Negotiating extremes

Part of the stimulus for this post is from the creative writer, David Ker, and his short quizzical article on Zen and Christian habit. He entitles this Christian Zen - and right away I see red flags. Christian as adjective is working against itself. Zen is Zen whatever it is and its Christian-or-not-nature is not relevant. Here I think David has not escaped some commonplace, less-than-creative words and habits. I used habit above because the clothes we wear are critical to the wholeness we share - even, perhaps especially, when we are not in verbal agreement.

Extremes are front and center in the story of Cain. How will I read this on the fly without checking a dozen commentaries?

הֲלֹוא אִם־תֵּיטִיב שְׂאֵת

"If you do well"? No - the first word indicates a negative - And if you do not - seem to do well with respect to a lifting up - what is that "lifting up" - an offering? Anyway, regardless of how I translate it, it is clear in the story that there is an extreme here and it shows as Cain's anger. Is his anger because he has been rejected? Or is a comparative anger at someone else's acceptance? Whatever the cause, the anger is real and requires a resolution. Does the resolution lie in Cain's own power? The traditional translation might think so - but he fails, so his power was insufficient. A better "lifting up" is required.

Can a human technique really deal with anger? Not in my experience. Technique is important and useful but ultimately insufficient. We should have good poetry in our liturgy, beautiful buildings, and a well rehearsed and gifted choir - because beauty is good. But by themselves, these are not the power that does the job of dealing with our anger. I should deal with my anger - but just suppressing it doesn't work.

You will notice that I am not talking about appeasement of an angry God. I am considering only human anger. God's jealousy is for us so that we might know his own healing of our anger and defensiveness, such healing as devours the whole earth (to paraphrase Zephaniah 3:8). But that is a religious turn of phrase and even the religious turn of phrase is not sufficient. It too can amount to nothing more than technique. Technique can provide a little discipline and can also be holy but it does not do the job of dealing with our anger. Even knowing the right answer in terms of words (faith, Spirit, etc) is not sufficient.

Now to easier extremes and divisions in the commonplaces of David's post: secular vs sacred, individual vs corporate. Well only partly easier. When the veil of the temple is torn from the top to the bottom, the world can no longer be divided between the secular and the sacred. God is in all things no matter how mundane.

I take the wings of the morning
I live in the farthest part of the sea
also there your hand leads me
and holds me
your right hand

and I say surely darkness will crush me
and the night be light about me
even darkness is not darkness with you
and night like day shines
as darkness as light

Without the veil, there is nothing separating us from Glory whatever our profession or placement.

One can find the same lesson in Job of course: (chapter 7)

What is a mortal that you make him great
and that you fix on him your heart
and that you visit him every morning
and every moment scrutinize him?
How long till you not stare at me
or let me be till I swallow my spit?

Job is unhappily in the Presence. Should our experience be an improvement over Cain and Job?

Corporate vs individual, the personal and private. Hey - there is no private in God. All things are open...(Hebrews 4:13) Every secret thing will be shouted from the housetops (Matthew 10:26-27 and Lukan parallel). Yet there is the private - "go into your closet and shut the door". The Father sees in secret and will reward you openly (Matthew 6:6 no parallel).

And he says in Matthew, what I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light. How, my Love? You have told me that I am not separated from you anywhere or at any time - why then should I gather? And what is the corporate where I should gather which so divides itself from itself and from the world you have loved?

How has he told me this in secret? The Zen master will appreciate the extremes in these verses. The Biblical Student whether pro or amateur will find excuses to talk about the talk rather than do it and will complain about the ultimate in subjectivity. There is no understanding without doing. It will be evident whether the bodily offering is accepted. It will be known as a repayment of a debt is known. It will be known in the body both individual and corporate in the manifestation of gifts that benefit both individual and all severally and together. Nothing will be lacking and cups will overflow. But some anger will continue.

I find no resolution of the individual and corporate extremes that I can put into words - except to appeal to the vine imagery. There is a wholeness in the vine and its branches even though the vine itself be destroyed and her fences broken down (Psalm 80). My suspicion is that if anyone will be still, there is room for the voice that heals.

Be still and know that I am God
I will be lifted up in the nations
I will be lifted up in the earth
יְהוָה of hosts is with us
our high tower the God of Jacob

Update: Bishop Alan's musings on corporate unity are revealing in the terms of clothing (habit) and doing.

Writing about writing about writing - bones without meat

Scholars who write well and footnote well still can write lots that is not very informative. Geoffrey Khan can say that the early eastern traditions of Hebrew grammar are important: "The discovery of the Karaite grammatical texts now makes it clear that Hebrew grammatical thought was far more widespread and developed in the east than scholars had previously thought." While this may be true, it is quite uninformative. It is talk about talk. To be informative there must be examples given that drill down to the data - what is the data? It is examples of language and rule, not lists of people who wrote about language and rule.

True, this essay by Geoffrey Khan in Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World is over my head, but there were some intriguing passages that read like today's solutions to the same problem - searching for the meaning of words in their usage.

On many occasions in  Ibn Nuh's DiqDuq, a variety of different opinions are cited [O for an example] The proponents are always left anonymous [no footnotes!] Very frequently he presents divergent opinions without asserting any preference of his own. The issue as to why a word has one form rather than another is sometimes referred to by the term mas'ala ('question', pl masa'il) ... His method was to attempt to reach the truth by exploring many possible paths.

To reach the truth - and many paths - it sounds like those who read many translations to see what might be happening. O for just one example of what he is referring to.

And this also intriguing thought: - Saadya appearently divided "the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into eleven base letters which occur only as root letters, and eleven servile letters, i.e letters that, in the formation of words, are attached to the fundamental root letters." How can you make a statement like this and leave out the obvious - which letters did he put in which list? Clearly vav the connector is in the second list. Aleph and Yod perhaps also - but the thesis is only a throw-away line and there is no reference given. There are a number of other throw-away lines that sound promising - but these are bones without meat.

The content of the characters in Job

What do these characters say about Job, about each other, about God, and about their various sources of authority for their views? Answering these questions helped me form an opinion about each character. I cannot agree with the three comforters and their assessment of Job. Nor do I think their sources of authority are adequate in themselves. You will of course recognize that tradition and Scripture are among their sources. Their problem is that they cite them as authoritative in themselves. They speak at a distance from their authority and from their God, always in the third person, almost 'hearsay'. Their truth stands on its own and as a result is without foundation in their citing of it.

Job in contrast observes and complains. To God he speaks - often switching mid-speech to direct confrontational lament (See chapters 7, 9, 10, 13). Of God he speaks, reflecting, as the frame story notes, those words that were prepared for him and therefore right for him to say, and intimating as I have noted before those characteristics of God that are required for us to live (e.g. start at chapter 23 and work backwards). In contrast, Bildad concludes chapter 25 and the last noted words of the comforters with humans as maggots and worms, a far cry from the words that are prepared that we know for instance from Psalm 8.

How can we then 'rightly' speak of God? We cannot remain at a distance from our sources of authority. What a terrifying risk - what if our authorities are not trustworthy? Imagine you are made to acknowledge a structure of tradition or Scripture that you do not trust in? You might find yourself on the outside. So you conform but for your own integrity's sake you must be at a distance. Does Job succeed in getting around this problem? And if so how?

We get a clue - a very important one - from the last human character to speak, Elihu. Elihu has some very bad press as I reported earlier.

The narrator takes a long time to introduce Elihu in contrast to the brevity we have become accustomed to. But Elihu takes a whole chapter (so far) - filled with meta-talk, before he gets to any point. You are allowed to laugh. It is a comedy after all. (But who gives himself as answer?)

Edwin Good (In Turns of Tempest, A Reading of Job) has nothing good to say about Elihu and though Crenshaw (Defending God) does say there is some insight from Elihu, he reports that the opinions of Elihu among the scholars are not generally positive. Here is Good as reported against chapter 37

Elihu's theology is depressingly conventional, adding nothing except detail to what the friends have given us in quite sufficient detail. His style is more than depressingly opaque, uttering sentence after sentence in which the words make sense one by one but defy comprehension in combination. It is wordy, convoluted, often scarcely intelligible. The speeches contain some nuggets of semiprecious metal, but embedded in such thick clods of ordinary dirt as to weary the miner beyond reason. Dealing with good poetry is hard and exhilarating, Dealing with Elihu is just hard.

This will not do as a final opinion. The pinions of God fall more fully around Elihu in ways that are unique in the poem. He speaks of his maker as One who 'soon will lift me up' and he says,

the spirit of God has made me

and the breath of the Sufficient has given me life

He intimates that he is among those in the assembly

if you have power to turn me

order before my face - present yourself

He alone finds the ransom for the lost

ransom him from his descent to the pit
I have found a price

And he defines himself as of the work of God - similar to the wisdom of chapter 28

and to the one whose work I am I will give justice

There are too many clues here to ignore. The poet has done something unique creating this character. No one responds to him in the poem and he it is who brings on the speeches of YHWH. Even if this character is an addition to the poem, it is a brilliant one, not without reward.

Crenshaw attributes cruelty to Elihu for the words at the end of chapter 34. But what is he making of that verse? Is Job to suffer for ever? Or is Job as parable-man to suffer on behalf of all till all turn from their distance, solitude, and third party knowledge of God? So Elihu can criticize Job's speeches as without knowledge and still himself survive the commendation of Job's words about God in the frame story.

Of the human characters, Elihu and Job both survive through closeness to their sources. (The comforters survive through Job's intercession.) Can we also survive? To be close to our canon of scripture requires diligent slow reading. To be close to our tradition requires care and feeding of liturgy without compromise. To be close to our God requires mystery and obedience. What great difficulty - hearing the invisible, critiquing sloppy performance and poor poetry, and escaping somehow from the distorted lenses of history, ecclesiastical policy, and confessional abbreviations of theology.

Online resources

John has highlighted some online resources here that are quite timely for me. I was just beginning to do phrase recognition and morphology with my older student last night. It is very difficult to begin without memorizing paradigms in advance. But I think it is important to have examples that are recognized in context before imposing a pattern - i.e. the pattern should emerge. It is helpful to have the division into word and affixes as is done in the presentation of morphology e.g. for Ruth here. This presentation gives a different context than just 'explaining' the placement of prepositions. Also John points out the online dictionary accessible with a Google search for Kautzsch-Cowley + the verse you are interested in. I tried this and it works sometimes. Eventually I will find my way around better.

Job presented

As I do on the Sunday school blog, I report my experience presenting Job. The class is 'engaged' as one senior attendee noted and wants more - good! One who had previously written off the book said he was interested now and willing to pursue the reading. Another said 'I am beginning to really like the Old Testament'. How's that for a positive result!

So in my backward reading of Defending God (I started at the end), I discover that Crenshaw summarizes the characters of the three comforters. I will look forward to his analysis as the page numbers decrease. I began to prepare next week's lesson. Chapter 3 looks so short compared with chapters 1 and 2, but the whole book is a response to chapter 3, even Job's elaborations and self-defence which I think he rightly refuses as ultimate in the end.

I think that the story is a parable, a mashal, is very helpful to people's desire to enter into it.

Tonight I go to read some more Ruth with my 13-year-old student. Our exercise today is to begin to recognize phrases and sentences in the Hebrew. He missed Sunday school so I will get him to do the alef-bet exercise which I predict he will find too easy.

A method for approaching Job

The first step in my approach is to be tried tonight and is roughly sketched here. If we continue with further sessions, I think this is how I might approach the whole epic.

1. Read the frame story.
2. Read and compare chapter 3 and chapters 38-41.
3. Develop a portrayal of each of the human characters in the poem: Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu
4. What meaning emerges: what relationships to the rest of the Bible (Deuteronomy 28 - direct, the NT rare).
5. What additional threads would one develop (e.g. like the thread on reproof/reason/referee).
6. Does Job intimate a necessary character of God?
7. How do we read Job's prayers/confession and distinguish them from the words of the religious?
8. Is chapter 28 reflecting the Narrator's view?
9. Elihu as a lead up to the speeches of YHWH.

42 chapters - minimum 10 weeks of study. Of course we could perform the whole thing with 7 or 8 speakers and really get into a shouting match as the third cycle degenerates. It would take about 2.5 hours - a stretch for an evening Bible study.

The last chapter of Job

I was unable to sleep last night so I got up and read the end of James Crenshaw Defending God where he deals with Job 42:6 and gives 5 choices:

1. Therefore I despise myself and repent upon dust and ashes
2. Therefore I retract my words and repent of dust and ashes
3. Therefore I reject and forswear dust and ashes
4. Therefore I retract my words and have changed my mind concerning dust and ashes
5. Therefore I retract my words and I am comforted concerning dust and ashes.

My stark translation is

therefore I refuse and I am comforted in dust and ashes

Refuse what? How about refuse the role of being his own referee? At least that is what I take as one 'meaning' where we have a verb with a missing direct object. In a sense that is refusing 'his words' - but not really for he has spoken what was prepared for him to speak (this is expressed negatively in verse 8).

for you have not spoken of me what is prepared as has my servant Job

I am pleased to see that my passive turn of phrase is acceptable at least by some. If not the passive "I am comforted" then the active "I sigh" in dust and ashes, groaning inwardly, as it were, for the ultimate consummation of the love of God which Job so accurately intimates in several of his speeches. In this Job uses God's word for repentance in full human terms. Here he anticipates the Incarnation. Wei Heisen in a rare post reflects on the words at Jesus' baptism. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. (Matthew 3:13 and parallels) Here is an act for which Hashem has no cause for sighing or repentance. Henceforth the word for repentance 'nacham' will be translated into the Greek as Comforter who will do the work of the Spirit where God's jealous love devouring all the earth (to paraphrase Zephaniah 3:8) will have been and will be accomplished and where this temple builder (whom the second temple builder, Nehemiah, anticipates) will have built and builds us now as living stones into a holy temple.

Joel Hoffman of God Didn't Say That has a lovely phrase about translation in his recent post here.

At any rate, my suggestion is to pick a phrase that’s likely to be accurate, capitalize it, and hope for the best.

I don't need capitals here but I can capitalize on what I have already done with the words. The Micawber approach to translation wins again.