reading to understand

Week 26  Ecclesiastes

I start reading Ecclesiastes today and right away get reminded of something that happens in bible-reading. It’s that I read something and I get it, and then maybe right away, maybe right in the next verse I see something that doesn’t make much sense to me.
It’s a bit like this: Ice cream. Txhjkow. Hydro-electricity. %%%dppyo8. Herd of elephants. Thhg &44) kkol. A kind of bible-reader’s parkour. I land on a spot where I’ve got some pretty solid comprehension then I hop over a gap where I’m feeling baffled. I move ahead and then stall. Think I know…think I don’t.
Reading any kind of Not-So-Easy material I can pretty much figure on this happening – this mix of getting-it & not-getting-it. Today I get that reminder when I start Ecclesiastes.
Not-so-easy reading more-or-less insists that I try to understand. Entertaining reading  is more appealing because it puts understanding way down on its list of requirements.

Note: month-end reading report. It’s the last day of June (so 50% of 2022 is in-the-books). I calculated that I’ve read 54% of the bible. When I finish with Ecclesiastes I’ve got a heavy diet of prophets through the hot days of summer. Isaiah & Jeremiah – two of the longest books in the bible – are up ahead. Since my plan is to finish the OT by August 31 I’ll have to pick up the pace a bit.

last on the list

Week 26  Song of Solomon

There are different orders I can choose to read the OT. For instance:
Consecutive order (beginning-to-end – Genesis > Revelation)
Chronological order (oldest-to-most-recent – maybe Job > Nehemiah(?))
Longest to shortest (Jeremiah > Obadiah(?))
Most-Interesting to Least-Interesting? I’ve never actually seen this one recommended. If it was the 39 OT books could be arranged in a thousand variations since most-favorite to least-favorite would be different for everyone.
Personally I’m not sure where I’d start. Genesis Ruth Esther Daniel Jonah would all be right up there. But I wouldn’t think twice about the last book at the very bottom of the list. Song of Solomon. Hands-down.
The thing is…every other OT book gives a bible reader some kind of detectable tip-off about structure or mechanics or operations in the Total World. They all talk about some things that’re pretty evident to me and other things that aren’t. (What I do with the-things-that-aren’t is another question. I’m just saying there’re there).
Anyway my point is that Song of Solomon reads like a this-material-world-only story. There’s a guy. There’s a girl. He loves her. She loves him. He wants to marry her & have sexual intercourse with her and she wants to marry him & have sexual intercourse with him. A pretty normal love-story.
So… Q: what tip-offs do I get about the Total World in Song of Solomon?
A: none.
I’m not saying there aren’t any tip-offs. Just that they aren’t obvious to me.

Note: on second-thought Esther reads like a this-material-world-only story too.

who said that?

Week 26  Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon is a pretty tricky book.
That’s not the same as saying it’s totally incomprehensible. It’s not like it’s written in Xhosa. I can read the words and get a kind of baseline idea about what’s going on. I can see that there’s a guy and a girl who are tangled-up in a romantic and dreamily-erotic longing & hoping. So I’d say it’s a kind of love-story (how much of a story I’m not sure).
More important for me today is that I notice how easy it is to lose track of who’s talking. I’m reading chapters 1-4 and saying: hold on a sec’…who’s-actually-saying-this?
It usually helps a reader to know who says something. Luckily the words and ideas sometimes tip me off:
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth – that’s the girl talking
If you do not know, most beautiful of women… – that’s the guy
My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts – the girl
How beautiful you are – sounds like the guy
How handsome you are – likely the girl
His left arm is under my head – girl
My lover is mine and I am his – girl
Your two breasts are like fawns – guy
Let my lover come into his garden – girl.
I know this isn’t much of a discovery. But it all helps. I finish chapter 4 reminding myself: I’ve gotta learn to walk before I can run.

Note: quotes from Song of Solomon 1:8 13 15 16 2:6 16 4:5 16 (NIV)

answering questions

Week 26  Job 38-41

Two years ago I counted up 70 questions the Lord asked Job in chapters 38-41.
This year I wondered how many of them Job could have answered. I got a sheet of paper and divided it into two columns:
Questions Job Could Answer (on the left).
Questions Job Could Not Answer (on the right).
I only had time to look at chapter 38. There were 28 questions and I calculated that ~24 of them were answerable. Which surprised me. For instance:
Q: where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
A: I didn’t exist at that point.
Q: who marked off (the earth’s) dimensions?
A: you did.
There were only a couple of questions Job couldn’t answer:
Q: on what were (the earth’s) footings set?
Q: where does darkness reside?
Answering 24 of 28 questions is a score of ~86%. Which is really good. Except it wasn’t that kind of quiz at all. That’s why when he got the chance to answer Job just said: I am unworthy – how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.
It wasn’t so much an I’m Going to Test You to See What you Know as it was a Here Are Some Interrogatives to Think About That Highlight What You Don’t.

Note: quotes from Job 38:4 5a 12 6 19b & 40:4 (NIV). And see back to May 30, 2020 post ‘something or nothing’.

colour management

Week 26  Job 38

The first thing the Lord says in his wrap-up is: who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?
Eliphaz Bildad Zophar & Elihu – each one had given his opinion. And the first thing the Lord did was ask this worrisome question.
The Lord talks about Counsel as if it was colourable. He doesn’t specify the original colour of Counsel but it’s got be in the white-vanilla-beige range because he says his original Counsel has been discoloured and darkened down.
How is it possible to darken White Counsel? It’s possible by adding words-without-knowledge (there might be other ways to tone down White Counsel but if there are they’re not mentioned here).
I admit that I’ve been impressed by some of the things EBZ and Elihu have said in their conversation with Job. Quite a few have sounded pretty good & pretty knowledgeable. But now it looks like the Lord hasn’t been nearly as impressed as I have. He says that these men had started with White Counsel – fresh & bright & clean – and worked at darkening it down. Blue. Purple. Mauve. Brown. Black. Doesn’t much matter which colour they used. They’re all darkeners. White Counsel’s preferred tone is white. But see how easy it is to tone it down. To tint it into Dark Counsel.
So there’s at least two kinds of advice/counsel:
The kind that brightens knowledge.
And the kind that muddies it up.
And Job 38-41 is a reminder of counsel’s Colour Management.

Note: quote from Job 38:2 (NIV)

something for everyone

Week 25  Proverbs 31

Reading through the bible I know I’ve got to read it all. But reading Proverbs 31:10-31 can seem like a toss-up for a guy or for an unmarried woman since the passage describes ideal qualities of a married woman.
For something to do a couple of years ago I wrote down Lemuel’s 16 Qualities of a Quality Wife.
So then last year I was wondering if I could ferret-out anything useful from that list.
I started with the 16 wife-specific items I had.
Then I Gender Neutralized them (for example I adjusted ‘her husband can trust her’ to something like ‘that person is trustworthy’).
I also took away all the near-eastern society-specific cultural-domestic-&-household-tasks that were anthropologically-off-putting & distance-creating & contemporarily-inapplicable.
This year I trimmed-down & tidied-up my list and ended up with 10 transferable questions I could ask myself:
Am I entrepreneurial?
Do I work hard?
Do I have a sense of “self-worth”?
Am I concerned enough about disadvantaged people that I help them?
Am I a forward thinker? Do I plan and prepare for the future?
Am I strong?
Am I confident?
Am I wise (and also kind) when I talk to people?
Am I concerned about the well-being of my family?
Do outsiders see the quality of my work?
My answer is the same in every case: well…not really.
I don’t know how a woman feels reading chapter 31. But reading my modified list gives me a feeling of work-still-to-be-done.

Note: quote from Proverbs 31:11 (NLT)

Agur’s assessment

Week 25  Proverbs 30

A man named Agur wrote this chapter – the only part of the bible he wrote.
He started with a prayer. At least I thought he started with a prayer. The bible I’m reading says: I am weary, O God; I am weary and worn out, O God. That sounds like a prayer.
The problem is that I looked at two other bibles and neither one of them said anything about being weary or worn-out. So is Agur weary or not? (I finally saw that the bible I’m reading says in a footnote that: “the Hebrew can be translated (differently)”).
So that left me in a Hebrew-language deficit.
But I do see that Agur says four other things in his intro. And all three versions say more-or-less the same:
I’m the most ignorant man
I lack common sense
I haven’t mastered human wisdom
I don’t know the Holy One.
Three versions. Three language differences. But the same self-critical assessment. Agur will go on to give some good proverbs but he starts with some pretty negative self-talk.
Common advice against self-criticism in southern Alberta these days is: don’t-be-too-hard-on-yourself. But the impression I get from Agur (and as far as that goes from other parts of Proverbs) is that being self-critical is only unhealthy if it’s wrong. On the other hand if I am – for instance – a genuine fool I’ll be staying that way as long as I keep telling myself I’m not.

Note: quotes & paraphrases from Proverbs 30:1-2 (NLT NASB NIV)

sounding good

Week 25  Job

Two years ago – May 26, 2020 – I was thinking about what Eliphaz Bildad & Zophar said to Job. They said quite-a-few things that sounded pretty good so that year I did a rough quantitative analysis to see what “quite-a-few” converted to in numbers. In the first series of conversations I calculated that 70% of the EBZ content sounded pretty good.
This year I decided to do that exercise again in the later conversations – chapters 15-31. Would EBZ keep saying pretty good things at a rate of 70%?
In 15-31 there are 121 verses of EBZ speaking. That much is a counting exercise. The second – trickier – judgment-call part of the calculation was deciding how many sounded pretty good. One simple test I used a few times was to ask: if I read this verse somewhere else – say Psalms or Proverbs – would it sound ok? (for instance: the light of the wicked will be snuffed out). And a second test was to ask myself: do these sound common-sensically legitimate to me? (for instance: God is so great – higher than the heavens, higher than the farthest stars).
Findings: out of the 121 verses of EBZ material I counted 67 verses that sounded pretty good. That’s ~55%.
EBZ slipped from 70% in the early going to 55% as the debate went on. But 55% still seems high to me (it didn’t drop to zero). So it looks like EBZ were arguably correct about quite a few things but still wrong in what they said about Job.

Note: quote from Job 18:5 & 22:12 (NLT)

if…

Week 25  Job 31

Job is getting near the end of his debate with EBZ and in this chapter he makes a whole bunch of conditional comments.
If X…then Y.
If Situation X happens…then Outcome Y occurs.
With Job the pattern is: “if I’d done Wrong Action X then the result would be Negative Outcome Y”.
I counted the number of times Job said if I’d done… I found 13. But there’s more than that because Job also switches off and uses words about equal to if I’d done. Phrases like or I’d done & and I’d done & the question have I done? Different ways of saying if I’d done. I added the ‘if I’d dones’ + ‘or I’d dones’ + ‘and I’d dones’ + ‘have I dones’ and got 33 – give-or-take. That’s quite a few conditionals in a 40-verse chapter.
Approximately 33 Hypothetical Concessions from Job: if I did Wrong Action X then I deserve Negative Outcome Y.
Job knew that one of the Inescapable Laws of the Universe was: If I Do Wrong Then I’ll Be Penalized. He had no argument with that Law; didn’t have any concern with it. His (Big) concern was the flip-side: if I’ve done nothing wrong will I get penalized? (And it really looked to Job like the answer was “Yes!”)
Job’s dilemma was that he figured he was in-the-right.
EBZ’s observation was that Job had been smashed to pieces and therefore he had to be in-the-wrong.
So in the end EBZ gave up on Stubborn Job.

arguing

Week 25  Proverbs 26

When arguing with fools, don’t answer their foolish arguments, or you will becomes as foolish as they are.
When arguing with fools, be sure to answer their foolish arguments, or they will become wise in their own estimation.
I sit there thinking about these consecutive (and pretty contradictory-looking) verses.
Don’t argue with a foolish guy…
Argue with a foolish guy…
Hmmm….
With a Real Contradiction there’d be two things that are so different that one has to be wrong – wrong by definition. So for instance: ‘a foolish guy is wise’.
But Solomon’s Do-Argue and also Don’t-Argue are different…and a bit trickier. So for instance – maybe the idea is that I can’t both argue and not-argue at the very-same-time. But I can at different times or under different conditions. That’s a situation where Do-Argue & Don’t-Argue are more circumstance-or-time-dependent and doing both is possible.
So verse 4 would be saying that if I’m going to get into a foolish & degraded & acrimonious & destructive argument then better not to argue.
And verse 5 would be more like: I’m doing the other guy a disservice if I don’t at least point out the other-side.
That’s one way I can think about it to help myself make sense. I have to do something since Solomon doesn’t always leave me much to work with. A lot of the proverbs are minimalist sayings. Simple-Complex short-hand comments. And I have to dope them out as best I can.

Note: quotes from Proverbs 26:4 & 5 (NLT)