inadequate presentation of the traditional wisdom itself.

Elihu’s remarks to Job’s critics are among the book’s best parts, variations of which will appear in God’s own account near the end. Elihu’s comments are heavily didactic, nonetheless, and seldom rise to the high poetic levels of the other speakers, especially Job himself.

Elihu’s chief objection to Job’s friends concerns their exclusive attribution of divine punishment to human suffering. Punishment and reward, Elihu argues, do not comprise between them the whole of God’s dealing with man. There is another and important aspect to the “negative side of God,” namely, divine correction and exhortation. God, says Elihu, is correcting and exhorting Job by permitting his sufferings.

We now meet explicitly for the first time (except in the introductory chapters in this book) a new thesis: God sends afflictions not only to punish, but also to admonish. If a man accepts these sufferings as God’s loving correction and invitation, rather than as a punishment, he will avoid the pride and self-satisfaction that may sometimes be the peril of a godly life. Such God-sent afflictions will serve, therefore, as a restorative. Neither Job nor any of his friends, Elihu believes, has sufficiently considered this perspective.

In order to advance this argument, however, Elihu must put to rest any notion of injustice in God. Such an idea involves an internal contradiction, Elihu contends (verses 10, 12); the very existence of the world depends on the thesis of God’s righteousness (verses 13–15).

There is no justice higher than God’s (verse 17), nor is the Almighty likely to be influenced by the more powerful of His creatures (verse 19). Truly, nothing in man’s experience is hidden from the gaze of God (verses 21–22). The font and source of justice, God holds all human activity to the same standard and the same sanctions (verses 24–28).

What Job’s comforters should have asserted is that God, through the sufferings that He has sent to Job, had only the latter’s proper correction in mind (verses 31–32). The insistence of his friends, however, that Job was being justly punished for his crimes simply provoked him to an improper assertion of his innocence. It was the responsibility of these men, says Elihu, to provide Job with proper instruction. The ineptitude of their arguments has served only to incite the sufferer into open rebellion against the Almighty (verses 35–37).

Moreover, Job’s call for a trial, in which he might argue his case against God, distorts the proper relationship between God and man. God is not man’s enemy or opponent. God needs opponents no more than He needs powerful friends, nor does He ever act from a sense of need.

Sunday, September 30

Job 35: Having addressed Job’s companions, Elihu turns again to Job himself and gives a fair paraphrase of Job’s position. Do not some of Job’s comments suggest that he thinks himself more righteous than God (verse 2)? Job may not have made so outlandish a claim in so many words, but what he has said amounts to the same thing (verse 3; cf. 4:17; 13:18; 15:3; 19:6–7; 21:15; 27:2–6). Now, asks Elihu, is this at all likely?

He turns Job’s gaze upwards, then, to the physical symbols of God’s transcendence, the clouds above his head (verse 5). God is not, in Himself, altered by either man’s virtue or his vice (verses 6–9). God does what He does, simply because He is free and righteous. He is not more or less righteous or free because of anything man does. How, after all, can human behavior touch God?

Is Elihu’s own presentation of the question entirely adequate, nonetheless? While there is a sense in which God is not, in Himself, affected by either man’s virtue or his vice, this is hardly a sufficient statement of the case. It is certainly not true that God is indifferent to man’s state, and the full context of Elihu’s comments shows that he knows this very well.

Rather, the point Elihu has in mind to make in this chapter is that no one has a forensic claim on God; indeed, even to voice such a claim is, in some measure, to attempt to put oneself on God’s level. This, claims Elihu, is what Job has done.

Is God indifferent to human suffering, or does He reject the cries of those in pain? No, but this does not mean that such cries are, in every case, really worthy of a hearing. Sometimes such pleadings are accompanied by the beating of a sinful heart (verses 12–13). Elihu’s point here is that not once has Job pleaded for forgiveness. His prayer has lacked humility. God hears man’s prayer because He is merciful, not because man deserves to be heard. If God seems to disregard Job’s prayer at the present, then, may it not be the case that there is still something wrong with Job’s prayer?

Job’s real trial, in fact, his true “temptation,” does not come from God. “God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed” (James 1:13–14). The trial endured by Job has demonstrated, not that Job has deserved to suffer what he has been obliged to suffer, but that, in spite of this fact, all is not well with Job. This painful trial has shown that Job himself is not beyond improvement. His prayer has made it evident that Job does not yet love God for God’s own sake.

Job’s pain has prompted him to argue that God both ignores the wickedness of evil men and neglects to reward just men (21:7–21). These are foolish words, retorts Elihu (verse 16). God has His own way of taking care of such matters, and things are not always as they appear, either with respect to God or with respect to ourselves.

God has not in anger punished Job for his words, nonetheless, and He has overlooked the foolishness of Job’s rebellious comments (verse 15). Job must now show the same patience that God has demonstrated. Job has complained that he does not see God, but Elihu insists that he must wait for God (verse 14).

Monday, October 1

Job 36: Elihu finished the previous chapter by accusing Job of hebel, variously translated as “vanity” (cf. KJV “in vain”) and “emptiness” (cf. RSV “empty talk”).

This word, so important to the Book of Ecclesiastes (where it appears 38 times, most famously in “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity”), puts a compelling finger on the problem. In the Book of Job (unlike the Book of Ecclesiastes), the problem of hebel is not an alleged emptiness in the universe (though Job in 7:16 does momentarily wonder about this); indeed, almost all the speakers in Job explicitly refute the notion of a chaotic world.

What is at issue in Job is, rather, whether or not man’s moral life will be hebel. Will Job himself prove to be only vanity and emptiness by his choices? There is irony in Elihu’s comment here, because hebel is the very word Job earlier used to describe the “comfort” his friends were providing for him (21:34).

In the Book of Job, God’s universe is in no danger. Job is the one in danger. Very serious danger. He must exercise caution, says Elihu, lest his mind be lured into total rebellion (verses 17–18).

God, says Elihu, does not hate (verse 5). Nor is He capricious; He renders judgment for the poor (verses 6, 15). When God does chastise, it is ever with a view to man’s correction and repentance (verses 8–10, 22). The time of trial, therefore, is the proper occasion of taking stock of one’s conscience. However, not to receive the judgment of God with repentance is most serious (verses 11–14). It is Job who may be failing in this regard, not God, and Job’s present path is parlous. Let not God’s chastisement lead him into rebellion.

At the end Elihu waxes poetic, and the chapter closes with his praise of God in creation (verses 26–33), praise that continues into the following chapter (37:1–13). Virtually all the lines of this paean of praise have parallels in the Book of Psalms and elsewhere in Holy Scripture.

Elihu’s point is that God is always to be praised, regardless of how suffering man feels on the subject. No matter what the lesson to be learned, God is ever the Teacher (verse 22). It is not man’s place to correct his Teacher (verse 23). Job is invited, therefore, to join all rational voices in the praise of God (verses 24–25).

Even from a purely psychological perspective, there is much wisdom in Elihu’s admonition here. God’s richest praise has ever been raised to heaven in times of suffering. Indeed, it is not a rare moment in human existence when a man’s only two real choices are either to praise God or to feel sorry for himself. Elihu invites Job to learn this lesson.

The end of this chapter (along with the first verses of the next) describes a storm. To the present writer it does not seem far-fetched to think of Elihu’s discourse at this point being accompanied by a real storm that he is describing while it happens.

Tuesday, October 2

Job 37: The first half of this chapter continues Elihu’s praise of God. This is Elihu’s way of exhorting Job, similar to the way that St. James exhorts all of us: “Is any among you suffering? Let him pray” (James 5:13). The deliberate praise of God is the proper and godly response of a faithful soul to the experience of suffering.

For example, the longsuffering Martin Rinckart in 1630 composed his well-known hymn, Nun danket Alle Gott (“Now thank we all our God”), as his response to the horrible trials of his native Eilenburg, which suffered from the devastating plague of 1619, several failed harvests, and the three different times the city was sacked during the Thirty Years’ War. In addition, Rinckart himself suffered that year from profound domestic grief.

Moreover, the popular choice of Rinckart’s stirring hymn to be sung in celebration of Thanksgiving Day reflects the attitude of those original pilgrims who first celebrated that holiday in our country. They, too, knew how to praise God for His mercy in the midst of adversity.

The section of Elihu’s hymn of praise in this chapter dwells especially on the imagery of the storm. He finally closes his discourse by exhorting Job to dwell more on what he knows of God and to assess his own suffering in the light of that knowledge. Elihu addresses Job directly, exhorting him to weigh God’s wondrous works. He puts to Job a list of parallel questions bearing on Job’s own ignorance of God’s ways (verses 15–18). To each of these questions, Job’s only possible answer is “no.” He cannot explain anything about God. Elihu then challenges Job himself to be the teacher (verses 19–20).

Most striking of Elihu’s comments is that respecting the sun (verse 21). Man’s inability to gaze directly at the light of heaven does not lessen the reality of that light. The inability is in man’s own limited faculty, not in the truth of what he is unable to gaze upon. Yet, the real light of God is brighter than the sun. Elihu means here that primeval light, the luminosity of the created universe, called forth by God’s voice on the first day of Creation, days before the sun was made (Genesis 1:3, 16). If man is unable to look directly at the sun, how does he dare to attempt to look directly at that stronger light at the heart of created reality? His inability to do so in no way calls the light itself into question.

What, finally, is to be said of Elihu’s contribution to this discussion about suffering and justice? It is worth remarking that his lengthy discourse prepares the way for God’s revelation to Job in the book’s closing chapters. It should also be noted that God does not reprimand Elihu as He does Job and the three comforters.

In the Book of Job, Elihu never arrives on the scene, nor does he leave it; he has neither beginning of days, nor end of life. Like Melchizedek, Elihu remains one of the more mysterious characters of Holy Scripture.

Wednesday, October 3

Job 38: Now—for the first time since chapter 2—the Lord Himself will speak. Why not? After all, Job has been asking for God to speak (cf. 13:22; 23:5; 30:20; 31:35), and now he will get a great deal more than he anticipated. With a mere gesture, as it were, God proceeds to brush aside all the theories and pseudo-problems of the preceding chapters.

God speaks “from the whirlwind,” min sa‘arah, an expression sometimes associated in the Bible with theophanic experience. For example, the word famously appears twice in association with Elijah’s ascent in the fiery chariot (2 Kings 2:1, 11). In other examples the word emphasizes the divine judgment, particularly in the Book of Psalms (107:25, 29; 148:8) and in the prophets (Isaiah 29:6; 40:24; 41:16; Jeremiah 23:19; 30:23; Zechariah 9:14).

More especially, however, one is struck by the word in the theophanies recorded in Ezekiel, the only other Old Testament book in which the character of Job appears. Thus, the Lord manifests Himself in this way to Ezekiel in the book’s inaugural vision by the banks of the Kabari Canal: “Then I looked, and behold, a whirlwind”—sa‘arah (1:4), which the prophet then describes at some length.

In the other two places where the word appears in Ezekiel, the emphasis is once again on the divine judgment (13:11, 13). This same emphasis marks the whirlwind in Job. He has asked for a judgment from on high. Now he will hear it.

We should observe that the One who speaks from the whirlwind is “the Lord.” Except when Job uses this divine name in 12:9, this is the first time it has appeared in the Book of Job since chapter 2. It is significant that the God who speaks in these closing chapters is identified with Israel’s Lord. Job’s critics, including Elihu, have their various theories about “God,” but the only God who will address them definitively is the Lord, Israel’s transcendent and living God of judgment and mercy. This is the God who lives and speaks beyond all philosophical and religious theory.

In this respect, the Lord’s words to Job out of the whirlwind may be considered in the light of His words to Moses on the mountain, especially His auto-identification: “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:2). This Lord speaks to Moses, if not in a whirlwind, at least just as impressively. There were, we are told, “thunderings and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain.” Moreover, “Mount Sinai was completely in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:16, 18). Now the Lord, the God who spoke to Moses, addresses Job.

At this point, all philosophical discussion comes to an end. There are questions, to be sure, but the questions now come from the Lord. Indeed, we observe in this chapter that God does not answer Job’s earlier questions. The Lord does not so much as even notice those questions; He renders them hopelessly irrelevant. He has His own questions to put to Job.

The purpose of these questions is not merely to bewilder Job. These questions have to do, rather, with God’s providence over all things. The Lord is suggesting to Job that His providence over Job’s own life is even more subtle and majestic than these easier questions which God proposes and which Job cannot begin to answer would suggest, questions about the construction of the world (verses 4–15), the courses of the heavenly bodies (verses 31–38), the marvels of earth and sea (verses 16–30), and animal life (38:39—39:30). Utterly surrounded by things that he cannot under-stand, will Job still demand to know mysteries even more mysterious?

If the world itself contains creatures that seem improbable and bewildering to the human mind, should not man anticipate that there are even more improbable and bewildering aspects to the subtler forms of the divine providence? God will not be reduced simply to an answer to Job’s shallow questions. Indeed, the divine voice from the whirlwind never once deigns even to notice Job’s questions. They are implicitly subsumed into a mercy vaster and far richer.

Implicit in these questions to Job is the quiet reminder of the Lord’s affectionate provision for all His creatures. If God so cares for the birds of the air and the plants of the fields, how much more for Job!

Thursday, October 4

Job 39: The Lord, having surveyed for Job’s benefit the myriad manifestations of divine wisdom and power in the realms of astronomy, physics, and botany, now (beginning in 38:39) starts to examine the world of zoology.

Several animals are considered in varying degrees of detail: the lion and the raven, both of which, powerful hunters though they be, depend on God’s provision (38:39–41); the mountain goat (or ibex), the deer, and the wild ass, all characterized by the freedom of their migrations (verses 1–8); the rîmu, a now-extinct species of ox that man never managed to tame (verses 9–12; the Vulgate has “rhinoceros”); the ostrich, renowned for both its stupidity and its speed, and evidently placed here (verses 13–18) to be in proximity to the next animal; the mighty war charger, whose neck, larger than its head, is “clothed with thunder,” and who revels to be once again in the excitement of battle (verses 19–25); and finally the hawk and the eagle, accomplished hunters who see from afar (verses 26–30).

The greatest detail is devoted to the only domesticated animal in the list, the destrier, or warhorse. The horse in antiquity was reserved for combat. It was not used for plowing (the work of oxen), nor for carrying burdens (the work of donkeys), nor for ordinary riding (the work of mules and donkeys). The horse, this most noble and impressive of all the animals that man has tamed, was employed exclusively for battle. Originally, equestrian warfare was by chariots, but fighting from horseback was introduced by at least the seventh century B.C. This latter case is what the Book of Job seems to have in mind, since the text does not mention chariots.

In the case of the ostrich there are special ironies relished for their sheer humor. This proud, strutting bird (verse 13) shows that she is not really very bright (verse 17). Indeed, she does not have enough sense even to protect her eggs adequately (verses 14–16). Here the Book of Job shares the common ancient view that the ostrich was lacking in elementary intelligence. Seneca testified that calling someone an ostrich was the most severe of insults, and Diodorus of Sicily humorously suggested that the ostrich hid its head in the sand to protect its weakest part. Yet, when it comes to speed, says the Lord to Job, this otherwise unimpressive ostrich has no equal (verse 18).

Such a listing of animals and their habits, described for the purpose of praising God, is found likewise in Psalm 104 (103), the common introductory psalm of Vespers. It speaks of donkeys, birds, cattle, storks, wild goats, rock badgers, and lions. Similarly, Psalm 147 portrays the raven and the horse. When animals are described in the Book of Proverbs, on the other hand, it is normally for the purpose of drawing some moral lesson.

The point driven home in the illustrations in this chapter of Job is that all these animals, even the warhorse, have an existence quite independent of man. God made them the way they are, and they tend not to answer to human expectations. Does this not show that man is bewildered even by things that are beneath him? How much more, therefore, must he humble his mind before mysteries above him!

Friday, October 5

Job 40: This chapter, unlike the two preceding, permits Job to put in a word of his own. He uses the occasion simply to confess his vileness and to state his resolve to remain silent before the Lord (verses 3–5), sentiments that will be expanded in the book’s final chapter.

Job has no plans to debate God. He will say nothing further. His earlier aspirations have really been answered, after all, because God has now spoken, and this is essentially what Job had sought. God continues, then.

As the two preceding chapters dealt with the mysteries of God’s activity in the realm of nature, the first part of this chapter turns to God’s presence in the order of conscience (verses 8–14). If Job understood next to nothing about the first, he knows even less about the second.

This revelation, too, comes min sa‘arah, “from the whirlwind” (verse 6; 38:1). Once again, as well, Job is commanded to gird up his loins like a man (verse 7; 38:3). Job is queried about who, on the evidence, is more righteous: himself or God (verse 8)? Does Job really desire a forensic setting to determine this question? Is Job capable of dealing with the myriad moral dilemmas involved in every man’s life, as God must do (verses 9–14)? In short, Job is trapped in his own subjectivity, unable to see the world from God’s perspective. There is no place where he may stand to indict the Lord.

Then, dramatically, the divine discourse goes from the realm of ethics and conscience to a consideration of two symbols of apparent chaos, both of them fearsome and incomprehensible: Behemoth and Leviathan.

Although “behemoth” is simply the plural of the Hebrew word for “beast” or “animal,” its description here seems largely to be drawn from the hippopotamus (hippos = “horse” and potamos = “river”—so “river horse”): huge, strong, invincible, even unchallenged, rightly afraid of nothing (verses 15–24). Other commentators have variously argued that the behemoth is really the crocodile, or a wild ox-buffalo, or some other kind of wild bull.

This is one of those questions that it is important not to decide. The reason for this has to do with the symbolic value of the description. The Behemoth, though portrayed with features recognized in animals already well known, represents simply “the beast.” This is the general sense that the Hebrew plural form “behemoth” has in several places in Holy Scripture (cf. Psalms 8:7; 49 [48]:10; 73 [72]:22; Joel 1:20; 2:22; Habakkuk 2:17).

That is to say, this Behemoth is a great deal more than any particular beast. It represents, rather, the wildness of untamed animal existence. It conveys in symbolism the truth that the world is not made according to man’s own measure. This Beast is irrational in the sense that it does not make rational choices. Yet, its behavior is not irrational, not chaotic, because it obeys the integral instincts placed in it by its Creator. It is not tame, but it is not really chaotic. In its own way, it declares the glory of God.

Friday, September 21

Job 26: Bildad has not said anything worth answering, so Job doesn’t answer him. Instead, he discourses on the immense majesty of God in the phenomena of heaven and earth.

This is a further and significant development in Job’s spiritual maturation through the course of the book. Especially since his avowal of personal faith in his “Redeemer” in chapter 19, Job has become more preoccupied with the world around him than with the misery of his own existence. Now he contemplates what God has made. Job’s mind escapes, in this way, the confinement of his own suffering.

In the opening of the chapter, Job throws one final taunt at those who pretended to be his comforters. Just what have they accomplished (verses 2–4)?

Then he proceeds to consider the wonders of all creation, beginning with the world that has so often preoccupied him, the nether world—sheol and ’abaddon (verse 6), the realm of the dead. The juxtaposition of these two words is also found in Proverbs 15:11 and 27:20.

In the present passage, the word ’abaddon (often translated as “destruction,” as in Job 31:12) serves as a personification of death itself, which seems also to be the case in Job 28:22. This is likewise how the same word is used in Revelation 9:11, where it refers to “the angel of the bottomless pit.”

Though this region of the dead lies concealed from the sight of man, it is open to the eyes of God. For Job this truth is important, certainly, because his great fear, through much of this book, is that he will die and simply disappear from the gaze of God.

From his consideration of the world beneath, Job then rises to contemplate the heavens above. The “north” (saphon) of verse 7 refers to the lights of the northern sky, dominated by the pole star. The rendering of the canonical Greek text here, borea, may evoke in some readers a memory of the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis.

Once again, Job’s juxtaposition of the nether world and the celestial world, in both of which places God is present and knowing, puts the reader in mind of Psalm 139 (138), where the Psalmist exclaims, “If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell (sheol), behold, You are there.”

These lights in the heavens, says Job, are suspended over “emptiness,” tohu (verse 7; cf. Genesis 1:2). The earth floats beneath this emptiness above and mere “air” beneath. (This last noun, belima, which is found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, I have translated as “air,” because in rabbinical literature it bears the meaning of “upper atmosphere.” The canonical Greek text here, followed by several modern translations, says “nothing,” ouden.) Since many ancient texts, including the Bible, speak of the earth as suspended “upon the waters,” the imagery here in Job is doubly striking.

From air, Job moves on to consider water, first in its atmospheric form—clouds and vapors (verses 8–9), and then in its earthly form—liquid (verse 10). The shaking of the “pillars of heaven” (verse 11) suggests a booming storm. God adorns these heavens by His Spirit, Ruach (verse 13), a theological truth proclaimed also in Psalm 33(32):6. This is still descriptive of a storm scene, as is the “thunder of His might” in verse 14.

Saturday, September 22

Job 27: During the past several chapters Job has been gaining a grip on his soul. His deep critique of the moral philosophies of his opponents has led him to neither skepticism nor despair. On the contrary, in this chapter we find him resolved to maintain the moral integrity that he displayed at the beginning of the book. Indeed, in his vow to do so, Job invokes the very God who has tried him so severely (verses 2–3).

As long as he lives, therefore, as long as “my breath [nishmati] is in me, And the breath of God in my nostrils [b’aphi],” Job will not use that breath, given by God, to “speak wickedness” (verse 4). Custody over his speech represents man’s most elementary stewardship, because breath itself is the first gift that man receives from God. Job’s reference to Adam’s reception of this initial gift seems pretty clear in the wording of the text: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils [b’aphyo] the breath [nishmat] of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). (Elihu the Buzite will also cite this text from Genesis in Job 33:4.)

Whatever the cost, then, Job is determined to maintain this elementary stewardship of his moral life, no matter how painful, humiliating, and short that life may be (verses 5–6). All Job has left is his integrity, and he will wager everything on it. Job does not pretend to understand the moral structure of the world, as he has so often confessed. He does perceive, however, the difference between right and wrong, and he intends to live on the basis of that elementary perception.

If Job is right, though, then his critics are wrong (verse 7), so the judgment of God is inevitable in their case as well (verses 8–10). Like Socrates at his trial, Job is persuaded that God too knows the difference between a just man and an unjust man, so his unjust critics must beware. Job prepares, then, to lecture his three friends (verse 11) on the theme of the divine wisdom. (This lecture will be chapter 28.)

Often men do not seek wisdom, being distracted by the love of wealth (verses 16–17). The initial steps toward wisdom lie in the consideration of the divine judgment that hangs over human life (verses 18–23).

Psalm 49 (Greek 48) may profitably be read with the second half of the present chapter of Job (verses 13–23). Both texts deal with the same theme and the same metaphysical problem, and in both of them the wisdom tradition of the Bible appeals to a universal theme of philosophy, mankind’s perennial quest for understanding. Neither text refers to God’s special revelation to the chosen people. No appeal is made to the divine words spoken on Sinai or to the prophets.

What we find in these two texts, rather, is the God-inspired thought of biblical man addressing the human mind on its own terms. Both passages treat of the universal mortality of men, “all the inhabitants of the world, both low and high, rich and poor together.” Psalm 49, based on a strictly philosophical motif, mentions God only twice, and the second of these instances sounds the very note that Job has pursued: “God will deliver my soul from the power of the grave.”

Sunday, September 23

Job 28: Job goes on now to meditate on the sheer inaccessibility of God’s secret designs, which lie concealed from human view.

In the previous chapter Job had considered the moral effects of money—or silver—on the conscience of man (27:16–17), but now he alters the sense and direction of the metaphor. These concealed wonders of the divine mind, he reflects, are more secret than veins of silver and other metals that lie buried in the bowels of the earth.

Because wisdom, like the lode veins of metals and nuggets of precious stone, lies concealed beneath the empirical surface of reality, man must dig for it. It is not available to him on the earth’s surface, the place where he earns his daily bread (verse 5). When he endeavors to dig deeper, nonetheless, man discovers that the divine secrets lie further than his thought can hope to penetrate. God by His hidden wisdom made the world and continues to sustain it in existence. Wisdom rests at the very base of things, lying deeper than any precious metal or costly stone, and its worth is incomparably greater. Wisdom is buried, in fact, in the depths of God.

Job’s metaphor is strengthened by the remoteness from which these various metals must be brought. Gold comes from far-off Ophir (identified as Supara in India by Josephus, Antiquities 8.6.4, §164; cf. the Septuagint of 2 Chronicles 8:18) and Sheba in southern Arabia. The topaz comes from Ethiopia, equally far away (verse 19). Iron and copper are imported from Cyprus (the very name of which island gives us the root of “copper” itself). Pearls and coral are raised from the depths of the sea (verse 18).

We observe that Job is no longer answering his critics in this text. He has abandoned them to their shallow theories about how the world is constructed. Job pursues, rather, the mind of God, realizing even in his pursuit that the divine wisdom vastly transcends the mind and comprehension of man.

Only God knows the way to wisdom (verse 23). God gives to man only “the beginning of wisdom,” not its final meaning, and this beginning consists in “the fear of the Lord” (verse 28). By God’s gift man can make a start in his search for wisdom, and he does so by turning away from evil. This path of conversion, or “turning away,” is Job’s own chosen way, and it has been since the beginning of the book (1:8; 2:3).

Job cannot read the mind of God, then, not even in those matters that concern his own life and destiny; but he does know what God requires of him, and he has affirmed already his resolve to live in perfect integrity (cf. 27:4–7). That is to say, although Job is not given to share in the secret designs of history, even his own history, he does know what is expected of him, and this is sufficient. Like those Levites charged to bear the Ark without looking into it, Job must carry forward the divine wisdom in the plodding path of his life, even if he must do this in relative darkness.

For the rest, Job’s mind may quietly acquiesce in the evidence of divine wisdom revealed in the established structure of the world. Whatever else may be said about the formation of the elements, they display order and understanding, not chaos (verses 23–27).

Monday, September 24

Job 29: These next three chapters contain the longest of Job’s soliloquies, in the course of which he surveys, for the last time, the overwhelming tragedy that has befallen him and the great moral puzzle that it poses to his mind.

He first reviews in some detail the happiness of his former life (chapter 29), then his subsequent misery (chapter 30), and finally his own innocence throughout the trial (chapter 31).

The present chapter, then, is about “the way things used to be,” those former days when Job was content, wealthy, and universally honored. Job enjoyed prosperity in those days. His lot was like that of the patriarchs in Genesis, notably Jacob. God’s protecting presence was tangible in those bygone times.

Those were the days in which Job was conscious of God’s protection: “God watched over me” (verse 2). The reader here recalls that Satan had made that very point with respect to Job when he told the Lord, “Have you not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side?” (1:10). Job enjoyed, in those days, what the Psalmist promised: “As the mountains surround Jerusalem, / So the Lord surrounds His people / From this time forth and forever” (Psalm 125[126]:10).

Bildad earlier taunted Job, “The light is dark in his tent, / And his lamp beside him is put out” (18:10), but Job can recall the days when “His lamp shone upon my head, / And when by His light I walked through darkness” (verse 3).

Job previously enjoyed the blessings that the wisdom tradition, notably the Book of Proverbs, promises to God’s loyal servants. Proverbs affirms of the Lord, “His secret counsel [sod] is with the upright” (3:32), and Job remembers those times, “When the friendly counsel [sod] of God was over my tent” (verse 4).

Respecting his relationships with his fellow men, Job was held in high esteem by everyone back then (verses 7–11, 21–23), not only because of his wealth, but also because of his righteousness and charity (verses 12–17). Contrary to the accusation of Eliphaz (22:6–9), Job was well known for his sense of justice (verse 11).

Job expected, moreover, to die in that state of universal approbation (verse 18), beloved of God and men. In those bygone days all these things seemed normal to Job, who related such blessings to his friendship with God and his doing of God’s will. But then, with no discernible explanation, everything changed all at once, and this change in Job’s fortunes is the subject of the next chapter.

What Job has established in the present chapter is that God formerly treated him as a just man, bestowing on him all the blessings that ancient wisdom had promised to just men.

Tuesday, September 25

Job 30: The motif of the present chapter, which is an extended and detailed contrast with Job’s earlier state as described in the previous chapter, is indicated by the repeated expression, “but now” (verses 1, 9, 16). This “but now” stands in contrast to Job’s “months of old” (29:2).

The thematic development of this chapter is the opposite of that in the chapter preceding. Whereas in chapter 29 Job began with his relationship to God (29:1–6) and then went on to speak of his relationship to his fellow men (29:7–25), in the present chapter he reverses the order, commencing with his alienation from his fellow men (verses 1–10) and then going to his sense of alienation from God (verses 11–31).

Formerly revered by elders, princes, and nobles (29:8–10), Job now finds himself contemned and reviled by utter nobodies. These have mocked him (verse 1) and treated him with obloquy (verses 9–10).

Never before in this book has Job been so harsh against his critics, even throwing back in their faces their low social standing. As we have seen, these three critics were men of the desert. Eliphaz came from Teman in the Negev, Zophar from Arabia, and Bildad from the far side of the Fertile Crescent. Now Job, in no little bitterness of soul, ridicules them as outlanders from the stark wilderness, “desolate and waste. . . . They had to live in the clefts of the valleys, / In caves of the earth and the rocks. / Among the bushes they brayed, / Under the nettles they nested” (verses 3, 6, 7).

These are rough comments but hardly unique in the history of religious and critical thought. For example, Thomas Aquinas later described the people in that part of the world as “bestial men dwelling in deserts,” “homines bestiales in desertis morantes” (Summa Contra Gentiles 1.6).

If Job permits himself to be carried away somewhat at this point, we recall that he has, after all, been sorely tried by his critics.

All such treatment might be bearable from others, claims Job, but not from God (verses 16–19). In his supposed rejection by God, Job feels that his soul has been “poured out” (verse 16; cf. 10:1), an expression reminiscent of the Psalmist when he speaks of the Lord’s Passion (Psalms 22[21]:15–16).

Then, abruptly, Job stops speaking about God and turns to address the Lord directly (verse 20), for the first time since 17:3. In sentiments that form a counterpart to the previous chapter (29:2–4), Job accuses God of cruelty and persecution (verse 21), but most especially of remaining silent (verse 20).

We must note here that Job does not ask to be restored to his former state. He simply wants to know why he is being so treated, since he has never treated anyone as badly as both God and man are currently treating him (verses 24–25). He does not deserve this treatment, Job avows, so he wonders why he is receiving it.

Wednesday, September 26

Job 31: Since the opening chapters of the book we readers have known that Job is on trial. Indeed, this is the indispensable key to understanding the story. (For this reason, those modern critics who regard the first two chapters of Job as a later addition to the text find themselves interpreting a book completely different from the Book of Job.) The trial of Job is the premise and presupposition of this biblical book.

This trial of Job has a clear parallel in Zechariah 3:2–6, where Satan brings accusation against the High Priest Joshua. We observe there—as here—that God is on the side of the one accused. In that prophetic passage the Lord rebukes Satan and, as a sign of Joshua’s acquittal, commands that the High Priest be clothed with clean garments. Moreover, in Zechariah 6:11–14 “crowns” (yes, plural, ‘ataroth) are prepared for Joshua, to indicate his innocence. Curiously, in the present chapter Job also speaks of “crowns” (again plural, ‘atarothI) with which he will be adorned (verse 36).

Job does not seem to know, at first, that he is being tried in accordance with God’s own will. We even sense that Job’s mind would be greatly relieved if he knew that he was being tested. Indeed, how reassured Job would be if he were aware of God’s own assessment of him to Satan!

The notion of a trial has been imposed on Job’s mind, not by the misfortunes that he has suffered, but by the steady flow of accusations brought against him by these three friends of his. They had originally arrived to be his “comforters,” but they very quickly became his accusers. Over and over, without a shred of empirical evidence against Job, they have accused him of dreadful crimes.

If Job feels himself to be on trial, therefore, it is hard to blame him for it. Now that his three witnesses have already borne their testimony against him (more as “character witnesses” than as “eyewitnesses,” to be sure), it appears now that “the prosecution rests its case” in Job’s regard.

But this is all absurd, thinks Job. Even before the trial started, he had already been sentenced. In fact, the sentence is even now being executed! Everything is proceeding backwards. This is chaos! (For a strikingly similar sensation of a legal trial as an outright nightmare, an outlandish exercise in anarchy and nihilism, one may profitably read Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess or The Trial.)

No matter, says Job, his defense will be made, no matter what. So he “swears himself in” and proceeds with a detailed testimony to his own innocence. Job runs through a fairly high code of ethics (not unlike that of Ezekiel 18:5–9) and rings the changes on his “not guilty” plea, giving specific rebuttal to the slanderous testimony of his accusers (notably Eliphaz in chapter 22).

In this defense Job repeatedly employs the normal Hebrew formula for a legal oath or imprecation: “If I have done such-and-such, may the Lord do this-and-that to me.” Often, in this formula, only the antecedent, not the consequent, is actually spoken, implying that the person swears that the accusation against him is untrue. Job employs both the complete and the truncated form of this oath rather frequently in this chapter (verses 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 38, 39). Thus, this entire chapter is just a series of imprecations, at the end of which “the words of Job are ended” (verse 40).

Is Job correct and proper in all these affirmations and denials? Does his defense actually prove Job to be innocent? In the sight of men arguably so, but not in the eyes of God. Man cannot litigate against God. In this chapter, then, Job has clearly gone too far in his claims, and the book’s next speaker, Elihu the Buzite, is going to call him on it. In the book’s final chapter, moreover, Job will very explicitly retract this defense.

Thursday, September 27

Job 32: By the end of Chapter 31, Job has answered all of the objections and arguments made by his three friends, thereby reducing them to silence. The final verse of chapter 31 suggests that “the defense rests”: “The words of Job are ended.” In the trial of Job, it would now seem time for a verdict.

But then, out of nowhere, an entirely new speaker suddenly bursts on the scene, an amicus curiae as it were, “Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram,” who rushes forth with all the impetuosity of youth. Elihu has been so silent hitherto that not even the narrator seems to have known he was present! Now, however, the young man insists on adding his own comments. Maintaining silence hitherto, he says, and thereby showing proper deference to the four older men (verse 4), this Elihu has been listening to the give-and-take of their lengthy discussion, a seemingly interminable debate that has lasted through twenty-nine chapters.

Outwardly patient during that prolonged discussion, Elihu has been inwardly seething with rancor at both Job and the other three gentlemen (verses 2–3). Hardly able to contain himself any longer, he disagrees with nearly everything said so far. Now, therefore, with a great display of indignation Elihu begins his discourse, which will run on for the next seven chapters, easily the longest single speech in the book.

Elihu begins by informing these four older men how patient he has remained during their pointless and frustrating arguments. Nonetheless, even as he boasts about his heroic longsuffering, we note the irony that Elihu mentions his own anger four times in five consecutive verses! Maybe he is not as patient as he thinks.

Job’s three comforters, having exhausted their case against him, seem content now to leave the suffering Job to God, having nothing more to say. Not so Elihu. In a torrent he will vent the pressure that has been building up within him (verses 18–20).

However, even as he answers his elders, Elihu not surprisingly demonstrates the self-consciousness of youth and inexperience. He must justify himself by explaining that he is a plainspoken man, a fellow both candid and proud of it (verses 21–22).

The amusement that young, impetuous Elihu’s appearance provokes in us readers should not cause us to overlook the importance of his specific contribution to the Book of Job. After all, Job has now reduced his three critics to silence. Especially in the previous three chapters, he has abundantly answered their accusations with an able defense. In some sense it would appear that Job has won his case. “Here is my mark,” he proclaimed (31:35). Repeatedly in the previous chapter he has sworn to his innocence.

But has Job really demonstrated his right to hurl down a gauntlet to the Almighty? Can anyone, in fact, rightly establish such a claim? From a theological perspective it is imperative that Job now be challenged on this point, and it will be the responsibility of Elihu to do it. Elihu’s contribution to the discussion, therefore, is of the essence. Without the words of Elihu, the Book of Job would be a different book. Elihu’s “summing up” prepares for the divine verdict on which the book will end.

Friday, September 28

Job 33: Like the other components in the complex discussions of the Book of Job, Elihu’s contribution is a critique, not a final answer. For him the overriding discussion is not reducible to an either/or. Elihu disagrees with and criticizes both Job and the three comforters.

The material in the present chapter is directed to Job. The latter, says Elihu, has gone too far in his demands for a trial between himself and God. Elihu confronts him on the point (verse 5).

Job’s three friends remained aloof from him, assuming a morally superior attitude. Elihu will do no such thing. He confesses himself at one with Job in their human solidarity, their descent from Adam (verses 4, 6). He will not talk down to Job as the comforters have.

That matter established, Elihu begins by summarizing Job’s protestations of innocence (verses 9–11), a claim advanced repeatedly throughout the book (cf. 9:21; 10:7; 13:18, 24, 27; 23:10; 27:5–6; 31 passim). This claim is pretentious, says Elihu, because “God is greater than man” (verse 12). That is to say, God owes man no explanations at all (verses 13–14), nor will Elihu attempt to act as God’s defender.

Then, like Eliphaz near the beginning (4:12–15), Elihu refers to dreams (verse 15), presumably the nightmares of Job himself (7:14). Such dreams, Elihu asserts, are providential. God employs them to draw men back from rash, dangerous, and unwarranted decisions (verses 16–17).

Elihu, displaying a compassion absent in the comments of Job’s three comforters, suggests that Job may have failed to recognize the true significance of his nightmares. Perhaps God intended them to pull him back from a reckless path.

The parallel between the dream of Eliphaz, Job’s first interlocutor, and the dreams mentioned by Elihu is not accidental. There is a deliberate correspondence between them and a contrast. Both men, in answering Job, start with dreams, but we are struck by a great difference of tone between the two. Eliphaz appealed to his own dream as the point of departure for establishing a moral judgment on Job. Elihu does not. He suggests to Job, rather, that his dream may have been the voice of God speaking to him in concern and warning. That is to say, Job’s nightmare, far from indicating God’s absence from his life, may have indicated the very opposite.

This approach will be operative in all of Elihu’s discourse. The three friends have understood Job’s sufferings to be simply punishments. Is there no other rational explanation? asks Elihu. Why presume that all suffering is by way of punishment?

Before putting that question to the three friends, Elihu first puts it to Job. Why not consider that these terrible sufferings, of which Job has so bitterly complained, represent God’s effort to preserve Job from the powers of death and darkness (verses 22–30)? Why not regard them, in fact, as a “chastening” (verse 19)? That is to say, is it really so obvious that suffering is always a punishment?

We readers, of course, instructed by the first two chapters of the book, are aware that Elihu is much closer to the correct answer than anyone who has spoken hitherto.

Friday, September 14

Job 19: This is arguably the finest chapter in the Book of Job, containing his most memorable profession of faith.

Up to this point in the book, Job has attempted various “soundings” of the mystery of his sufferings, and these themes are remembered again in the present chapter. Thus, he speaks once again of the testimony of his conscience (6:30; 9:29; 10:7; 16:17), his appeal to God’s justice (10:2, 7; 13:23; 16:21), his sense of God’s friendship (7:8,21; 10:8–9; 14:15), his desire for God’s vindication of his case (14:13–15; 16:19–20). This last theme, Job’s desire for God’s vindication, dominates the closing section of the chapter.

Job begins by wondering why his friends feel so threatened by his reaction to his predicament (19:4). Are they really so unsure of themselves and their theories? What, after all, do they have to lose? Job is dealing with God (19:6), not them, and the problem is on God’s side, not Job’s (19:7). Job argues that his sufferings do not come from some inexorable law (19:8–12), as Bildad supposes (cf. 18:5–10), but from God’s intentional choice.

Indeed, it was God who sent these alleged comforters to make him even more miserable (19:12–15,19), to say nothing of his wife (verse 17)! He is wasting away (19:20) and now pleads for pity from these professed friends (19:21–22).

Then come the truly shining lines of the book, where Job places all his hope in God, his “Redeemer” or Vindicator in the latter days (verses 23–27). This noun, go’el, is the active participial form of the verb ga’al, meaning “to avenge.”

Both the noun and the verb are often used in the Hebrew Bible with reference to God Himself, and, in those instances where this is the case, the Christian transmission of Holy Scripture has preferred the words “redeem” and “purchase” to translate this Hebrew verb. Thus, Psalm 74(73):2 says that God “redeemed” or “purchased” (ga’alta) His people in their Exodus from Egypt. Similarly, God is called the “Redeemer” (Go’el) of the fatherless (Proverbs 23:11; cf. Jeremiah 50:34). Such expressions are very common in the Book of Psalms (for example, 69:19 [68:18]; 107 [106]:2).

Particularly to the point with reference to the Book of Job is the use of this verb, ga’al, when it means deliverance from death or the underworld (Sheol). This context is found in Psalm 103(102):4 and Hosea 13:14.

When Job calls God his Go’el, therefore, he is speaking with the common voice of Holy Scripture. The Lord is explicitly invoked by this name in Psalm 19:15 (18:14) and 78:34 (77:35). In the second part of the Book of Isaiah this word is a standard epithet for God (41:14; 43:14; 44:6; 47:4; 48:17; 49:7,8,26; 54:5; 60:16; 63:16).

Job’s Go’el is identical to his heavenly Witness (‘edh) in 16:19–20 and his “Spokesman” (melits) in 9:33 and 33:23. Job’s appeal here is entirely eschatological. That is to say, he lays all his hope in God’s final, future, definitive judgment.

Until that day, and in testimony to that hope, Job wants these words inscribed in stone. Here we have the Hebrew Scriptures’ clearest expression of hope for the resurrection of the dead and the final vision of God. This chapter is one of direct preparation for the New Testament and the glory of the Resurrection.

Saturday, September 15

Job 20: Through the various soliloquies, prayers, and discourses of Job, we may observe a distinct development and maturing of his thought. The critical observations of his friends, even their insults and obloquy, force him to examine his own ideas and perceptions more critically, to try fresh paths of reflection, to probe his problem anew from previously untried perspectives. Job’s mind is not monochrome; it actually changes and grows richer throughout the course of the book.

With Job’s three friends, the very opposite is true. In the eight responses that they make to him, the reader observes that the thought-content, if it can be said to alter at all, rather grandly declines. Job grows, that is to say, while his friends diminish.

The first speaker was Eliphaz, who largely based his argument against Job on his personal experience, his religious vision, insight, or veda. Although the thought of Eliphaz is certainly found wanting in the full context of the Book of Job, his first discourse did represent, in fact, a solid nucleus of profound insight. Eliphaz was, so to speak, an eyewitness. He represented a living contact with genuine religious experience. Whole civilizations could be constructed on the teachings of Eliphaz.

Next came Bildad, however, whose argument against Job appealed, not to any religious or metaphysical experience of his own, but to the inherited and established teaching of his elders. Bildad represents, as it were, the next generation of thinkers, and in the transition from Eliphaz to Bildad we observed insight declining into theory. Bildad was no eyewitness, but more of a character witness. He represented a tradition rather than an insight. Bildad’s ideas, compared with those of Eliphaz, were not vibrant. Indeed, they were somewhat stale.

Finally, when we came to Zophar’s contribution, there was neither insight nor theory, but mere opinion and prejudice. Moving through the arguments of these three men, we perceived a decline of insight into tradition, and tradition into bias. The respective arguments of Job’s friends, that is to say, followed a downward path.

Now, as these same three speakers take their second turns to speak, their arguments have become even worse, because each man can do no more than repeat what he said before, only this time in a much louder and more strident voice: “What?! Didn’t you hear me the first time?!”

The loudest and harshest of these is Zophar, who had neither insight nor theory even to start with. Zophar never possessed any argument stronger than a prejudice, and his second attempt is simply a more obstreperous version of the first.

Zophar’s speech here in chapter 20 and Bildad’s in chapter 18 serve as two sides to frame Job’s great profession of faith in chapter 19. The contrast between Job’s inspiring, living profession and the moldy, repeated vituperations of these two men could not be starker. The present chapter is Zophar’s perverted fantasy about what an evil man Job must be and what a terrible divine judgment awaits him. It sounds all the more ridiculous and improbable because it so closely follows on the grandeur of Job’s aspirations in the previous chapter.

Sunday, September 16

Job 21: Most of this is Job’s examination of the considerable empirical evidence that stands against the thesis of his friends. Job only argues here; he does not pray. Psychologically strengthened by his own affirmation of faith two chapters earlier, he now goes on the offensive against these mean, narrow men who have made themselves his critics. They have contended all along that God blesses the virtuous and punishes the wicked, and that this principle of retributive justice is manifest in Job’s own fate. Oh, says Job, is this so clear?

The example elicited by Job is not the obvious villain, the wicked tyrant proposed by Eliphaz (15:20) and Zophar (20:12–14, 18), because such a person cannot truly be called happy. Job proposes, rather, the simply godless man, who has no time for God nor sees why he should. Such a one is sufficiently happy with his lot in this world, so why bother about God? Does not this example indicate that goodness and good fortune are not necessarily inseparable things?

Indeed, it seems to be the case that prosperity itself may actually prompt a man to adopt godless sentiments (verses 14–15). Still, says Job, we see irreligious men enjoying God’s benefits, rather much as his three friends claim is the lot solely of God-fearing men.

Take the blessings that Eliphaz predicates of the religious man in 5:20–26. These blessings also fall to the lot of the irreligious man described by Job here in verses 8–13. Such a one receives God’s precious gifts, such as children (verse 8), homes (verse 9), possessions (verse 10), and happiness (verse 11). Truth to tell, are not these the blessings that Job himself formerly knew? But an ungodly, irreligious man may have these things as well.

And then that same man may also die a painless death (verse 13). Moreover, does not death itself suggest that God is something less than discriminating in the outpouring of His benedictions? Death befalls everyone, just and unjust alike (verses 23–26). Just where, then, is all this justice that established the world?

Dr. S. M. Hutchens has summarized very well the metaphysical problem uncovered in this chapter of Job: “I believe that one of the fundamental insights of the Book of Job is that theodicy is always a losing game. God cannot be justified, by Reason, reasons, or reasoning. The only argument for God is God Himself. . . . No matter how much a man has suffered or received in his suffering, it does not qualify him to serve as God’s attorney.”

Monday, September 17

Job 22: In this, his third speech, Eliphaz the Temanite abandons all restraint in his response to Job. Did not Job’s most recent comments, after all, completely overthrow the moral order? No more, then, will Eliphaz demonstrate the forbearance that somewhat characterized his first speech (chapters 4—5), nor even the (Eliphaz would say) restrained tone of his second (chapter 15). He now regards Job as the utter skeptic and unbeliever that his most recent remarks prove him to be.

We observe how Eliphaz, having started from the highest moral authority among the three comforters, sinks now to the lowest. This moral decline demonstrates the Latin adage, corruptio optimi pessima, or, as Shakespeare rephrased it, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” We know that Eliphaz is a religious man, but now his religion is put at the service of intellectual and moral distortion as he accuses Job of the vilest crimes, especially cruelty to the poor (verses 6–9).

No point of this accusation against Job, of course, can be sustained by evidence. Eliphaz never appeals to evidence, however. His arguments are entirely a priori, arguments “from principle.” He has no empirical evidence for Job’s sins. These alleged offenses of Job are but inferences drawn from Eliphaz’s theory. Unfortunately his theory is wrong.

The error displayed in the argument of Eliphaz is the one logicians call the AC fallacy, “affirming the consequent.” It is the kind of argument that asserts that, because athletes must be strong, all strong people must be athletes.

This very common formal logical fallacy consists in the misguided attempt to argue from an inference (or consequent) to a premise (or antecedent); that is to say, it is the attempt to reverse the terms of a hypothesis. This description may sound complicated, but another example renders it easier to understand.

Let us look at the following hypothetical syllogism, which is perfectly valid: “(A) If I steal all the money in Chase Manhattan Bank, I will be wealthy. (B) I have stolen all the money in Chase Manhattan Bank. (C) Therefore, I am wealthy.” The juxtaposition of these two antecedents or premises (A and B) leads logically to the consequent or inference (C). This is a sound exercise in logic.

The AC fallacy, however, which “affirms the consequent,” endeavors to reverse the process of that valid hypothetical syllogism. It turns the argument backwards by simply “affirming the consequent” of the hypothesis. Sticking with the same example, the AC fallacy says: “(A) If I steal all the money in Chase Manhattan Bank, I will be wealthy. (B) I am wealthy. (C) Therefore, I must have stolen all the money in Chase Manhattan Bank!”

We immediately sense that something is wrong with this argument, because it implies that wealthy people are necessarily thieves. This argument is fallacious on its face, because we know that there are all sorts of ways of becoming wealthy besides recourse to theft.

This kind of fallacy, though somewhat common, is easily spotted by inspection, as the present example shows, and we would expect a man of Eliphaz’s intellectual culture to detect it readily.

Instead, Eliphaz has been using that same fallacy to argue against Job. He is saying, “(A) People suffer for it if they sin. (B) Job is suffering. (C) Therefore, Job must have sinned.”

Just as there are all sorts of explanations for wealth besides bank robbery, however, so there are all sorts of explanations for personal suffering besides personal sin.

The narrow moral imagination of Eliphaz, nonetheless, is incapable of considering such possibilities. He has had a personal religious experience that he described earlier in the book, and he bases his entire moral theory on the limited insight derived from that experience. He had a vision one night, and his hair stood on end (4:15), and now he thinks he “knows it all.” In this he presumes to be God’s spokesman (verses 21–30).

Tuesday, September 18

Job 23: Having listened to Eliphaz’s third discourse, Job apparently feels, “Why bother?” Consequently, in this chapter he limits his rebuttal of Eliphaz to a brief and entirely oblique repudiation of the latter’s slanders against him (verses 11–12).

As Job was entirely argumentative in chapter 21, so in these next two chapters he becomes entirely meditative. The tone of these two chapters is deeply sad, notwithstanding Job’s high assertion of faith in chapter 19. His mood is more somber now, as he reflects on God’s inaccessibility. If chapter 18 represented Job’s pillar of fire, the present discourse is his pillar of cloud, and both experiences are integral to his testing. Now he longs for a God that he cannot reach: “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him” (verse 3).

In verses 8–10 Job describes his sense of God’s absence in terms reminiscent of the psalmist’s description of God’s presence (cf. Psalm 139[138]). A comparison of these two texts is instructive. The Psalmist found God in whatever direction he turned: “You have hedged me behind and before, / And laid Your hand upon me” (Psalm 139:5). God, that is to say, is in front and in back of him. God is also on either side of him: “Even there Your hand shall lead me, / And Your right hand hold me” (139:10). In short, the Psalmist finds that he can go nowhere and escape the presence of God: “Where can I go from Your Spirit? / Or where can I flee from Your presence?” (139:7).

Like the Psalmist, Job seeks God in every direction: “I go forward, but He is not there, / And backward, but I cannot perceive Him; / When He works on the left hand, I cannot behold Him; / When He turns to the right hand, I cannot see Him” (verses 8–9). In short, Job’s experience seems, at first, to be the opposite of that in Psalm 139. Whereas the Psalmist found God everywhere, Job finds Him nowhere. As Eric Voegelin observed when commenting on this text of Job, “the search in space no longer reveals a divine presence” (Israel and Revelation [Volume 14 of Order and History], page 76).

It must be said, nonetheless, that this contrast between Job and the Psalmist is more apparent than real. Job is no skeptic about the divine presence. Indeed, he is overpowered by it: “Therefore I am terrified at His presence; / When I consider this, I am afraid of Him. / For God made my heart weak, / And the Almighty terrifies me” (verses 15–16).

In each case, moreover, there is the profound sense of being known by God. Thus, the Psalmist began his meditation, “O LORD, You have searched me and known me (vatteda‘) . . . . You comprehend my path . . . And are acquainted with all my ways (derakai)” (Psalm 139:1, 3). Job, for his part, affirms no less: “But He knows the way (yada‘ Derek) that I take; / When He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold” (verse 10).

The Psalmist does, in fact, finish his meditation with sentiments that we easily associate with the soul of Job: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; / Try me, and know my anxieties; / And see if there is any wicked way in me, / And lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24).

Wednesday, September 19

Job 24: The present chapter continues Job’s seventh response to his critics. Here he leaves the limiting confines of his own experience to reflect more generally on man’s miserable estate. This reflection continues the startling challenge that Job had made in chapter 21, offering further evidence to dispute the “moral universe” idea defended by his three friends.

To these men, who have been consistently asserting that those who suffer deserve to suffer, Job raises the spectacle of those who clearly suffer unjustly. God sees all such suffering (verse 1), but He does not intervene, says Job.

Thus, men are obliged to endure the theft of their property (verses 2–4). They must bear with homelessness and exposure (verses 7–8). They have to sustain injustice and oppression (verses 9, 12). Hunger presses upon them (verse 10). Those thus oppressed do not deserve such things. But does God put a stop to all these moral outrages (verse 12)? Manifestly He does not.

Thus Job demolishes the theory that suffering is solely the lot of the wicked. Those who would defend the justice of God must do so in a way that takes seriously these sad facts of life.

And if the evidence shows that the just must sometimes endure injustice, is it not also true that the unjust go unpunished? Is it so obvious that God invariably chastises the sinner? Does God, for instance, invariably bring retribution on the murderer (verse 14)? Is it always the case that the adulterer is reproved (verse 15)? Does it never happen that the thief goes unpunished (verse 16)? Those who glibly contend that the world is founded on divine justice, says Job, had better take a closer look at such evidence!

Job is not arguing that God is unjust, of course, nor is he denying that justice itself is rooted in the structure of created existence. He is simply asserting that the evidence is complex and not easy to grasp. Job is taking seriously the classical problem of theodicy: How do we reconcile the existence of an all-wise, all-just, and all-knowing God with the simultaneous existence of evil?

Against his own accusers, Job is arguing that goodness and good fortune are not invariably and in every instance entwined. The simplest observations of well-known facts prove this not to be true.

This manifest separability of goodness from good fortune, a separability so often characteristic of life in this world, later prompted Emmanuel Kant to affirm the existence of a just God and a retributive afterlife as “moral postulates” demanded by the very structure of reason. Man’s innate sense that goodness and good fortune should go together, Kant reasoned, is an instinct that demands some future adjudication.

Thursday, September 20

Job 25: Job’s responses to his critics have had their effect, because these three appear to have become dispirited. They have reached the end of their limited intellectual resources. After the present brief rambles of Bildad, Job will hold forth without challenge until the end of chapter 31.

From the present chapter it is clear that Bildad the Shuhite has lost his way. As we have seen from the beginning, there was never anything very original about Bildad; he relied entirely on what his elders had taught him. Indeed, he made this trait his explicit boast to Job (cf. 8:8).

When we come to Bildad now, however, he does not seem to know what he thinks. One commentator, in fact, describes his speech as “short and out of keeping with his previous utterances.”

As the chapter begins, one has the impression that we are interrupting a line of thought already in process, as though somehow we are suddenly made privy to some secret musing of Bildad’s that we just happen to overhear.

Most of what Bildad says here is, in truth, simply a quotation from earlier discourses of Eliphaz (compare verses 4–6 with 4:17 and 15:14). Perhaps those words of Eliphaz had made a deep impression on Bildad. He is mumbling something that Eliphaz said earlier. He has no response at all to Job’s recent argument.

Anyway, when Bildad considers that man is only a worm (verse 6), this very thought apparently prompts him to be silent, for the speech ends abruptly, and we still wonder where his thought was leading him. Bildad does not seem to know.

This sudden disorientation by Bildad, along with the lack of any third discourse by Zophar, has prompted some biblical scholars to propose various reconstructions of the text at this point.

This futile and subjective exercise is not necessary, because the text as it stands is perfectly intelligible. The dramatic loss of direction on the part of Job’s critics shows simply that they have become undone. They have nothing left to say. Job has bested their best efforts. There is nothing further to add. Chapter 25 is the place where the earlier eloquence of Job’s critics ends with a whimper.

Perhaps there is an added significance in the fact that their efforts end with Bildad, who has been, more than any of them, the spokesman for a certain philosophical tradition. It is the tradition itself that is breaking down under the onslaught of Job’s intense, impassioned queries, so Bildad is the last of them to speak, and he has almost nothing to say.

Friday, September 21

Job 26: Bildad has not said anything worth answering, so Job doesn’t answer him. Instead, he discourses on the immense majesty of God in the phenomena of heaven and earth.

This is a further and significant development in Job’s spiritual maturation through the course of the book. Especially since his avowal of personal faith in his “Redeemer” in chapter 19, Job has become more preoccupied with the world around him than with the misery of his own existence. Now he contemplates what God has made. Job’s mind escapes, in this way, the confinement of his own suffering.

In the opening of the chapter, Job throws one final taunt at those who pretended to be his comforters. Just what have they accomplished (verses 2–4)?

Then he proceeds to consider the wonders of all creation, beginning with the world that has so often preoccupied him, the nether world—sheol and ’abaddon (verse 6), the realm of the dead. The juxtaposition of these two words is also found in Proverbs 15:11 and 27:20.

In the present passage, the word ’abaddon (often translated as “destruction,” as in Job 31:12) serves as a personification of death itself, which seems also to be the case in Job 28:22. This is likewise how the same word is used in Revelation 9:11, where it refers to “the angel of the bottomless pit.”

Though this region of the dead lies concealed from the sight of man, it is open to the eyes of God. For Job this truth is important, certainly, because his great fear, through much of this book, is that he will die and simply disappear from the gaze of God.

From his consideration of the world beneath, Job then rises to contemplate the heavens above. The “north” (saphon) of verse 7 refers to the lights of the northern sky, dominated by the pole star. The rendering of the canonical Greek text here, borea, may evoke in some readers a memory of the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis.

Once again, Job’s juxtaposition of the nether world and the celestial world, in both of which places God is present and knowing, puts the reader in mind of Psalm 139 (138), where the Psalmist exclaims, “If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell (sheol), behold, You are there.”

These lights in the heavens, says Job, are suspended over “emptiness,” tohu (verse 7; cf. Genesis 1:2). The earth floats beneath this emptiness above and mere “air” beneath. (This last noun, belima, which is found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, I have translated as “air,” because in rabbinical literature it bears the meaning of “upper atmosphere.” The canonical Greek text here, followed by several modern translations, says “nothing,” ouden.) Since many ancient texts, including the Bible, speak of the earth as suspended “upon the waters,” the imagery here in Job is doubly striking.

From air, Job moves on to consider water, first in its atmospheric form—clouds and vapors (verses 8–9), and then in its earthly form—liquid (verse 10). The shaking of the “pillars of heaven” (verse 11) suggests a booming storm. God adorns these heavens by His Spirit, Ruach (verse 13), a theological truth proclaimed also in Psalm 33(32):6. This is still descriptive of a storm scene, as is the “thunder of His might” in verse 14.

Friday, September 7

Job 12: Job now begins a speech (12:1—14:22) that is his longest until the final soliloquy in the book. Having just received a blast of sarcasm from Zophar, and now aware that all three of his friends are against him, Job himself takes up the weapon of sarcasm, and to considerable effect. He already knew, after all, everything that his friends have been telling him. Indeed, much of it was of the commonest knowledge. Though he had looked to his friends for insight, they have hitherto provided only truisms and platitudes.

Unlike his three friends, Job knows there is a mystery involved in his sufferings, and he endeavors to identify it. Tell me something new, he says to them, not things we all know already and are already agreed upon.

Anyone with eyes in his head, Job argues, can see that the wicked sometimes really do prosper (verse 6). This much is not news. Might it not also be the case, however, that the just sometimes really do suffer?

Of course, God governs the world and all things, including the destinies of men (verse 10), but if the prosperity of the wicked is compatible with the governance of God, might not the suffering of the just also be consonant with the governance of God? Who among men has so clear an understanding of God that God can be reduced simply to a component in some human theory of justice?

These matters are not to be rashly concluded, says Job. They should, rather, be tested and probed, much as the ear of a writer tries various words, and the mouth of the cook tests various recipes (verse 11).

Indeed, the entire Book of Job, exploring the mystery of God’s justice and providence, is an example and illustration of such testing. Those who would speak for God, especially if they speak to a man who is suffering, should not pretend that they really see things as God does. This has been the offense of Job’s friends. They imagine themselves to be speaking for the Almighty, but in fact they are only trying words and testing recipes. Nothing more.

God will overthrow their theories (verse 20), bringing deep things out of darkness (verse 22). Left to their own lights, men grope about in this darkness (verses 24–25). In this respect, Job’s friends are no wiser than he.

The difference between the two cases is not a matter of wisdom, therefore, any more than it is a matter of justice. The difference between Job and his friends is that Job is suffering, while they are “at ease” (verse 5). They have been using this advantage solely to pass judgment on a suffering human being, who differs from them only by the fact that he is suffering. This is a great moral offense.

Saturday, September 8

Job 13: Has Eliphaz experienced God (4:8; 5:3, 27)? Well, so has Job (13:1–2). Indeed, throughout these discussions Job is the only person who has actually addressed God. Job’s three friends have set themselves to speak for God, but it is significant that not one of them has yet spoken to God. Job, in contrast, has never tried to speak for God. It is God Himself that Job would address (13:3). He wants to “reason with” God, not reason about God.

And all the reasoning about God with which his friends have been occupied, says Job, is a pack of lies (13:4). Unable to perceive that the ways of God are mysterious and inscrutable, they have succeeded only in elaborating a moral theory that discredits the Almighty by denying the subtlety of the divine wisdom. They themselves would display more wisdom if they simply kept quiet (13:5). Such a silence would at least keep them from speaking “wickedly for God” (13:7).

Verses 6–11 begin with the plural form of the Deuteronomic “Hear!” (also in verse 17) and go on to ask a series of questions, each line of which begins with the Hebrew interrogative prefix ha (the Hebrew equivalent of the question mark in English). Job thus beats back his critics with a chain of unanswerable questions.

In verse 14 Job begins his “reasoning with” God, an exercise that consists in the “pleadings” of his lips (cf. verse 6). These pleadings are a combination of questions and prayers in which Job’s deepest soul and most anguished longings are laid bare before the Almighty. His trust in God will never be destroyed, he declares (verse 16), for God is his “salvation” (Yoshuah = Jesus).

Job is urgently concerned for his standing in God’s eyes. Indeed, this is his sole concern. He wants nothing more than to be pleasing to God. Unlike his friends, Job knows, in an absolute sort of way, that more is happening in his life than meets the eye. If this were not the case, Job is sure, his sufferings would be senseless.

If these sufferings cannot be interpreted as a divine punishment, then what do they mean? In addressing this query, Job is feeling his way tentatively toward what we have called the Bible’s apocalyptic principle, according to which “more is happening than seems to be happening.” In the “pleadings” of this chapter, Job’s mind is faced with a blank wall with no cracks through which he might see the reality just on the other side of his pain. This pain of his yearning, questioning heart is far sharper than the afflictions in his flesh.

Sunday, September 9

Job 14: This chapter has a dialectical structure. Starting from an individual lament, in which Job attends to his personal pain and the longings of his own heart, he turns to a general reflection about what is today called “the human situation” (as distinct from “my situation”). He reflects on the short and troubled life of “man” (adam) born of a “woman” (ishsha). The very measuring of man’s time on earth, the determined numbering of his allotted days, becomes for Job the symbol and reminder of the larger and more encompassing limitations that mark human existence (verse 5).

A tree, in fact, is harder to kill than a man, because of the depth of its root. The unfeeling tree, which has never reflected on its existence at all, may yet find the resources to go on living, even though it is cut off at ground level: “There is hope for a tree” (yesh la‘ets). The tree thrives by reason of its burial in the earth. Man, in contrast, once he is buried in the earth, simply disappears. At least if “man” is considered abstractly—that is to say, regarded from outside—this seems to be the case (verses 6–12).

At this point, however, Job stops regarding man from outside and begins once again to inspect the impulses of his own heart, touching on an underlying preoccupation of his mind. Specifically, he begins to consider his own natural aspiration for an afterlife and his innate suspicion, spawned of a prior hope (which seems native to the structure of his heart), that God will not disappoint that suspicion: “Oh, that You would hide me in the grave, . . . You shall call, and I will answer You” (verses 13, 15). Even as he lies in his grave, Job will await the summoning voice of God. Will God remember him? Will he hear that voice, “Lazarus, come forth”? With all his heart, Job longs for that day and the vindication of that hope.

The Christian, who reads Holy Scripture as a single body of canonical literature, will recognize Job’s hope as the prelude to a higher promise: “Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth” (John 5:28–29). At this point, however, Job himself can hear only a quieter voice whispering faintly in his heart. His is the faith of Enoch, who believed that God exists “and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).

This hope of Job’s heart is organic to his experience and inseparable from the deeper impulses of his soul. It is not, like the hope of Socrates in the Phaedo, a theoretical hope. It is spawned of a spiritual instinct, not of critical reflection. Consequently, when Job starts once again (in verse 18) to reflect on the question abstractly and to argue the point dialectically, he cannot justify this hope to his critical mind. Born solely from a faint and innate perception, this hope cannot yet survive critical dissection, so the end of the chapter finds Job falling yet once more into despondency.

Indeed, at this point Job seems to lose even the modest, meager expectation of the worldly man: namely, that he may live on in his children (verse 21). In any case, alas, Job no longer has any children. From a worldly perspective, Job’s existence is a total wreck.

Behold the dilemma of Job’s mind. If he consults solely the personal impulses of his soul, Job knows that he loves God and strongly suspects that God loves him. When, however, he begins to regard human existence in the detached abstraction of critical thought, death appears as the very end, and all man’s hope is doomed (verse 19). One suspects that Job, if he had died at this point in the story, might have finished his life begging—like Goethe—“More Light!”

Monday, September 10

Job 15: With this chapter we start the second cycle of speeches. Once again, Eliphaz speaks first. (He seems to be the eldest; cf. verse 10).

In his former discourse (chapters 4—5) Eliphaz showed respect and even a measure of sympathy for the suffering Job, treating him as a basically righteous man who had somehow incurred the divine wrath by some unknown offense. He exhorted Job, at that time, to examine his conscience more carefully, to discern what that hidden offense against God might be, and to repent of it.

That simple attitude of sympathy and concern for Job, however, is no longer possible; Eliphaz has listened to Job repeatedly profess his innocence of any such offense. Since that first speech of Eliphaz, Job has altered the very suppositions of their discourse by separating his sufferings from any simple concepts of either justice or wisdom.

It now seems to Eliphaz that Job, by emphatically denying a causal relationship between his sins and his afflictions, menaces the moral structure of the world itself, and Eliphaz responds with both aggression and, in the closing verses of the chapter, even a tone of threat.

Is Job older than Adam, he asks, or as old as wisdom itself (verse 7; cf. Proverbs 8:25), that he should be engaged in such dangerous speculations about the hidden purposes of God?

The irony here, of course, is that Job is the only one whose discourse manifests even a shred of intellectual humility. Job has never, like Eliphaz (4:12–21), claimed to discern the divine mind.

Yet it is true that Job, driven by his distress, has probed the matter of suffering more deeply. Job has sensed that something mysterious is at play in the sad fortunes of his recent life, something hinted at in Eliphaz’s own expression, “the [secret] counsel of God” (verse 8). Job himself will later use this identical expression, sod Eloah, to describe his friendship with God in the earlier part of his life (29:4).

In the first two chapters of this book, we readers were given a glimpse into that secret counsel of God. God’s “secret counsel” is the essence of His mysterious intervention in human history (Ephesians 3:9), including the individual lives of His loyal servants (Romans 8:28).

Job’s sustained probing after that secret counsel is what offends Eliphaz, the older man who considers such probing investigation a symptom of arrogance (verses 9, 12–13). There is nothing “hidden” going on, Eliphaz declares (verse 18); the moral structure of human existence, including the principle of inevitable retribution, has long been plain to human understanding (verses 20–35). Thus, the suffering Job is getting only what he deserves.

Tuesday, September 11

Job 16: Job must now answer the scathing indictment he has just received from Eliphaz. His response, which generally takes the form of lament and complaint, contains some of the most memorable and moving verses of the book, chiefly his appeal to the heavenly Witness of his sufferings.

Just exchange souls (nephesh, as in Genesis 2:8) with me, Job tells his companions (the “you” here being plural), and you will understand (verse 4). I certainly would not treat you as you are treating me (verse 5). If their roles were reversed, says Job, he would be a worthier comforter. He would not add to their suffering but would assuage their grief.

Job finds that neither speech nor silence can avail (verse 6). He kept silence, but it provided him no wisdom. He spoke with his companions, seeking help to understand, but this brought him only further ignominy. In both cases his sufferings continued.

At this point, however, Job stops speaking to his companions and once again addresses God. (The reader observes that Job is always at his best when he speaks to God.) Eliphaz, he complains, has attacked him with the fury of a wild beast (verse 9), and so have the others. Indeed, God Himself has handed Job over to their reproaches (verse 11), and they inexplicably afflict him with every manner of suffering (verses 12–17). (This text is one of those that best indicate why the Eastern Orthodox Church reads the Book of Job during Holy Week.)

But suddenly, in the midst of this lament, Job appeals to God to bear witness to this terrible taking of his innocent life. Using terms reminiscent of the unjustly slain Abel, he tells the earth not to cover the innocent blood that cries to heaven with “pure prayer” (verses 17–18; cf. Genesis 4:10; Isaiah 26:21; Ezekiel 24:8; Hebrews 12:24).

And who in heaven will hear Job’s cry? The Witness—the very God in whom Job has ever placed his trust (verse 19). Let men on earth say what they will; Job sends his appeal on high. As the chapter ends, Job seems resolved to die without understanding what terrible thing has transpired to make him die in such misery of soul and body. But God is his Witness; God will see, and Job leaves his case to God.

No matter how vehement his frequent complaints, Job always returns to this conviction that “God sees and knows.” All his life long, Job has endeavored to live in the sight of God. God has always been his Witness, the One who reads his heart. This cultivated awareness, at the root of Job’s character, is the source of his strength to endure.

Wednesday, September 12

Job 17: It is the teaching of all Holy Scripture that our mortality is the Fall we sinners inherit from Adam. In other words, “through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12). We have it on this same authority that “by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one” (5:17). In short, “sin reigned in death” (5:21).

It is the teaching of the Christian Church that by reason of Adam’s Fall, man without Christ is under the reign of death and corruption, because “the reign of death operates only in the corruption of the flesh” (Tertullian, On the Resurrection 47).

As the physical expression of sin, death chiefly represents man’s final and definitive separation from God. That is to say, apart from Christ, death is simply sin in its final stage. It embodies everything that sin means. It is the ultimate alienation from God. Consequently, if there is one sure general characteristic of death in the Old Testament, it is death’s utter separation of a man from the knowledge, remembrance, and praise of God.

Thus, King Hezekiah, after his own very close encounter with the grave, commented that what he most feared about death was its concomitant exclusion from the praise of God: “For Sheol cannot thank You, / Death cannot praise You; / Those who go down to the pit cannot hope for Your truth” (Isaiah 38:18). “For in death there is no remembrance of You,” lamented David; “In the grave who will give You thanks?” (Psalm 6:5). And the sons of Korah mourned, “Shall Your loving kindness be declared in the grave? / Or Your faithfulness in the place of destruction? / Shall Your wonders be known in the dark? / And Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” (Psalm 88[87]:11–12).

Always there is that same rhetorical question: “Who shall praise the Most High in the grave?” (Sirach 17:27)—“What profit is there in my blood, / When I go down to the pit? / Will the dust praise You? / Will it declare Your truth?” (Psalm 30[29]:9). It was the common doctrine of the Old Testament that “the dead who are in the graves, whose souls are taken from their bodies, will give unto the Lord neither praise nor righteousness” (Baruch 2:17). It is in the Book of Job, as we shall see in due course, that this perspective of death’s finality is most forcefully challenged in the Old Testament.

Still, the notion of an “afterlife with God,” following death, is entirely alien to the Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, it is also alien to the New Testament, unless a person has died in the redemptive faith of Christ. It is Christ alone who delivers man from death, including the saints of the Old Testament. Nowhere in the Bible is there an afterlife apart from Christ. Whatever after-existence there may be apart from Christ, it is certainly no real life.

This hopeless Old Testament view of death, then, is what Job is facing in the present chapter. He is staring at death’s approach, his entrance into “the land of forgetfulness,” his final separation from the One whom he has loved and trusted all his life, and he is doing so with no sense of God’s presence or His favor. The dark words of this chapter, nonetheless, will not be Job’s last comment on the subject of death and corruption.

Thursday, September 13

Job 18: Bildad contends that he and his two companions have been sharing with Job the rock-solid truth on which the moral life is founded. Job, however, has insisted on moving this rock (18:4). Does Job believe that the eternal principles of the moral order should be adjusted to suit his own case?

Bildad goes on to elaborate the punishments that wicked men, such as Job, must expect (18:5–11). His references to darkness (18:5–6, 18) appear especially severe when we bear in mind how desperately Job has sought enlightenment in his plight.

Bildad’s second speech is particularly cruel in its judgment of Job, listing each of his afflictions in turn as evidence of his guilt. For example, Job has just spoken of the approaching darkness of the grave (17:12–14). Now Bildad takes up that very theme against him (18:5–6, 18). Job has just mentioned his failing strength (17:7, 18), and Bildad turns it into sarcastic obloquy (18:7, 12–13). Job lamented that onlookers were shocked at his condition (17:6, 8), and Bildad makes the point a matter of further reproach (18:20). The grave that Job described as his future home (17:13–16) is evidence to Bildad that he is “a man who does not know God” (18:21). In short, Job shows every symptom of a man whom God has rightly abandoned, and Bildad makes even his sufferings a reproach to him.

Bildad, in this second speech, thus abandons even the scant sympathy expressed in his first. He further rehearses, rather, his simplistic and illogical claim that all human suffering can be reduced to the inevitable consequence of the sins of the man who suffers. This impersonal, even mechanical theory of moral retribution more closely resembles the Hindu “law of karma” and the Buddhist “chain of causation” than it does anything taught in Holy Scripture.

Moreover, in its emphatic denial of this mechanical and impersonal theory of sin and retribution, the teaching of the Book of Job on the mystery (sod) of human suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent and the just, prepares the believing mind for the more ample doctrine of the Cross, whereon an innocent and just Man suffered and died for the sake of the guilty and the unjust. The trial of Job was preparatory to the trial of Jesus. It is ultimately the Cross that vindicates Job’s cause.

This vindication by the Cross especially pertains to Job’s preoccupation with death and corruption. The Just Man who died on the Cross, tormented by the bystanders as a person rejected by God (Matthew 27:39–43), is identical with the Holy One who was not suffered to see corruption (Acts 2:27).

Friday, September 14

Job 19: This is arguably the finest chapter in the Book of Job, containing his most memorable profession of faith.

Up to this point in the book, Job has attempted various “soundings” of the mystery of his sufferings, and these themes are remembered again in the present chapter. Thus, he speaks once again of the testimony of his conscience (6:30; 9:29; 10:7; 16:17), his appeal to God’s justice (10:2, 7; 13:23; 16:21), his sense of God’s friendship (7:8,21; 10:8–9; 14:15), his desire for God’s vindication of his case (14:13–15; 16:19–20). This last theme, Job’s desire for God’s vindication, dominates the closing section of the chapter.

Job begins by wondering why his friends feel so threatened by his reaction to his predicament (19:4). Are they really so unsure of themselves and their theories? What, after all, do they have to lose? Job is dealing with God (19:6), not them, and the problem is on God’s side, not Job’s (19:7). Job argues that his sufferings do not come from some inexorable law (19:8–12), as Bildad supposes (cf. 18:5–10), but from God’s intentional choice.

Indeed, it was God who sent these alleged comforters to make him even more miserable (19:12–15,19), to say nothing of his wife (verse 17)! He is wasting away (19:20) and now pleads for pity from these professed friends (19:21–22).

Then come the truly shining lines of the book, where Job places all his hope in God, his “Redeemer” or Vindicator in the latter days (verses 23–27). This noun, go’el, is the active participial form of the verb ga’al, meaning “to avenge.”

Both the noun and the verb are often used in the Hebrew Bible with reference to God Himself, and, in those instances where this is the case, the Christian transmission of Holy Scripture has preferred the words “redeem” and “purchase” to translate this Hebrew verb. Thus, Psalm 74(73):2 says that God “redeemed” or “purchased” (ga’alta) His people in their Exodus from Egypt. Similarly, God is called the “Redeemer” (Go’el) of the fatherless (Proverbs 23:11; cf. Jeremiah 50:34). Such expressions are very common in the Book of Psalms (for example, 69:19 [68:18]; 107 [106]:2).

Particularly to the point with reference to the Book of Job is the use of this verb, ga’al, when it means deliverance from death or the underworld (Sheol). This context is found in Psalm 103(102):4 and Hosea 13:14.

When Job calls God his Go’el, therefore, he is speaking with the common voice of Holy Scripture. The Lord is explicitly invoked by this name in Psalm 19:15 (18:14) and 78:34 (77:35). In the second part of the Book of Isaiah this word is a standard epithet for God (41:14; 43:14; 44:6; 47:4; 48:17; 49:7, 8, 26; 54:5; 60:16; 63:16).

Job’s Go’el is identical to his heavenly Witness (‘edh) in 16:19–20 and his “Spokesman” (melits) in 9:33 and 33:23. Job’s appeal here is entirely eschatological. That is to say, he lays all his hope in God’s final, future, definitive judgment.

Until that day, and in testimony to that hope, Job wants these words inscribed in stone. Here we have the Hebrew Scriptures’ clearest expression of hope for the resurrection of the dead and the final vision of God. This chapter is one of direct preparation for the New Testament and the glory of the Resurrection.

Friday, August 31

Job 5: Eliphaz touches a theme in the Prophets (for instance, Amos 5:4, 6), going on to describe God in terms of justice (Job 5:11–15) and benevolence (5:9, 10, 16). Eliphaz contends that Job, instead of complaining about God, even by implication, should be putting his trust in God (5:17), who delivers (5:19–20) and heals (5:18), even as He corrects and chastises.

This severity of Eliphaz will become the dominant temper of his second and third speeches (chapters 15 and 22), where he will no longer demonstrate deference and compassion toward Job. His former sympathy and concern, characteristic of chapters 4 and 5, will disappear, because Eliphaz will have repeatedly listened to Job professing his innocence. Job, Eliphaz believes, by emphatically denying a moral causality with respect to his afflictions, menaces the moral structure of the world. This is the great shortcoming of Eliphaz’s comments.

In the final verses of this, his first speech (5:25–26), Eliphaz ironically foretells the blessings that Job will receive at the end of the story (42:12–17). However much, then, Eliphaz managed to misinterpret the implications of his own religious experience, that experience itself was valid and sound. To say that Eliphaz was wrong in his assessment of Job does not mean that Eliphaz was wrong in respect to everything he proclaimed.

Indeed, with respect to the exchange between Eliphaz and Job, we have the impression that the two men are arguing at cross-purposes. Most of Eliphaz’s claims are beyond dispute, nor will Job dispute them. Above all, Job himself will bear witness to God’s purity and transcendence, about which Eliphaz has been most insistent. Indeed, as the story develops we shall see that Job knows far more on this subject of God’s holiness and purity than Eliphaz could imagine. The difference between the two men is that Eliphaz has never been tested as Job is being tested. Job knows this difference; Eliphaz doesn’t.

Mark 15:42-47: Joseph of Arimathea is variously portrayed by the four inspired writers. Mark (15:43) and Luke (23:51) describe him as someone who “was waiting for the kingdom of God,” an expression which, taken without context, might indicate no more than that Joseph was a devout Jew. Luke adds that Joseph, though a member of the Sanhedrin, had not consented to its plot against Jesus. Matthew (27:57) and John (19:38) are more explicit about Joseph’s faith, both of them calling him a “disciple”—that is, a Christian—-though John observes that he was so “secretly, for fear of the Jews.”

In their slightly differing descriptions, the evangelists may have been portraying Joseph of Arimathea at somewhat different stages of his “spiritual pilgrimage,” to use the customary expression. If this is the case, then it appears that the death of Jesus, the very hour of His apparent failure and defeat, was the occasion Joseph chose for getting really serious in his commitment, going public about his Christian discipleship.

He approached Pontius Pilate—“boldly,” says Mark—and asked for the body of Jesus.

Saturday, September 1

Job 6: Job now answers the first of his “comforters,” not with a point-by-point refutation, but by a more detailed analysis of his own experience.

Each of us tends to universalize or absolutize his religious experience, and Job believes that this is what Eliphaz has done—he has projected his own experience onto Job. Basing his objections to Job solely on his own limited vision, Eliphaz has failed to appreciate the unique dimensions of Job’s suffering.

Job says that he expected better of this friend. Eliphaz and the others know him well enough not to take him for the sinner they now imagine him to be. They have interpreted Job’s sufferings as evidence of his sinful state, whereas they should be trying to see his affliction as Job himself sees it. They have not sufficiently weighed his grief, Job says (6:2).

Now Job’s comments will begin to take more direct aim at God. Eliphaz, after all, has set himself up as God’s spokesman, and Job’s response will respect that arrangement. Eliphaz had called God “the Almighty” (Shaddai in 5:17), the divine title that is now taken up by Job himself (6:4,14). That is to say, the God that Job now addresses is specifically God as identified by Eliphaz.

Job insists that his complaint is no more unreasonable than that of an animal denied its basic sustenance (6:5). He wishes that God would take away his life (6:8–10); he knows that he has not betrayed God and does not deserve this suffering.

We readers, who are familiar with the prologue of the book, are aware that Job is right. Indeed, whereas Job has only the testimony of his own conscience, we readers have the testimony of God Himself, who has already declared Job to be a just man.

Thus, when Job reproaches his friends, we readers stand with him; like dried-up streams, those friends have failed the parched traveler who looked to them with hope (6:14–20). Job has asked so little of them, nothing beyond their simple friendship (6:22–23). Instead of showing compassion for a suffering friend, however, Eliphaz has treated those sufferings of Job chiefly as an occasion to rehearse the religious convictions born of his own limited experience.

Like the friends of Job, many men are too quick to blame, especially when faced with unexplained suffering. Commenting on this chapter, St. John Chrysostom refers to the rash judgment of the citizens of Malta when they saw Paul bitten by the snake in Acts 28:4—“No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he has escaped the sea, yet justice does not allow to live.” Similarly, the apostles, when they beheld the man born blind, immediately wanted to place the blame on somebody (John 9:2). Thus the self-appointed comforters of Job add the grievous burden of calumny to the already heavy load of his sufferings.

Sunday, September 2

Job 7: Job is no longer simply answering Eliphaz. This chapter consists, rather, of a new lament, a kind of soliloquy about the tragedies to which human existence is subject. Job likens them to three particularly miserable kinds of men: an unwilling military conscript who is in constant danger for reasons that do not interest nor concern him, a day laborer forced by his desperate circumstances to earn just enough to stay alive until he goes back to work the next day, and a slave. Human life is both hard and short, that is to say, occasionally relieved by the shadows that give a slight reprieve from the oppressive heat (7:2).

The very transitions between day and night, which in Israel’s traditional wisdom literature provide a sense of stability and structure (cf. Psalms 104[103]:19–23), become in the oppressed mind of Job the source of enervating boredom, anxiety, and apathy (verses 3–4). He experiences already the corruption of death (verse 5). It is a life without hope (verses 6, 16).

Job addresses God, asking only that God will “remember” him (verse 7), for he knows that God regards him (verse 8). To die, however, as Job sees it, is to disappear even from the sight of God (verses 9–10); the finality of death is addressed several times in this book (7:21; 10:21; 14:10, 12, 18–22; 17:13–16). Death represents, for the author of Job, the major preoccupation, and a hopeful quest for a life after death is one of the deepest and most moving aspects of the book (19:25–27).

Job then begins to turn his lament into a prayer (7:11–21). His spiritual dilemma comes from the knowledge that all these terrible things have befallen him, even though throughout his life he has known God as someone who loves him and whom he loves. Has God now become his enemy? Or will God return to search for him once more? And if God does come to look for him, will He arrive too late? Will Job be already dead and gone (verses 8, 21)?

Whereas for Job’s friends his sufferings raise the question of justice, for Job himself those sufferings raise, rather, a question about friendship.

Observe how, in verse 18, Job ironically alters the sense of Psalm 8:5, which asks, “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?” Those words—“What is man?”—words that originally referred to man’s grandeur, become, in the mouth of Job, a lament over man’s degradation: “What is man that You should exalt him, that You set Your heart on him, that You should visit him every morning, and test him every moment?” Clearly the religious experience of Job far transcends that of Eliphaz. Alas, his other friends will not rise even to the level of Eliphaz.

Monday, September 3

Job 8: To the ears of Bildad, Job’s second respondent, a man even less tolerant than Eliphaz, the foregoing lament seems to be an attack on the justice of God and the entire moral order. Unlike Eliphaz, however, Bildad is able to make no argument on the basis of his own personal experience.

He is obliged to argue, rather, solely from the moral tradition, which he does not understand very well. Indeed, Bildad treats the moral structure of the world in a nearly impersonal way. To the mind of Bildad, the effects of sin follow automatically, as the inevitable effects of a sufficient cause. The presence of the effect, that is, implies the presence of the cause.

If Eliphaz’s argument had been too personal, bordering on the purely subjective, the argument of Bildad may be called too objective, bordering on the purely mechanical. In the mind of Bildad the principle of retributive justice functions nearly as a law of nature, or what the religions of India call the Law of Karma.

Both Eliphaz and Job show signs of knowing God personally, but we discern nothing of this in Bildad. Between Bildad and Job, therefore, there is even less of a meeting of minds than there was between Eliphaz and Job.

We should remember, on the other hand, that Job himself has never raised the abstract question of the divine justice; he has shown no interest, so far, in the problems of theodicy. Up to this point in the story, Job has been concerned only with his own problems, and his lament has been entirely personal, not theoretical.

Bildad, for his part, does not demonstrate even the limited compassion of Eliphaz. We note, for example, his comments about Job’s now perished children. In the light of Job’s own concern for the moral well-being of those children early in the book (1:5), there is an especially cruel irony in Bildad’s speculation on their moral state: “If your sons have sinned against [God], He has cast them away for their transgression” (8:4). What a dreadful thing to say to a man who loved his sons as Job did!

Like Eliphaz before him, Bildad urges Job to repent (8:5–7), for such, he says, is the teaching of traditional morality (8:8–10).

Clearly, Bildad is unfamiliar with the God worshipped by Job, the God portrayed in the opening chapters of this book. Bildad knows nothing of a personal God who puts man to the test through the trial of his faith. Bildad’s divinity is, on the contrary, a nearly mechanistic adjudicator who functions entirely as a moral arbiter of human behavior, not a loving, redemptive God who shapes man’s destiny through His personal interest and intervention.

Nonetheless, in his comments about Job’s final lot Bildad speaks with an unintended irony, because in fact Job’s latter end will surpass his beginning (8:7), and “God will not cast away the blameless” (8:20—tam; cf. 1:1, 8; 2:3). On our first reading of the story, we do not know this yet, of course, because we do not know, on our first reading, how the story will end (for example 42:12).

So many comments made by Job’s friends, including these by Bildad in this chapter, are full of ironic, nearly prophetic meaning, which will become clear only at the story’s end, so the reader does not perceive this meaning on his first trip through the book.

Tuesday, September 4

Job 9: If we find Job becoming increasingly despondent through the course of this book, let us bear in mind that he is responding to friends who prove themselves increasingly obtuse and insensitive. Bildad, in his objections to Job, was far worse than Eliphaz.

Job’s response to Bildad follows the same threefold outline that we saw in his response to Eliphaz in chapters 6—7. There is a direct response (9:2–24), a soliloquy (9:25—10:1), and an address to God (10:1–22).

Ironically, in Job’s direct response, which takes up most of this chapter, he largely ignores the self-righteous ranting of Bildad. Indeed, we have the impression that Job has “tuned out” Bildad at some point and gone on to recall Eliphaz’s earlier comment (4:17) about man’s inability to be just in the sight of God.

That earlier remark of Eliphaz posed for Job a problem he addresses in the present chapter. If God’s will is that which determines justice, and there is no other measure of justice to be consulted, how does a man of clean conscience deal with the problem of suffering? (This is, of course, the great problem of theodicy. Job’s analysis of it, however, is not theoretical; he has too much personal pain for purely abstract thought.) If man is unable to perceive God as acting justly, must he not think of God as acting in anger? And how can man perceive God’s anger as just, in the absence of any condign self-accusation in his own conscience? Job knows that God is near, but he cannot discern the path that God is following (9:11).

Job’s impulse is not to answer God in this respect, but rather to supplicate Him (9:15). Is there no difference between God’s violent treatment of nature (9:4–5) and His violent treatment of man (9:17–18)? Is God’s justice truly indistinguishable from His power (9:19)? Is justice rational, or merely willful?

Meanwhile, even as he ponders these deep, perplexing questions, Job seems to be dying (9:25–26), and he fears dying without being reconciled to God (9:30–33). Truly his plight is dire.

Wednesday, September 5

Job 10: Job reasons that God must be different from what his friends believe Him to be. If these friends have so wrongly judged Job, whom they do see, how can they rightly judge God, whom they do not see?

Job essays in this chapter, then, various theories to elucidate the problem under consideration, only to reject all those theories in the end. Is God cruel (verse 3), or deceived (verse 4), or shortsighted (verse 5) with respect to Job? No, Job answers. God knows that he is innocent (verse 7).

Having mentioned God’s “hand” in verse 7 (“no one who can deliver from Your hand”), Job goes on, in verses 8–12, to meditate on God’s fashioning him by hand (“Your hands have made me and fashioned me”). This moving text is especially reminiscent of Psalm 139 (138):13–15.

All this care did God take in this creation and preservation; was everything for naught, Job wonders? Does he himself value this “life and mercy,” Job inquires, more than God does? Not a bit. God holds these matters in His heart, he says (verse 13). Feeling full of confusion at such thoughts, Job pleads only that God look upon his sufferings (verse 15).

Aware that he is not a wicked man, Job is compelled to imagine that God afflicts the just as well as the unjust, for reasons best known to Himself (verses 16–17). We readers, in fact, know this to be the case. We know exactly what those reasons are. We have the advantage of overhearing those early conversations between God and Satan in the first two chapters of the book.

In this respect we readers of the Book of Job enjoy a great interpretive edge over the human characters within the story itself, because from the very beginning of the story we have known its true dynamics and direction. Remembering that Job is being tried by a God who has great confidence in him, we readers are entirely on Job’s side in this contest and hope he will not fail his period of probation. For this reason we also know that the speculations of Job’s three friends are far wide of the mark.

At the same time, especially as Job expresses his longings in these lengthy soliloquies, we readers become conscious of the deeper dimensions of his character, levels of soul more profound than what might have been expected of that observant doer of God’s will introduced back in chapter 1. God, of course, has known these things all along; God was already thoroughly familiar with Job’s heart.

Throughout the story we ourselves are gradually given an insight into that heart. We begin to discern Job’s radical longing for God, his deep need for God’s approval. Though the verb itself is not used in the text, we are looking at a man that actually loves God.

Thursday, September 6

Job 11: We come now to the first speech of Zophar, Job’s most strident critic, a man who can appeal to neither personal religious experience (as did Eliphaz) nor inherited moral tradition (as did Bildad). Possessed of neither resource, Zophar’s contribution is what we may call “third-hand.” He bases his criticism on his own theory of wisdom. Although he treats his theory as self-evidently true, we recognize it as only a personal bias.

Moreover, Zophar seems to identify his own personal perception of wisdom as the wisdom of God Himself. Whereas Bildad had endeavored to defend the divine justice, Zophar tries to glorify “divine” wisdom in Job’s case. If it is difficult to see justice verified in Job’s sufferings, however, it is even harder to see wisdom verified by those sufferings.

Like the two earlier speakers, Zophar calls on Job to repent in order to regain the divine favor. (This is a rather common misunderstanding that claims, “If things aren’t going well for you, you should go figure out how you have offended God, because He is obviously displeased with you.”)

Zophar also resorts to sarcasm. Although this particular rhetorical form is perfectly legitimate in some circumstances (and the prophets, beginning with Elijah, use it often), sarcasm becomes merely an instrument of cruelty when directed at someone who is suffering incomprehensible pain.

In the present case, Job suffers in an extreme way, pushed to the very limits of his endurance. It is such a one that Zophar has the vile temerity to call a “man full of talk” (11:2), a liar (11:3), a vain man (11:11–12), and wicked (11:14, 20).

The final two verses (19–20) contain an implied warning against the “death wish” to which Job has several times given voice. This very sentiment, Zophar says, stands as evidence of Job’s wickedness.

The author of the Book of Job surely understands this extended criticism by Zophar as an exercise in irony. Though the context of his speech proves the speaker himself insensitive and nearly irrational in his personal cruelty, there is an undeniable eloquence in his description of the divine wisdom (11:7–9) and his assertion of the moral quality of human existence (11:10–12). Moreover, those very rewards that Zophar promises to Job in the event of his repentance (11:13–18) do, in fact, fall into Job’s life at the end of the book.

In this story of Job, men are not divided into those who have wisdom and those who don’t. In the Book of Job no one is really wise. There is no real wise man, as there is in, say, the Book of Proverbs. While wisdom is ever present in the plot of the story, no character in the story has a clear grasp of it. True wisdom will not stand manifest until God, near the end of the narrative, speaks for Himself. Even then God will not disclose to Job the particulars of His dealings with him throughout the story.

Friday, September 7

Job 12: Job now begins a speech (12:1—14:22) that is his longest until the final soliloquy in the book. Having just received a blast of sarcasm from Zophar, and now aware that all three of his friends are against him, Job himself takes up the weapon of sarcasm, and to considerable effect. He already knew, after all, everything that his friends have been telling him. Indeed, much of it was of the commonest knowledge. Though he had looked to his friends for insight, they have hitherto provided only truisms and platitudes.

Unlike his three friends, Job knows there is a mystery involved in his sufferings, and he endeavors to identify it. Tell me something new, he says to them, not things we all know already and are already agreed upon.

Anyone with eyes in his head, Job argues, can see that the wicked sometimes really do prosper (verse 6). This much is not news. Might it not also be the case, however, that the just sometimes really do suffer?

Of course, God governs the world and all things, including the destinies of men (verse 10), but if the prosperity of the wicked is compatible with the governance of God, might not the suffering of the just also be consonant with the governance of God? Who among men has so clear an understanding of God that God can be reduced simply to a component in some human theory of justice?

These matters are not to be rashly concluded, says Job. They should, rather, be tested and probed, much as the ear of a writer tries various words, and the mouth of the cook tests various recipes (verse 11).

Indeed, the entire Book of Job, exploring the mystery of God’s justice and providence, is an example and illustration of such testing. Those who would speak for God, especially if they speak to a man who is suffering, should not pretend that they really see things as God does. This has been the offense of Job’s friends. They imagine themselves to be speaking for the Almighty, but in fact they are only trying words and testing recipes. Nothing more.

God will overthrow their theories (verse 20), bringing deep things out of darkness (verse 22). Left to their own lights, men grope about in this darkness (verses 24–25). In this respect, Job’s friends are no wiser than he.

The difference between the two cases is not a matter of wisdom, therefore, any more than it is a matter of justice. The difference between Job and his friends is that Job is suffering, while they are “at ease” (verse 5). They have been using this advantage solely to pass judgment on a suffering human being, who differs from them only by the fact that he is suffering. This is a great moral offense.

Friday, August 24

Second Chronicles 23: Although repentance is profitable to the soul, Holy Scripture does not regard it as sufficient to undo the historical effects of sin. That is to say, by repentance I can change the course of my life—and my eternal destiny—but the bad things I have done, and the good things left undone, will still continue to run on their own. My repentance will not undo them as actions in history. Such is the practical meaning, I take it, of the adage, factum non fit non factum—”a thing done cannot become a thing not done.” It can be repented of, it can be forgiven, but it cannot be undone.

This truth about repentance was made clear at the discovery of the Deuteronomic Scroll in 622. When this document caused Josiah and his friends to realize how far Judah had wandered into sin, they immediately repented. The prophetess Huldah, consulted on this matter, assured them that the Lord accepted their repentance, but she also warned that their repentance would not avert the historical effects of so much sin. The accumulated transgressions of numerous generations would still bring about the destruction of the nation. Part of Josiah’s repentance was an acceptance of the divine judgment on the nation.

Indeed, I believe an integral component of repentance is the grace to leave in God’s provident hands the historical judgment of the manifold evil effects of our sins. We repentant sinners make such amends as we can (cf. Luke 19:8), but none of us can even know—much less avert—all the evil consequences our sins have unleashed in history. These things have already taken on a dynamism of their own, and God will deal with them according to His own wise judgment.

As I mentioned, this truth about repentance pertains, not only to the bad things we have done, but also to the required good things we have failed to do. Only in our later years—long after we made the major decisions that governed our lives—do some of us come to realize how many possibilities we have squandered and how few duties we have fulfilled. But now it is too late: our education is long over, our children have already been raised, further opportunities are few, and our neglected friends lie cold in the tomb.

We find ourselves unable to undo any of it. We weep, with Joel, for “the years the locust hath consumed, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm.” We are obliged simply to accept the judgment of God, following the insight of the Psalmist: iudicia Domini vera, iustificata in semetipsa—”the judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.”

Repentance, then, as a turning from sin to God, involves more than a release from personal guilt. It means, also, handing over to the Lord’s judgment and providential care the countless historical effects of our myriad failures. That is to say, repentance places not only our individual lives but also our larger destiny—the myriad links that join us to the rest of mankind—under God’s sovereign governance of history. Repentance makes us participes rei, sharers of a thing vastly larger than ourselves.

Josiah’s death at Megiddo in 609, a bare thirteen years after the discovery of the Deuteronomic Scroll, was the beginning of all the punishments Judah would undergo as the binding historical legacy of its many infidelities. Jeremiah saw it and wept.

Saturday, August 25

Second Kings 24: The opening verses of this chapter are tied to the closing section of chapter 23, which gave an outline of the reign of King Jehoiakim/Eliakim (609—December 7, 598). He was not a good king (cf. Jeremiah 22).

The Assyrian Empire effectively ended in 609 with the fall of Nineveh to the forces assembled by the Babylonians under Nabopolassar (626-605). His crown prince was a military leader named Nebuchadnezzar, who commanded the Babylonian forces that defeated the Egyptian army at the Battle of Carchemish.

On the death of Nabopolassar on August 16, 605 this Nebuchadnezzar assumed the throne and ruled until 562. He is remembered in Holy Scripture chiefly as the villain in the fall of Jerusalem and the ensuing Babylonian Captivity. The accounts of his reign in Daniel picture an unusual display of megalomania.

The two prophets contemporary to Nebuchadnezzar—Jeremiah and Ezekiel—call him “Nebuchadrezzar,” which better reflects his name in Akkadian sources: Nabu-kudurri-usur. Since we are considering him in the Book of Kings, however, we will follow the spelling of this later source.

After his conquest of the Holy Land in 604, Nebuchadnezzar apparently made an annual campaign into the region in order to collect the imposed taxation personally. The present chapter indicates that King Jehoiakim paid this tribute for three years and then rebelled (verse 1). This detail is significant, suggesting that something changed in 601.

This was the case: In 601 Nebuchadnezzar moved against Egypt and was soundly defeated by Pharaoh Neco II (610-594). After this defeat, Nebuchadnezzar left the region and returned to Babylon, where he spent the next eighteen months rebuilding his army. Feeling stronger, Nebuchadnezzar first defeated other states in and around the Fertile Crescent in 599-598, prior to moving against Judah (cf. Jeremiah 49:28-33).

According to the Babylonian Chronicles, Nebuchadnezzar’s army took up siege against Jerusalem on November 28, 598, and the city fell to that army on March 13, 597. During that interval, King Jehoiakim died on December 7, 598. He was succeeded by his 18-year-old son, Jehoiakin, who ruled only until the fall of Jerusalem three months later. When the city fell to the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar made Jehoiakin’s uncle, Zedekiah, king in his place, and Judah was once again subject to the throne in Babylonia.

In the hope that the citizens of Jerusalem would be more compliant to Babylon in the future, Nebuchadnezzar took much of its leadership into captivity at the other end of the Fertile Crescent. This large group included a young priest named Ezekiel.

Sunday, August 26

Second Kings 25: Jerusalem continued to be rebellious to Babylon. Or, more exactly, it courted favor with Egypt, where the XXVIth Dynasty was still trying to challenge Babylon’s hegemony over the western half of the Fertile Crescent. This was certainly Jeremiah’s reading of the political situation, and he fell into strong official unpopularity by speaking against it. The pharaoh at that time was Apries, or Hophra, 589-570.

Within a decade, Nebuchadnezzar became weary of it all. He once again laid siege to Jerusalem, this time for 19 months. This lengthy siege probably means he needed most of his army to keep the Egyptians at bay (cf. Jeremiah 37:5). The king’s flight from Jerusalem during the famine was the first sign the city was soon to fall. He was captured and forced to witness the execution of his sons before his eyes were put out. Jerusalem fell a month later.

Solomon’s Temple was not destroyed in battle. It was deliberately razed, rather, when the fighting was all over. This destruction came from a cool decision and represented Babylon’s determination that Judah would no longer be even a little power on the earth. The treasures of the Temple were carried away to Babylon, as well, and Judah’s official leaders were duly executed. Over the region Nebuchadnezzar appointed a governor, Gedaliah, who befriended Jeremiah. After the departure of the Babylonian forces, this governor was assassinated by revolutionaries, who abducted Jeremiah to Egypt; these details are told at great length in Jeremiah 40.

The author of Kings, who wrote much later, knew that the fall of Jerusalem was not the real end of the story, even though it marked the end of the period of the kings. This writer knew that Jerusalem was restored in the next generation; he knew also of the fall of Babylon itself in 539. Although these later events lay outside of the scope of the present book, the author of Kings was well aware of them.

It is hardly surprising, then, that he chose to end Kings on a somewhat more positive note. He records that King Jehoiakin, deposed a decade earlier and currently in captivity in Babylon, was liberated from prison and permitted to spend the rest of his life at the Babylonian court, along with other captured kings who owed their very lives to the throne in that court. In that court he finally became somebody. Indeed, when we recall that poor Jehoiakin had reigned, in fact, for a bare three months, there is something distinctly pathetic in learning that, in the latter part of his life, he received “a seat above the seats of the kings who were with him in Babylon.” Inscribed on clay tablets in the palace at Babylon, the actual figures of Jehoiakin’s regular “allowance” are still preserved, along with other receipts and inventory lists of the time.

Jehoikin’s change in fortune came in 561 as a kind gesture from the new Babylonian Emperor, Evilmerodach, or Awil-Marduk, who was assassinated the next year. Nebuchadnezzar was, in fact, the last of Babylon’s significant kings. Evilmerodach was succeed by Neriglissar (559-556), and he by Nabonidus (555-539). This last attempted a religious reform; favoring the moon god, Sin, over the sun god, Marduk, Nabonidus alienated the populace and especially the priests of Marduk. He fled to Arabia, leaving his son, Belshazzar on the throne to read the handwriting on the wall (Daniel 5) and to face the advance of Cyrus and his Persians.

Monday, August 27

Job 1: The Book of Job begins, like the Psalter, by describing “the blessings of a man” (’ashrei ha’ish). “A man there was, in the land of Uz,” it commences, ’ish haya b’erets ‘uts. This parallel between Job and Psalms is significant. In the Hebrew text of Holy Scripture, though not in the Septuagint (LXX), the Books of Psalms and Job stand in immediate sequence. In the Greek and Latin Bibles, the Book of Job serves as a kind of transition from the narrative books (Joshua through Esther) to the wisdom literature (Psalms through Ecclesiasticus). Job is at once a work of narrative and a work of sapient reflection; it is both history and (for want of a better term) philosophy.

This sequence, moreover, prompts comparative reflection on the beginnings of both Job and Psalms. The first chapter of Job describes him, in fact, as the embodiment of the ideals held out in the first psalm. Job “walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, / Nor stands in the path of sinners, / Nor sits in the seat of the scornful.” On the contrary, he is “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, / That brings forth its fruit in its season, / Whose leaf also shall not wither; / And whatever he does shall prosper.”

Whereas the “man” in the first psalm is clearly a Jew, whose “delight is in the law of the LORD,” Job is only a man—any righteous man, anywhere. That is to say, Job does not enjoy the benefits of the revelation made to God’s chosen people. The only revelation known to Job is that which is accorded to all men, namely, that God “is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).

The first verse of Job introduces the narrative prologue (1:1—2:13) preceding the lengthy and complicated dialogue that forms the long central core of the book.

In the first scene (verses 1-5) Job is called a devout man who feared God, a man who “shunned evil.” He thus enjoyed the prosperity promised to such folk in Israel’s wisdom literature. As we have reflected in our introduction to this book, Job is the very embodiment of the prosperous just man held up as a model in the Book of Proverbs.

The next scene (1:6–12) describes the first discussion between God and “the Satan,” “the Adversary.” Satan, the name of the “accuser of our brethren, who accused them . . . day and night” (Revelation 12:9–10), was also known to the Prophet Zechariah (3:1–4). The LXX identifies Job’s tempter as “the Slanderer” (ho Diabolos, whence the English derivative “devil”). Satan and “the devil” are identified in Matthew 4:8–10 and elsewhere in the New Testament.

According to the Hebrew text of Job, Satan is numbered among the “sons of God,” an expression that the LXX understands as a reference to the angels. The Christian Church, following the lead of such passages as Matthew 25:41 (“the devil and his angels”), understands Satan to be the leader of the fallen angels.

Satan’s argument against Job is simple and plausible: If a just man is so richly blest in his uprightness, who is to say that this just man is really so loyal to God? May it not be the case that the just man is simply taking good care of his own interest? Let the alleged just man, then, be put to the test.

Indeed, ever since the first man who lived in prosperity, Adam in the Garden, this demonic Adversary has been endeavoring to put man to the test. The greatest trial of Job will come in the consideration of his own mortality, which is the sad inheritance he has received from Adam. We must not lose sight of Job’s antithesis to Adam. Job’s faithful service to God in this book stands in sharp relief against the disobedience of Adam, which brought death into the world.

Tuesday, August 28

Job 2: Satan endeavors to provoke Job to curse God, the very sin that Job abhorred and which he had been afraid his children might commit. In the present chapter Job’s own wife tempts him in this way (2:9).

Satan, disappointed at Job’s unexpected response to the initial trials, wants to afflict Job in his very flesh, persuaded that this new kind of pain will bring out the worst in him. He predicts that Job, in such a case, will finally curse God (2:5).

Back in Job 1:9, Satan had asked if Job was a just man “for nothing” (higgam), meaning “without getting anything out of it.” Now God throws this expression back in Satan’s face in 2:3—“you moved me to destroy him ‘for nothing’ [higgam]” (NKJV, “without cause”). That is to say, it was not Job that failed the test, but Satan. The reader discerns that God is actually taunting Satan here. As in Psalm 2, the Lord is laughing His enemy to scorn.

Satan, however, now takes his cynicism to a new level. Believing that man is at root selfish, Satan wants Job put to the test in his own flesh, his own person, not simply in his family and possessions. Job’s success so far, Satan believes, amounts to nothing more than the experience of survival. So, he contends, let Job’s survival be put at risk. Strip him down to his naked existence, deprived of health and reputation, and then see what happens. At that more personal level, the demonic cynic argues, Job will not fear God; he will curse God, rather.

God, ever the optimist with respect to Job, agrees to this new trial; the ensuing sufferings involve loathsome and unsightly infections that are often mentioned by Job in the later discourses. Treated like a leper, Job goes to sit on the city dump. He becomes a foreshadowing of the Suffering Servant prophesied in the Book of Isaiah: “In His humiliation His justice was taken away, / And who will declare His generation?” (Acts 8:33, quoting Isaiah 53:8 LXX).

Job is apparently dying, and his wife tempts him to curse God before he does so. In short, Job’s wife reacts very much as Satan predicted that Job would react.

Indeed, we do perceive a change in Job at this point. If he does not curse God, Job also does not explicitly bless God as he had done in his first affliction (1:21). Instead, he humbly submits to God’s will (2:10).

In each case, nonetheless, God’s confidence in Job is vindicated. Satan has done his worst to Job, but Job has not succumbed. Like Abraham in Genesis 22, Job has met the trial successfully.

Having done his worst, Satan disappears and is never again mentioned in the book. The rest of the story concerns only God and human beings.

Job’s three friends now show up; their arrival directly prepares for the long dialogues that make up the book’s central section.

Job’s friends, we are told, come to “comfort” him. This verb, “to comfort” (niham), is a very important word in the Book of Job. Introduced here at the story’s beginning, the expression “comfort” appears several more times, whether in the verb form (7:13; 16:2; 21:34; 29:25) or as the cognate noun (6:10). Whereas Job’s friends fail utterly in their efforts to “comfort” him throughout almost the entire book, they do ironically succeed at the end (42:11), after the resolution of Job’s conflict by God’s revelatory intervention.

A week of silence ensues (2:13), parallel to the week of revelry with which the book began (1:2, 4).

Wednesday, August 29

Job 3: The style now switches from prose to poetry, the style that will be maintained until almost the end of the book.

Job breaks the week of silence, beginning his lament, a lament that reminds us more of Jeremiah and some of the Psalms, perhaps, than of Israel’s wisdom literature. Chapter 3 is, in fact, a prayer that is paralleled in several of the psalms (such as 49, 73, and 139 [LXX 48, 72, 138]). This chapter is simply a lamentation, much like the biblical book that bears that same name.

Like Elijah pursued by Jezebel, Job is weary of life. Indeed, a more detailed comparison between Elijah and Job is amply warranted by the resemblances between this third chapter and 1 Kings 10. The faith of both men is tried in adversity and discouragement.

Job is also to be compared here to the suffering, afflicted Jeremiah. The present chapter resembles the dereliction recorded in such texts as Jeremiah 15 and 20. Like Jeremiah (20:14–18), Job curses (yeqahlel) the day he was born (cf. also 1 Kings 19:4; Jonah 4:3, 8; Sirach 23:14). Job does not, however, curse God.

Still, Job has become impatient; he is beginning to experience even God as an enemy. Job’s “let there be darkness” (3:4–6) stands in opposition to God’s “let there be light” in Creation (Genesis 1:3). In verses 11–12 Job begins the great question “Why?” that will fill so much of the book.

In 3:9 we note the striking image of the “eyelashes of the dawn,” referring to the beams of light that radiate from the sun just before its rising.

This very question that Job begins to utter, “Why?” is also heard frequently from the lips of the psalmist. It will in due course be given its definitive sanction by Christ our Lord (Mark 15:34).

In 3:20 the “Why?” becomes more intense and less rhetorical. Theodicy’s major problem, how to reconcile innocent suffering with a just, merciful, and almighty God, is now introduced. It is this “Why?” that Job’s three friends will endeavor to answer in the discourses of the following chapters. These friends have their own theories on the matter of evil. None of them really suspects the truth of the matter, namely, that God is permitting Job’s faith to be tempted.

The Book of Job illustrates what we may call the Bible’s “apocalyptic principle,” the rule that asserts that “more is happening than seems to be happening.” Like Abraham in Genesis 22, Job does not realize that his faith is being tested. Indeed, this is an essential aspect of the book’s drama. God knows that Job’s faith is being tried, Satan knows it, and we readers know it. None of the other dramatis personae in this story, however, has a clue about what is really happening, not even Job. Indeed, especially not Job.

Thursday, August 30

1 Thessalonians 4:1-12: Since Job 4 is adequately covered in today’s reading in The Saint James Daily Devotional Guide, we turn our attention to the earliest extant work of the New Testament, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians.

Paul prays that the Thessalonians will abound “more and more” (verses 1-2). This idea of growth is frequent in Paul, for whom the Christian condition of justification is less a “state” than the dynamic possibility of growth in the Holy Spirit. The word “more” (mallon) appears seven times in Romans, eight times in 1 Corinthians, twice in 2 Corinthians, five times in Philippians, once each in Galatians, Ephesians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and twice in the tiny letter to Philemon.

This frequency of a simple adverb suggests something of how Paul experienced the life in Christ. It had no limits, neither in knowledge nor in love. He does not, therefore, attempt to “define” a disciple of Christ, because to “define” means to “determine the limits of.” Belonging to Christ is limitless, because Christ Himself is limitless.

For this reason St. John Chrysostom comments on this verse, comparing the soul to fertile soil: “For as the earth ought to bear not only what is so upon it, so too the soul ought not to stop at those things that have been inculcated, but to go beyond them.”

The image of the seed sown on the earth is a famous one, of course. The Lord’s parable of the sower is only one of its uses.

The early Christian parishes had a strong sense of identity based on a negative attitude towards the society in which they lived. They realized that what Jesus meant was radically opposed to what the world stood for, and the call to holiness, an essential feature of the life in Christ, required from them a radical break with their pagan past. Often enough this also meant, in practice, a break with their pagan friends (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

Thus, the local Christian congregations served as communities of support, because believers could find with one another a very real solidarity in those convictions that separated them from other people. We find in early Christian literature ample evidence these Christians felt a great gulf between “them” and “us.” The New Testament and other primitive Christian literature leave no doubt that the specifics of Christian existence were founded on a position of contrast with, and opposition to, the “world.”

Indeed, today’s reading uses a technical expression to designate non-Christians, hoi exso, “those outside” (verse 12). This was evidently a common term among the early believers (1 Corinthians 5:12-13; Colossians 4:5; Mark 4:11; cf. also Titus 2:7-8; 1 Timothy 3:7).

Christians at that period were enormously aware of their minority status among non-Christians, and they were careful how they impressed those non-Christians (1 Peter 2:12; 1 Corinthians 10:32-33; Matthew 5:16).

The picture that emerges of the Christian parishes during that early period is one of communities of sobriety, hard work, and a closely-knit bond of fraternal love (philadelphia). In today’s reading Paul stresses minding one’s own business, and doing one’s own job becomingly and unobtrusively. There is no question of evangelizing one’s neighbor’s by aggressive approach or slick advertising. In the words of Tertullian, Non magna loquimur, sed vivimus—”We don’t talk big, but we live.”

Friday, August 31

Job 5: Eliphaz touches a theme in the Prophets (for instance, Amos 5:4, 6), going on to describe God in terms of justice (Job 5:11–15) and benevolence (5:9, 10, 16). Eliphaz contends that Job, instead of complaining about God, even by implication, should be putting his trust in God (5:17), who delivers (5:19–20) and heals (5:18), even as He corrects and chastises.

This severity of Eliphaz will become the dominant temper of his second and third speeches (chapters 15 and 22), where he will no longer demonstrate deference and compassion toward Job. His former sympathy and concern, characteristic of chapters 4 and 5, will disappear, because Eliphaz will have repeatedly listened to Job professing his innocence. Job, Eliphaz believes, by emphatically denying a moral causality with respect to his afflictions, menaces the moral structure of the world. This is the great shortcoming of Eliphaz’s comments.

In the final verses of this, his first speech (5:25–26), Eliphaz ironically foretells the blessings that Job will receive at the end of the story (42:12–17). However much, then, Eliphaz managed to misinterpret the implications of his own religious experience, that experience itself was valid and sound. To say that Eliphaz was wrong in his assessment of Job does not mean that Eliphaz was wrong in respect to everything he proclaimed.

Indeed, with respect to the exchange between Eliphaz and Job, we have the impression that the two men are arguing at cross-purposes. Most of Eliphaz’s claims are beyond dispute, nor will Job dispute them. Above all, Job himself will bear witness to God’s purity and transcendence, about which Eliphaz has been most insistent. Indeed, as the story develops we shall see that Job knows far more on this subject of God’s holiness and purity than Eliphaz could imagine. The difference between the two men is that Eliphaz has never been tested as Job is being tested. Job knows this difference; Eliphaz doesn’t.

Mark 15:42-47: Joseph of Arimathea is variously portrayed by the four inspired writers. Mark (15:43) and Luke (23:51) describe him as someone who “was waiting for the kingdom of God,” an expression which, taken without context, might indicate no more than that Joseph was a devout Jew. Luke adds that Joseph, though a member of the Sanhedrin, had not consented to its plot against Jesus. Matthew (27:57) and John (19:38) are more explicit about Joseph’s faith, both of them calling him a “disciple”—that is, a Christian—-though John observes that he was so “secretly, for fear of the Jews.”

In their slightly differing descriptions, the evangelists may have been portraying Joseph of Arimathea at somewhat different stages of his “spiritual pilgrimage,” to use the customary expression. If this is the case, then it appears that the death of Jesus, the very hour of His apparent failure and defeat, was the occasion Joseph chose for getting really serious in his commitment, going public about his Christian discipleship.

He approached Pontius Pilate—“boldly,” says Mark—and asked for the body of Jesus.

Friday, August 17

Second Kings 16: We come to the reign of Ahaz of Judah (735-715), a period documented, not only in Kings, but also in the Book of Isaiah. During this time, Assyria begins to flex new muscles, with the intent to take charge of the entire Fertile Crescent.

In 752, ten years before Isaiah’s prophetic call, the Assyrian Empire adopts Aramaic, the common language of the Fertile Crescent, as its official language, in addition to the traditional Akkadian. Assyria is about to enlarge its field of influence, and the careers of the kings of Judah and Israel—as well as the prophetic ministry of Isaiah—are set within that geopolitical context.

This was the whole point of the notice at the beginning of the Book of Isaiah: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” These were the years from 742 to 687 before Christ, the absolute high point of Assyrian power. Tiglath Pileser III, who became emperor in 745, just three years before Isaiah’s call, ruled until 727. Other notable emperors of this period were Shalmaneser V (727-722), Sargon II (722-705) and Sennacherib (704-681).

With respect to Assyrian warfare during this second half of the eighth century, the extant art of the period confirms what is described in the Bible; it depicts charioteers breaking through enemy lines that have been decimated by Assyrian archery. Following the chariots comes the infantry, to make certain no one escapes.

An inscription of Sennacherib illustrates this process:

At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane…I put them to rout and turned them back. I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows. Humban-undasha, the commander in chief of the king of Elam, together with his nobles…I cut their throats like sheep…My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with corpses of their warriors like herbage.

The terrain of Mesopotamia largely determined this style of warfare. On the open plain, defensive posturing was not possible. Assyria’s two major cities, Asshur and Nineveh, stood between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which afforded only minimum protection. It was the Assyrian style to “take it to the enemy.” Survival depended on the total destruction of an enemy. We gain some sense of this in Isaiah 5, which gives us a very graphic presentation of the invincible Assyrian might, using a staccato style evocative of a Blitzkrieg:

No one will be weary or stumble among them,

No one will slumber or sleep;

Nor will the belt on their loins be loosed,

Nor the strap of their sandals be broken;

Whose arrows are sharp,

And all their bows bent;

Their horses’ hooves will seem like flint,

And their wheels like a whirlwind.

Their roaring will be like a lion.

In response to this Assyrian threat, Syria and Israel form a military league. Feeling threatened by this coalition, Ahaz of Judah appeals directly to Assyria for help. As the present chapter shows, this appeal simply makes the Kingdom of Judah a mere vassal of Assyria, thus introducing new forms of apostasy and idolatry.

Saturday, August 18

Second Kings 17: We come now to the fall of the Northern Kingdom, the deportation of the Ten Tribes, and the enforced “importation” of foreigners into the Holy Land by the forces of Assyria.

An individual named Hosea (not to be confused with the prophet of that name) assassinated King Pekah and seized the throne in 732 (15:30). In fact, it was Shalmaneser V of Assyria who placed on the throne, making him a vassal of the empire. The record of this development was inscribed in a contemporary document, the Nimrud Tablet, in which Shalmaneser testified, “They deposed Pekah, and I set Hosea over them.”

When Hosea proved treacherous to the Assyrian alliance, however, he was removed from the throne, and the new emperor, Sargon II (722-705), deported great masses of the population to the east; they were never again to return.

Sargon recorded this event in another contemporary (and fragmentary) inscription, the Nimrud Prism: “At the beginning [of my rule . . . the city of the Sa]maritans I . . . who let me achieve victory . . . carried off prisoner.” This partial testimony supports what is said here in Kings: “In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria” (verse 6). The year was 722, the first year of Sargon’s reign.

Our biblical historian reflects on the theological significance of these sad events, ascribing their cause to the idolatry which had prevailed in Israel since that fateful day in 922 when Jeroboam had revolted against the house of David (verses 7-23). Throughout that whole period, when the Lord “spoke by all his servants the prophets”—Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea—the divine word was treated with insouciance and contempt by the kings and their people.

The Assyrians, following their practice of deporting rebellious populations, not only removed the masses of the Israelites to the east; they also imported eastern peoples into Israel. These intermarried with what was left of the local population, thus creating a hybrid race known in Holy Scripture as the Samaritans. This new race, which followed a different form of the biblical faith (verses 24-28), also continued the infidelities of the earlier Israelites in the land (verses 29-41). In due course they were evangelized, however, by Jesus and the Christian missionaries (cf. John 4 passim; Acts 1:8; 8:4-8).

Sunday, August 19

Acts 26:12-32: Since there is already a substantial comment on King Hezekiah in today’s reading in The Saint James Daily Devotional Guide, our comments here will turn to the ministry of Paul, as recorded in the assigned reading from The Acts of the Apostles.

As we take up this text, Paul continues recounting his own history, not omitting his earlier persecutions of Christians, and then goes on to describe his conversion. We have here the third and most elaborate account of that event in the Acts of the Apostles and the only version of the story to contain the detail about Paul’s “kicking against the goad,” a metaphor for resistance to divine grace. This detail insinuates that Paul had already been feeling the pangs of conscience for his grievous mistreatment of Christians. This verse suggests, then, that Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus represented a sort of climax to a spiritual struggle already being waged in his own soul.

In this experience Paul was “grabbed” by Christ (Philippians 3:12), and a radical destiny was laid upon him (1 Corinthians 9:15-18). Like Ezekiel (2:1-2), he is told to stand on his feet (verse 16). Indeed, this account of Paul’s calling should be compared with the stories of the callings of several of the Old Testament prophets, chiefly Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. What Paul is called to preach is the fulfillment of all that the prophets wrote. Thus, various prophetic themes appear in this account of his call. For example, there is the metaphor of the opening of the eyes from darkness to light (cf. Isaiah 42:7,16). Paul clearly regards his ministry as a completion of the work of Moses and the prophets (verse 22).

When Paul mentions the Resurrection, however, Festus believes that he has gone too far. Paul’s excessive study of literature (polla grammata) — that is to say, the Bible — has caused his mind to snap, Festus asserts, so that the Apostle can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

In this response of Festus we discern the reaction of the pagan world to this most Christian of doctrines — the Resurrection. Greco-Roman culture, with its chronic disrespect for the material world (as evidenced, for example, in the Roman and Hindu custom of cremating dead bodies), would have scanty respect for the doctrine of resurrection, which takes so seriously the holiness inherent in the human body sanctified by the Holy Spirit. The situation is not so different today.

Monday, August 20

Second Kings 19: Emperor Sennacherib of Assyria (704-681) seems to have attacked Jerusalem twice, once in 701, near the beginning of his reign, and again in 688, somewhat closer to its end. The details of these two invasions, it appears, have become somewhat entangled within the three biblical accounts (Second Kings 18—19; Second Chronicles 32; Isaiah 36—37), the evidence in Josephus (Antiquities 9—10), and Sennacherib’s own record on the “Taylor Prism.” Historians speak with proper caution on this matter, however, and the hypothesis of a double invasion is far from certain. (Indeed, even the biblical dating of Hezekiah’s accession to the throne is troublesome [18:1]; few historical difficulties in the biblical text have proved so tangled and intractable.)

Certainly there was at least one Assyrian siege set around Jerusalem—it was impossible to take this elevated city without the effort of a siege. In addition to the biblical testimony on this point, we have the inscription of Sennacherib on the “Taylor Prism” in the British Museum: “But as for Hezekiah the Jew, who did not bow down in submission . . . I shut him up like a bird in a cage in Jerusalem, his capital city. I put guards around it and turned back to his ruin anyone who exited the city gate.”

The besieging general, Rabshakeh (if this was a personal name and not a military rank), taunted Hezekiah (18:28-35), who responded by praying in the Temple (verses 1,14). In this respect, it is instructive to contrast Hezekiah to Saul at an earlier period; faced with a nearly impossible military crisis, Saul panicked, but Hezekiah prayed. The words of his prayer are preserved (verses 5-19).

The Prophet Isaiah knows, apparently from the Lord, that the king has been praying, and he responds with a prophecy that encourages Hezekiah to hold fast and continue to trust in divine guidance and help (verses 20-34). This prophecy makes explicit reference to the Lord’s covenant with David. That is to say, the present chapter ties the outcome of this siege to an abiding concern of the biblical author, the inviolability of the Lord’s covenant with the Davidic house. As in those dire days when, for six years, Athaliah usurped the Davidic throne, so in the present threatening situation God remains faithful to His oath to David. Trust in God is not an abstract sense that “things will turn out all right.” It is related to the Lord’s specific promises contained in a covenant form.

The reference to “the angel of the Lord,” who slew the besieging Assyrian army, is theological. Exactly how the angel accomplished this is not specified.

The context of the besiegers’ withdrawal, furthermore, is the recent insurrection of Tirhakah back in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. Sennacherib is slain in the insurrection and succeeded by his son Esarhaddon (680-669).

Tuesday, August 21

Second Kings 20: This chapter includes three parts: Hezekiah’s sickness and recovery (verses 1-11), the delegation from Babylon (verses 12-19), and the final assessment of his reign (verses 20-21). It is difficult to date the first two of these components, notwithstanding the specific reference to “fifteen years” in verse 6. Since that same verse seems to presuppose an Assyrian threat, the reader wonders how Hezekiah’s sickness is chronologically related to the events of the previous chapter. None of this is clear.

Isaiah, consulted about the king’s sickness, apodictically foretells his death (verse 1). Like Jonah’s to Nineveh, Isaiah’s prophecy to Hezekiah is unconditional: “you shall die, you shall not recover.” Yet, as the event shows, this prophecy of Isaiah, like that of Jonah, is reversed. Apparently bothered by this paradox, Josephus (Antiquities 10.2.1) omits Isaiah’s first prophecy and narrates only the second, that in verses 5-7).

With respect to Hezekiah’s prayer (verse 3), we observe four things about the king: First, he walked in God’s presence, like such men as Enoch (Genesis 5:21), Noah (6:9), Abraham and Isaac (48:15), and, of course, David (First Kings 3:6). Second, Hezekiah has walked in “fidelity”—’emeth; that is to say, he has imitated the Lord’s own fidelity. Third, he has walked with his “whole heart”—leb shalem; his internal thought and resolve has had both integrity and proper direction. Fourth, he has done that which is “good”; he has endeavored to follow what God Himself considers to be “good.”

With respect to the medical remedy prescribed by Isaiah, the application of a fig poultice to drain ulcers is mentioned by Pliny (Natural History 22.7) and by two much earlier (second millennium before Christ) Ugaritic texts about veterinary practice.

Since Isaiah has now contradicted his earlier prophecy about Hezekiah’s death, we should probably not be too hard on the king for asking for an ’oth, a confirmatory sign (verses 8-11). We recall identical requests from Gideon and Joshua.

The movement of the sun’s shadow has to do with its progression on a set of stairs adjacent to the royal palace; a person could tell the time by the position of the sun’s shadow moving up the stairs. In the execution of the “sign,” the shadow moves backwards. The king, understandably, finds the phenomenon convincing.

In the eastern half of the Fertile Crescent, during this period, the little kingdom of Babylon, still a vassal state of the Assyrian Empire, is beginning to test the latter’s strength—finding it increasingly less impressive! Within a century, Babylon will make its move, finally vanquishing Nineveh in 609. In the present text, Hezekiah receives a “friendly” delegation from Babylon, not suspecting its full political significance. Unwisely, he displays signs of his kingdom’s prosperity to the delegation. The Prophet Isaiah, who sees reality far into the future, mentions—“Hear the Word of the Lord!”—the danger incurred by the king’s imprudence (verses 16-18). When sixth century editors put the finishing touches on the Book of Isaiah, they were much impressed with his ability to discern events so far in the future, convinced that they were witnessing, in their own times, the historical developments foretold by him.

Wednesday, August 22

Second Kings 21: Manasseh (687-642) and Amon (642-640), the two kings of Judah separating Hezekiah and Josiah, make no positive contribution to the spiritual health of the realm. Their careers are contained in this single and uninspiring chapter.

The infidelities of Manasseh stand in vivid contrast with the religious reforms of his father. In addition to the reintroduction of Phoenician Baalism—including child sacrifice (verse 6)—Manasseh brings in Assyrian astral worship (verse 5). In addition, fortune telling becomes prevalent.

There was a great deal of violence; Manasseh “shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another” (verse 16). Josephus must have had this text in mind when he wrote that Manasseh “barbarously slew all the righteous men that were among the Hebrews; nor would he spare the prophets, for he every day slew some of them, till Jerusalem overflowed with blood” (Antiquities. 10.3.1).

The most notable of the prophets murdered by Manasseh was the great Isaiah. According to an account recorded in the apocryphal story, The Martyrdom of Isaiah, Manasseh caused the prophet to be sawn in two. A passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, because it mentions this detail, is often thought to refer to the era of Manasseh: “Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword” (11:36–37).

The Bible-reader is stunned by this massive apostasy within a single generation. What can account for so thorough and swift a fall from grace? It is likely that it should be ascribed to several causes, but I suggest that among those causes should be counted a certain erroneous and unwarranted sense of security, nearly tantamount to superstition and magic. When Manasseh was but a child, Jerusalem had been miraculously delivered from Sennacherib’s siege. That deliverance, which had arrived as though out of nowhere, gave rise in many minds to the persuasion that Jerusalem was invincible and would never fall to the enemy. Once saved, Jerusalem would always be saved.

The Chronicler gives more qualified account of Manasseh. According to this source, the king had a conversion in his later years, after the Assyrians took him captive and imprisoned him for a while (Second Chronicles 33:11-17). This account is strengthened by an Assyrian source called The Prism of Esarhaddon. According to this archival document, the new emperor, Esarhaddon (680–669), compelled the kings in the western part of the Assyrian Empire to come to the capital of Assyria to render their obeisance. The Prism names all these kings, among whom was Me-na-si-i Ia-ú-di, Manasseh of Judah.

In 640 Manasseh’s son, Amon, is slain in revolt after a very brief reign.

Thursday, August 23

Psalm 133 (Greek and Latin 132): Since there is already a substantial comment on King Josiah in today’s reading in The Saint James Daily Devotional Guide, our comments here will turn to one of the psalms assigned for today.

Psalm 133 is arguably among the loveliest of the small compositions in Holy Scripture: “Behold how good and delightful a thing, for brothers to abide as one; like balsam on the head, descending down on the beard, the beard of Aaron, descending to the hem of his robe; like the dew of Hermon, descending on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord decreed blessing, life for evermore.”

My translation here preserves a delicate but structurally important feature of both the Hebrew and the canonical Greek texts; namely, the psalm has only one finite verb, and it is found in the final line: “decreed” (eneteilato, tsivvah). The blessing in this psalm is a matter of God’s command and ordinance.

Now the blessing (evlogian, berakah) decreed of the Lord is everlasting life (zoen heos tou aionos, haiim ‘ad ha‘olam), and He decreed it in the holy mountains of Zion. This is Jerusalem, which appears in the final chapters of Revelation as the home of those brothers who abide as one. This is the ultimate meaning of “good and delightful.” It is eternal life.

The place of the Lord’s decree, “there,” is accented in both the Greek (ekei) and the Hebrew (sham). The blessing of this psalm is not some sort of general benediction poured out at random; it is specified, rather, with respect to place. It is defined and fixed in the institutions of the holy city of Jerusalem, especially in the priesthood, most particularly the high priesthood of Aaron. That is to say, the blessing decreed by the Lord is related to the consecration of that priesthood by which the people of God is defined as a priestly people and holy nation.

The emphasized “there” of the last verse stands in structural parallel and contrast with the earlier sense of “here” conveyed by the “behold” (idou, hinneh), with which the psalm begins. The poem commences, then, with the atmosphere and feeling of presence. Accordingly, there are no verbal sentences; the action in these early verses is entirely conveyed, as in both the Hebrew and Greek, by an infinitive, “to abide,” and the threefold repetition of a single participle, “descending.”

Moreover, this steady descent is described so as to suggest the slow flowing down of a consecratory blessing, and the same words for “descending” are used for both the priestly oil and the dew of Hermon in both the Greek (katabainon) and the Hebrew (yored). This sustained blessing is also conveyed by the advancing flow of the ointment, poured out in consecration on the high priest’s head, then oozing down to saturate his priestly beard, before flowing onto the hem of his priestly vestment. The “oil” of the Hebrew (shemen) is enriched and sweetened to “balsam” (myron) in the Greek text.

The high priest’s beard is mentioned twice in connection with this bountiful anointing, portraying the accumulated saturation of the blessing into this supreme symbol of his manhood. (Indeed, Holy Scripture is very strict on the point. The priest may not shave his beard, and the man who can’t grow a beard cannot be a priest.)

Beneath the beard of the high priest there hangs from his neck a pectoral of stones on which are engraved the names of Israel’s twelve tribes. When he comes to appear before the Lord, Aaron thus bears all of Israel upon his breast, directly in the path of the descending ointment of his sacerdotal consecration. The whole People of God is rendered holy in his priesthood. The oneness celebrated in this psalm is the unity of God’s people gathered in worship with their priest.

This pervasive saturation is high and exotic poetry, of course. Indeed, the picture of the heavy dew descending all the way from Mount Hermon, up in Syria, down to Jerusalem in Judah can only be introduced in a poetic context already conditioned by the psalm’s earlier and more plausible images.

The priesthood of Aaron is, moreover, the ministry preparatory to the definitive priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is He who ever lives to make intercession for us (cf. Heb. 7:25). “For brothers to abide as one” is the blessing given to the Church, described in St. Paul’s epistles as the “body of Christ” and in St. John’s Gospel as the vine with its branches. Our unity is in Christ, and more specifically in that unchangeable priesthood by which He ministers in heaven on our behalf, the one mediator between God and man. There the Lord decreed blessing.

Friday, August 24

Second Chronicles 23: Although repentance is profitable to the soul, Holy Scripture does not regard it as sufficient to undo the historical effects of sin. That is to say, by repentance I can change the course of my life—and my eternal destiny—but the bad things I have done, and the good things left undone, will still continue to run on their own. My repentance will not undo them as actions in history. Such is the practical meaning, I take it, of the adage, factum non fit non factum—”a thing done cannot become a thing not done.” It can be repented of, it can be forgiven, but it cannot be undone.

This truth about repentance was made clear at the discovery of the Deuteronomic Scroll in 622. When this document caused Josiah and his friends to realize how far Judah had wandered into sin, they immediately repented. The prophetess Huldah, consulted on this matter, assured them that the Lord accepted their repentance, but she also warned that their repentance would not avert the historical effects of so much sin. The accumulated transgressions of numerous generations would still bring about the destruction of the nation. Part of Josiah’s repentance was an acceptance of the divine judgment on the nation.

Indeed, I believe an integral component of repentance is the grace to leave in God’s provident hands the historical judgment of the manifold evil effects of our sins. We repentant sinners make such amends as we can (cf. Luke 19:8), but none of us can even know—much less avert—all the evil consequences our sins have unleashed in history. These things have already taken on a dynamism of their own, and God will deal with them according to His own wise judgment.

As I mentioned, this truth about repentance pertains, not only to the bad things we have done, but also to the required good things we have failed to do. Only in our later years—long after we made the major decisions that governed our lives—do some of us come to realize how many possibilities we have squandered and how few duties we have fulfilled. But now it is too late: our education is long over, our children have already been raised, further opportunities are few, and our neglected friends lie cold in the tomb.

We find ourselves unable to undo any of it. We weep, with Joel, for “the years the locust hath consumed, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm.” We are obliged simply to accept the judgment of God, following the insight of the Psalmist: iudicia Domini vera, iustificata in semetipsa—”the judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.”

Repentance, then, as a turning from sin to God, involves more than a release from personal guilt. It means, also, handing over to the Lord’s judgment and providential care the countless historical effects of our myriad failures. That is to say, repentance places not only our individual lives but also our larger destiny—the myriad links that join us to the rest of mankind—under God’s sovereign governance of history. Repentance makes us participes rei, sharers of a thing vastly larger than ourselves.

Josiah’s death at Megiddo in 609, a bare thirteen years after the discovery of the Deuteronomic Scroll, was the beginning of all the punishments Judah would undergo as the binding historical legacy of its many infidelities. Jeremiah saw it and wept.