Week 24 Job 7
By chapter seven Job is near the end-of-the-line. He wishes he was dead.
Part of the attraction of being dead was that any circumstance was starting to look better than the one he was in.
There are two basic states: being alive and being dead. I don’t have any clinical studies to prove it but my sense is that the normal feeling among living people is that being alive is the preferable condition.
In my mind I imagine a long horizontal line – a Life & Death Preference Continuum. Life is on the left. Death on the right. And everyone is located in between. Lots of us – maybe the majority – are clustered over toward the life-preferring left-end of the line. But as life gets less attractive for me I’ll start inching along toward the right. Job’s life circumstances were alarmingly bad. Job was a strong right-end candidate.
He says: I prefer…death, rather than this body of mine. I despise my life…my days have no meaning.
He’d been mulling being dead since chapter three: I would be lying down in peace; I would be asleep and at rest
In death: the weary are at rest
In death: captives enjoy their ease
In death: the slave is freed.
Personally I think Job embellished the benefits of the death state a little too much.
But the point is that he’s definitely warming-up to the benefits of being dead.
Note: quotes from Job 7:15-16 3:13 & 16-17 (NIV)