Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Reginald Wallace Ponder, Jr." <rwponder AT lycos.com>]

> 
> 
> >> BR:   and declared his willingness to stand before God and make his case.
> >
> >RWP: Those who understand 42:1-6 in terms of Job's repenting of sin or
> >impiety seem to view his willingness to stand before God as impiety. 
> 
> BR: This may be what others have said but it's not my position.
> 
> >RWP: Although a verse or two here and there might be understandable on 
> >those
> >terms, in the main Job's position seems to be consistent with YHWH's own
> >position as articulated  in Chapter 1 and in 42:7-9.
> >     My own sense is that Job repents, not of sin or impiety, but of his
> >mournful despair.
> 
> BR: This was your offering on V6 a few days ago:-
> 
> RWP: v6 Therefore I shall reject that I should grieve upon dust and ashes.
> 
> BR: Your paragraph above seems to have sifted ground. Am I correct?
> Reject and repent seem quite different to me.

  RWP: Thanks for the opportunity to clarify my position on this point. 
The translation that I propose is precisely the one you have quoted here.
I am not moving away from that at all. There are two different aspects to
this discussion, a grammatical/lexical aspect and a
theological/hermeneutical aspect.  Much of the confusion has arisen from
the fact that I have a point of grammatical agreement with Robert's
original post, even though he and I appear to differ sharply on the exact
*meaning* of 42:6 and of Job as a whole.
     I do not use "repent" in my translation.  I do, however, think there
is repentance in this passage.  Job's rejection of grief (as in my
translation of 42:6) is repentance in the basic sense of a change of
mind/heart.
     So I even would say that I do see a defiant Job in 42:1-6. But Job
does *not* shake his fist at YHWH.  Rather, bolstered by his vision (v5)he
shakes his fist at Satan, or more properly (since he does not mention
Satan, and knows nothing about the dialogue in Chapter 1) at the ideas
that Satan articulates in Chapter 1.
> 
>BR:  To me Job makes the claim that he is ready and willing to stand
> before YHWH and make his case because he knows that YHWH is just
> and will vindicate him. His friends were making the case that he
> was suffering because he had committed some sort of wickedness.
> But when YHWH turns up in the tornado and speaks giving Job a 
> chance to talk with him, what happens? Job doesn't have anything to
> say. The encounter with the tornado and baffling speech from YHWH
> seems to be enough for him. He appears to be overwhelmed. While Job
> may not be repenting of a specific sin he is overcome by just how
> little he understood of YHWH. There is nothing he can say that YHWH
> doesn't already know.
> 
> RWP: It is exactly "just how little he understood of YHWH," coupled with 
> the conventional widsom dispensed by the friends (who themselves understand 
> much less of YHWH than they realize) that sparked Job's grief-unto-despair. 
>  What Job finally does in Chapter 42, perhaps, is to *rest* -- something he 
> has not done for the rest of the book.
     Although it could be that Job *cannot* speak, as you suggest, the
alternative is that he *doesn't have to* -- he has been freed from the
treadmill of his own words.
 
\
> Dan Wagner wrote:-
> 
> >Bill Rea writes on 42:6, "I am still interested in what the LXX says at 
> >this
> >point."
> >
> >Hmmm, interesting: "Therefore I disparage(d) myself, and
> >faint/melt/dissolve(d): now/but/then [de] I have considered myself [to be]
> >ground/dirt and ashes."
> >
> >The verbs are aorist, aorist, & perfect respectively, but that's probably
> >not important for our purposes. My assumption would be that they are
> >interpreting multiple ideas possible in the M)S verb and then trying to
> >cover the scope of it's meaning with two separate verbs (trying to reflect
> >your "double meaning" in his translation!?), and that the 3rd verb reflects
> >NXM (though not very well it would seem). I don't think i'd want to suppose
> >in any difference in the LXX's Vorlage, although i suppose only someone
> >well-studied in the LXX of Job (assuming one translator of the book) would
> >be in position to make a strong statement on that issue.
> 
> BR: It's interesting the LXX seems to be aware of the double meaning 
> possibility
> and tries to capture it. Often these sorts of things rely on a unique
> feature of the original language which can't be reconstructed in a 
> second. Thanks.

 RWP: I also am interested in this double meaning possibility. One thing
that surely is true of Job is that it is super-charged with meaning at
multiple levels. This is an important discussion because there is a
powerful message in Job.  Possibly we are closer to agreement on the
content/character of that message than might first appear.

> Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_ 
> E-Mail b dot rea at it dot canterbury dot ac dot nz             </   New
> Phone   64-3-364-2331, Fax     64-3-364-2332                   /)  Zealand
> Unix Systems Administrator                                    (/'