Friend or Foe?

Is Job God’s enemy or God’s friend?  The text in the Book of Job swings wildly between those poles for chapter after chapter.  Even the words of the text themselves swirl with ambiguity and mystery.  In Job 13:15, for example, you can read these words in the New Revised Standard Version—“See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face.”  

Alert readers will notice the footnote at the end of that verse and will follow it to the bottom of the page.  There they will read an alternative translation, “Though he kill me, yet I will trust in him…”  Try as we might, it is impossible to reconcile those alternative translations as slight variations of one another.  What is happening here?

The Book of Job has more translation uncertainties than any other book in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.  The reasons for those uncertainties are many, and that doesn’t really need to concern us here in detail.  However, Job 13:15 can illustrate these difficulties and what they might mean.  The translation “I have no hope” renders the meaning of the letters on the page in the Hebrew text.  The translation “I will trust in him” renders the meaning of the words that were read aloud from the Hebrew text in traditional settings.

This is an example of what scholars refer to as “ketiv/qere.”  Sometimes in the Hebrew manuscripts there is a difference between what is written on the page and what is read aloud in worship or in study.  Scribes who copied the manuscript from one generation to another would often make marginal notations about how to read a given text.  And sometimes those notations would find their way into the Hebrew text itself.

In Job 13:15, the written (“ketiv”) text is pronounced “low” (that’s the pronunciation of the word itself, not a description of tone or volume).  That word means “no” or “not.”  The text traditionally read aloud (“qere”) is also pronounced “low” but means “in him.”  One scribe might have thought another made a transcription error and sought to correct it.  

The problem is that we don’t know which reading is the original and which is the “corrected” one.  And we cannot know simply by looking at the text itself.  So interpreting Scripture—especially that piece of Hebrew and Christian Scripture called the Book of Job—is far more difficult, complex and subtle than most lay people might wish for or hope to believe.

So, what to do?  We must look at the larger context and try to render a decision that fits with the evidence of that larger context.  In Job 13:16 Job declares that his “salvation” consists in the fact that “the godless shall not come before” God.  He continues to demand an audience with the Almighty to adjudicate his case, even if it kills him.  

Job hopes that might not be the case.  He pleads for such an audience as would make space for him within the searing reality of the Divine Glory.  “Withdraw your hand far from me,” he pleads, “and do not let dread of you terrify me” (Job 13:21).  Job knows that a face to face confrontation with the Maker of All Things will be a fatal conversation, unless God can make a safe space for the dialogue.  That’s all he asks at this point.

It seems to me much more likely that the traditional reading of Job 13:15 is the preferred one—“Though he kill me, yet I will trust in him.”  The more interesting question is whether the writer of Job intended to create such ambiguity from the outset.  Did the writer of Job want to force us to wonder whether Job lived in trust or despair?  

As we read further in the Book of Job, I think you’ll see that the writer of Job is a master at creating such verbal forks in the road.  And I hope you’ll have some sympathy with my approach to such forks.  The great philosopher Yogi Berra said it best—“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  I think that the writer of Job wishes for us to live with the ambiguity and uncertainty because that is what life is like as we suffer.

One evening in March of 2010, a dear friend sat in our basement family room.  She had lost her husband and had come to share some of her experience, and to feel the love and support of all of us who grieved with her.  We sat for stretches of silence, not knowing what to say that would not launch the next cascade of tears.  Then she said, “I just don’t think I can ever be OK with what has happened to him.”  

We also talked about where life might take her in her new and unexpected reality.  It was difficult and confusing to be “not OK” and to try to think about any kind of future.  Perhaps this is exactly what the writer of Job observes in chapter thirteen.

Job: friend of God or enemy?  It’s not clear at this point.  But perhaps the ambiguity leads to a much more important confrontation.  Has our friend, Job, been moved from the God who is safe to the God who is dangerous?  

At the beginning of Job’s story, he knows a god who is indeed quite safe.  This is the god who obeys the rules of the system.  Righteous people are rewarded with blessings.  Wicked people are punished with curses.  If one suffers, it is because that person deserves the suffering.  This god can be placated by sacrifices “just in case”—the kinds of sacrifices Job offers just in case his children get a little to boisterous at their many and various soirees.  

This is the god who fits into human categories, is the size of the human brain, and is therefore hardly worth the bother.  Mark Buchanan describes a bit of this experience in Your God is Too Safe.  “We fear God the way we fear tigers and tyrants, cyclones and cyclopes: a power swift and capricious.  So we want it muffled, mediated, caged.  We settle for—no, demand, echoes, rumors, shadows” (page 23).

Job has lived with the “echoes, rumors, shadows.”  Now Job confronts the Lord of the Universe.  Job’s experience seems to call God’s goodness into question.  Perhaps he’s not quite so good—and he certainly isn’t merely a “he.”  

Or perhaps it isn’t God’s goodness that is the question at all.  Perhaps, instead, what is on trial is the god that Job has worshiped all these years only to find that the god of personal security, safety and stability is no god at all.  Perhaps that god is just a projection of our own wishes, just so much metaphysical whistling past the graveyard.  Now it’s time to encounter the real God—who isn’t safe.

It’s one thing for us to be God’s enemies (see Romans 5:7-11) and then to be reconciled, having been justified by means of the faithfulness of Christ.  But it is a different thing entirely when it seems that God is the “enemy”—make to appear so through our experiences of suffering.  Who is the real enemy in the book of Job?

The sheer existence of suffering is insufficient either to prove or disprove the existence of God.  Humans have assented to the sheer existence of various gods in spite of or even because of the experience of suffering.  Our problem is not God’s existence.  Our problem is God’s character.  Is our God trustworthy (this is, of course, Paul’s question in the letter to the Romans)?  

It gets worse, of course.  Jesus died too.  Can God be trusted?  That depends on who Jesus is and what really happened to him after he died.