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)