double post
JOB-Was He Used As A Gambling Pawn?
by PaintedToeNail 26 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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King Solomon
BTS Said:
The answer remains a mystery. Job is forced to accept that he cannot know.
NO, you are forgetting that the reader enjoys the perspective of the narrator's point of view, such that we get a "behind the scenes" peek into the Counsel Chambers of Heaven. As such, We KNOW that the tribulations of Job arose as a result of the equivalent of an idle bar-bet made with Satan, where YHWH allowed Job to be messed with to test his loyalty, as if betting on mortal's lives as if they were betting on pitbull fights. There IS NO MYSTERY here: THAT'S the reason for Job's suffering.
YHWH could've explained it as, "Job, I used you as my faithful servant in a test to see if your loyalty was real, and congratulations! You passed!" Isn't that kind of rationale the ENTIRE BASIS of what JW's do: serve YHWH faithfully, in the hopes of being blessed in the New System?
But instead of validating that concept, God says, "Look Job: you're a tiny maggot, and you couldn't understand it even if I told you, so suck on it!!" Damned straight to the commenter who said that YHWH comes off assholish.... There's no other way to spin it. To suggest that Job couldn't understand the first explanation is ludicrious and demeaning, in itself.
BTW, the gambling scenario is completely bonkers, too, filled with continuity errors, given that Christians insist God has a perfect understanding of the future, and that God perfectly knows the end from the beginning, and the outcome of future events. Satan would know that God knows the future, and would be a fool to bet against God on this (or really anything else, for that matter).
Isaiah 46:9-10:
For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done.
So it's a goofy scenario, however you cut it, as it requires YHWH to not possess traits in Job that are later claimed for him in Isaiah.
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Cold Steel
I have some thoughts about it: Christians shouldn't try to interpret Jewish Scripture because it will only confuse them. They should stick to their own testament and leave ours alone.
We can’t do that. Jesus said, “Search the scriptures, for they are they which testify of me.”
The Old Testament, so called, points the way to Christ. Why, for example, do you think YHWH instituted the law of sacrifice? Because he enjoys the wanton killing of animals? No, but because it was a teaching implement. The sacrifice of the firstborn of the flocks was done in the similitude of the sacrifice of Jesus.
One Christian commentator writes: “It was initiated by a wise and prudent Heavenly Parent to impress upon hisweak, mortal children the reality of the greatest sacrifice of all which would be consummated [several thousand] years hence when the anguish, cruelty and sweat of blood at Gethsemane and Golgotha would mark the crowning climax to the life and mission of Jesus Christ.” In Gethsemane, Jesus took upon himself the sins of mankind, which suffering caused him, the greatest of all, extreme pain and bleeding from every pore. And at Golgotha, he gave his life.
Beginning in Isaiah 52, the prophet wrote: “Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. As many were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men: So shall he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider.”
From there the prophet launches a highly prophetic chapter (Chapter 53) that unmistakably points the way to Jesus as the Messiah. But Jews would have to be familiar with the life of Jesus to see the prophetic connections. Isaiah wrote: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” But, he added, writing from the Jewish standpoint, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” Jesus thus made no reply to the Jewish authorities.
The Old Testament writers all pointed the way to Christ, yet according to Zechariah, the Jews will not come to a realization of Jesus’ identity until the final assault on Jerusalem by the Gentiles. That prophet writes: “And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon. And the land shall mourn, every family apart; the family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart; the family of the house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart; the family of the house of Levi apart, and their wives apart; the family of Shimei apart, and their wives apart. All the families that remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.”
According to the prophets, many of the Jews will die in that assault, but those “that remain” will be converted in a single day.
Ezekiel describes that day and what led to it: “So the house of Israel shall know that I am the Lord their God from that day and forward. And the heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword.” Throughout the centuries, the Jews were scattered and persecuted by their enemies, suffering under the Inquisition and the Nazis. “According to their uncleanness and according to their transgressions have I done unto them, and hid my face from them.” But, said the Lord, “After that they have borne their shame, and all their trespasses whereby they have trespassed against me, when they dwelt safely in their land, and none made them afraid. When I have brought them again from the people, and gathered them out of their enemies' lands, and am sanctified in them in the sight of many nations; then shall they know that I am the Lord their God, which caused them to be led into captivity among the heathen: but I have gathered them unto their own land, and have left none of them any more there.” (See Ezekiel 39)
The Jews, scattered by the Romans in 70 A.D., were scattered because “they have trespassed against me” at a time when they “dwelt safely in their land.” Yes, they were under the yoke of the Romans, but they were threatened by no one. They were safe until they rebelled, then they were scattered among the heathen nations. But in the late 1800s the same God “which caused them to be led into captivity” caused them to begin to be “gathered…unto their own land” and none was turned away. Isaiah wrote that “And it shall come to pass…that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” The first time the Lord recovered his people was after the Babylonian conquest. So prophecy speaks in numerous places about the gathering of Judah to its ancestral homeland.
But if Jews knew their “testament” a bit better, they would know that Jesus was the Christ, and that he suffered and died for the sins of mankind. But prophecy states that they would miss the event, and only when attacked by the Gentiles would they understand their folly. Zechariah writes that only when they look upon him “whom they had pierced” would they “mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. The Father mourned for his “only begotten son,” the “firstborn” of his spirit children.
One must understand the first testament to comprehend the New Testament. If you have not accepted Jesus as the Christ, know that one day in the near future your grandchildren or great grandchildren will.
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Leolaia
The ending of Job as its now found in the Bible is horrible. Whats the morality lesson there? Might makes Right?
NO, you are forgetting that the reader enjoys the perspective of the narrator's point of view, such that we get a "behind the scenes" peek into the Counsel Chambers of Heaven. As such, We KNOW that the tribulations of Job arose as a result of the equivalent of an idle bar-bet made with Satan, where YHWH allowed Job to be messed with to test his loyalty, as if betting on mortal's lives as if they were betting on pitbull fights. There IS NO MYSTERY here: THAT'S the reason for Job's suffering.
I can see how it could be read that way but I do not believe this is what the author of the poetic dialogues (ch. 3-31, 38-42 up to v. 6, excepting the speeches of Elihu in ch. 32-37, which probably come from another hand) had in mind. The point he was making was not that God is just because he is all powerful but that lowly man is incapable of understanding theodicy at all because he cannot even begin to comprehend God and his works. Ironically enough, this lesson was lost on the author of the prose narrative frame of ch. 1-2, 42, who tried to supply a backstory aimed at explaining how the sufferings of Job are explicable from a particular understanding of theodicy, reducing what is supposed to be beyond our understanding to a rather simplistic affair.
The older poetic dialogues have strong parallels to Deutero-Isaiah and imo explore the theodicean implications of the kind of pure monotheism found in Deutero-Isaiah, wherein God brings both blessing and calamity (Isaiah 45:7). This raises a serious moral dilemma. If God is the source of both calamity and blessing, and if he brings punishment on the wicked, then if a person receives calamity can one infer that he is being punished for wickedness? Or does God bring calamities on the innocent as well? If this is the case, then how is God just? Job's companions assume that if God is just then Job must be guilty of some sin that he is being punished for; they assume that innocent suffering cannot exist. They have their own theory of theodicy that Job knows is wrong because he knows from his own subjective experience that he is truly innocent and blameless. But the reality of his suffering clashes with Job's own sense of justice and Job challenges God to explain why he is seemingly being punished (9:2, 10:2, 13-14, 19:4-8, 27:2, 31:1-40). When God appears at Job's request, he does nothing to explain himself. No solution is offered to the problem of theodicy because man cannot know the mind of God or the reason behind the calamities he brings; the question of justice must be left as a mystery of God. The author of the prose sections was not satisfied with this and attempted his own explanation (which imo is a failure). But the moral lesson of the poetic dialogues is this: (1) If you see a person experience calamity, do not judge the person and think he or she is guilty of some fault on the basis of your own limited understanding of God's justice, and (2) If you experience calamity and know that you did nothing to deserve such a misfortune, do not judge God and think you are more just than him on the basis of your own limited understanding of God's justice. I think some modern readers will not be satisfied with (2) but will agree that (1) is a good lesson that anticipates the Christian ethic of Matthew 7:1-2, Luke 6:37, 1 Corinthians 4:5, James 4:12.
To me, the frank discussion that occurs in Job was a necessary one in the transition from polytheism to full monotheism. The prose additions derailed this by reverting to the kind of henotheism that could simply blame "evil" on the lesser beings in the divine council (later Judaism and Christianity departed from the robust monotheism of Deutero-Isaiah even more by inflating the role of antagonists like "Satan" to full status as archenemies of the divine order). The poetic dialogues confront the problem head-on, but fail to offer a satisfactory solution because there isn't one. Nature operates without any understandable sense of morality and that raises a problem if God is responsible for what happens in nature (e.g. orchestrating things behind the scenes); the reasons behind what God does ultimately cannot be explained since (from the perspective of the author) humankind had very little understanding of how nature actually works. And one interesting thing the author questions is the egocentric assumption that humankind is at the center of the universe; that was really innovative stuff for its time. There is an awareness throughout that the priorities and interests of people may matter less to God than other things in nature. I am struck by the passage about the wild ass (39:5-8), which has Yahweh helping it escape if captured by man, loosening the ropes so it could run to the salt flats that Yahweh has given to the wild ass as its home. This would be a misfortune to the livelihood of the family that captured it; people may starve. The passage about death (ch. 14) is also instructive. Death is viewed as divinely ordained just like other natural processes of decay, erosion, and evaporation: "You have decreed the number of his months and set limits he cannot exceed....As the water of a lake dries up or a riverbed becomes parched and dry, as a mountain erodes and crumbles and as a rock is moved from its place, as water wears away stones and torrents wash away the soil, so you destroy a person’s hope" (v. 5-20). Unlike J who viewed death as the result of divine punishment for disobedience (Genesis 2-3), the author here simply views it as part of more general natural processes. The value of a person's individual life is less important than the continued progression of the cycles of nature. The author even notes that a tree is more advantaged than a human in this respect (v. 7-10), though people have gifts that a tree does not have (such as intelligence). Yahweh later makes it a special point that he did not give wisdom to the ostrich, resulting in a share of misfortune (such that its eggs and young may be needlessly endangered). He doesn't explain the reason for this, only to add that he instead gave it abilities (such as its speed) that other animals would envy (39:13-18). The modern transition from philosophical theism to atheism exposed similar issues. Deism conceived God as disinterested in the affairs of humankind and who did not intervene in the normal course of nature. Full atheism today views nature as amoral and lacking in any "divine" direction. It just is.
It is interesting how subsequent editors were so dissatisfied with the perspective of the poem. The author of the prologue and epilogue wanted to give some explanation of the reasons behind Job's afflictions, and he also makes Job voice an attitude altogether different from that in his complaint: "Yahweh gives and he takes away, may Yahweh's name be praised.... We take the good out of God's hand, should we not also take bad things?" (1:21, 2:10). The words in the dialogues are not erased, but they are countered. The writer who inserted the Elihu speeches similarly was not content with Yahweh's indifferent response and used Job's request for an arbiter (9:33, 16:19-20, 19:25) as the excuse to insert a new character who gives an extended critique of the content of Job's complaint — something one might wish that Yahweh had done in his lengthy speech from the whirlwind. The LXX translators softened the bleakness of reality further by adding into the dialogues and the prose story the hope of future resurrection (which attempts to balance present suffering with the promise of a future reward). The later theological development of Satan as a cosmological opponent of God also distracts from Job as a self-professed critic of God's seemingly arbitrary actions. The pseudepigraphal Testament of Job (first century AD), for instance, portrays God as the "Master of virtues" (50:2), while Satan is responsible for all evil that Job experiences (17:1), and even responsible for inspiring what Elihu had to say (41:5). This theological development of Satan was also central to JF Rutherford's use of Job as a primary source for his "vindication" doctrine. The focus is entirely on Satan as the figure who challenges God's judgment and sovereignty, despite the fact that in the actual text it is Job, not the satan, who does precisely this.
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King Solomon
Cold Steel said:
The Old Testament, so called, points the way to Christ. Why, for example, do you think YHWH instituted the law of sacrifice? Because he enjoys the wanton killing of animals? No, but because it was a teaching implement. The sacrifice of the firstborn of the flocks was done in the similitude of the sacrifice of Jesus.
"A teaching implement"? "A TEACHING IMPLEMENT?"
Did anyone tell the animals that their main purpose in being created by YHWH was to serve as his disposable teaching aids?
Cold Steel, that is the MOST asinine example of anthropocentric apologetic rationale I've read on this forum to date (although, in your defense, it IS a scripturally-based sentiment: man's role was to exercise dominion over the animals, per Genesis). Kudos!!
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King Solomon
Thanks for the insightful information and perspective, Leo... It always an education to see what a REAL scholar has to say on the subject (as opposed to wanna-be hacks like me).
As with the tale of Adam and Eve, I suspect if the story of Job were turned in for an assignment in a creative writing class, it would be handed back to the student with the words, "re-think your basic premise before I grade this" at the top.
Yet another example of "too many cooks spoiling the broth", with one redactor's efforts to "fix" something opened a can of moral worms, with unintended consequences by undermining the efforts of the first. So much for Divine Inspiration....
And as noted in other threads, the Bible offers a broad selection of Hallmark greeting-card sentiments from which to choose to send on Theodicy Day, depending on a given need: you can send a card printed with "God protects his faithful servants and punishes the evil-doer", or one with "unforesceen circumstances befall all", or one with Job's "God works in mysterious ways". Pick the card that fills the need, depending on if the sender thinks the person brought their misfortune upon themselves or not.
BTW, it's interesting to note the element in the Job story of Satan "the accuser" being a faithful servant of YHWH's Heavenly Divine Counsel, and acting under YHWH's authority to test Job. Of course, 'Satan' is not a proper name but a title (much as we use the term "prosecutor" to refer to lawyers who represent the interests of the State in criminal matters). That point is missed by most Xians, who as you say, have elevated Satan to the Zoroasterian duality model of arch-enemy, turning a title (Satan) into a proper name, a specific individual.
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nuthouse escapee
Thanks Leolaia, your post explains a lot. Appreciated understanding how Rutherford came up with the vindication scenario. -Leslie-