Medicine Hat Joe

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’.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

Week 25  Job 27

A few years ago I heard a guy say that Job 27:7-23 wasn’t actually said by Job (even though the chapter begins: Job continued speaking). The reason was that it didn’t sound like something Job would say.
I read the 17 verses asking myself: ‘could Job have said this?’ In the end I figured the answer was ‘yes’.
The main point of the speech is that evil people with be judged for their evil actions. I couldn’t think of a reason why Job wouldn’t say that. His concern wasn’t whether wicked people would be punished. His concern was quite a bit more personal – why am I being punished?
EBZ were a bit befuddled too. They started with the True General Principle (TGP) that evil people would be judged for their evil actions. They had the idea that negative consequences were almost magnetically attracted to evilness…that where one was you’d predictably find the other. So then EBZ took their TGP and applied it back-to-front to Job’s specific & personal case: awful things are happening to Job…therefore Job is awful.
I figure I’ve got to cut them some slack. They didn’t have an alternative TGP that applied in Job’s case. Didn’t realize that terrible things can happen to innocent people.
Even Job didn’t know that. Maybe nobody did until Job lived out his  life.

Note: quote from Job 27:1 (NLT). BTW: the guy said that the Job 27:7-23 passage was a speech by Zophar.

Week 25  Proverbs

Yesterday I was reading a collection of proverbs that my bible subtitled: Thirty Sayings of the Wise.
Those Thirty-Sayings were followed by another subtitled section: More Sayings of the Wise.
Those More-Sayings were followed by another subtitle: More Proverbs of Solomon (which went for the next ~140 verses).
I wondered why I’d not been noticing subtitles. I paged back from Thirty Sayings of the Wise past 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10. Chapter ten said: The Proverbs of Solomon. So there haven’t been any subtitles for 13 chapters.
Anyway then I wondered – since Solomon wrote chapters 10-22:16 and 25-29 – did he write chapters 22:17-24:34 too? I just kind of assume he did since that section is sayings-of-the-wise and Solomon was wise. But I also noticed a slight difference in the two.
Many of the Solomon Proverbs are one-verse long: the rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord made them both. But quite a few of the Wise Proverbs are a couple of verses long: don’t weary yourself getting rich. Why waste your time? For riches can disappear as though they had the wings of a bird.
Does that prove anything? Maybe the Wise Proverbs were written by someone else (the last two chapters of the book weren’t written by Solomon). Or maybe ancient Jewish literature had different styles/forms of proverbs and Solomon wrote both kinds. It’s hard to say.

Note: quotes from Proverbs 22:2 & 23:4-5 (NLT). Added note: I figure 99%  of Solomon’s proverbs were only one-verse long. Someday I might do a count.

Week 24  Proverbs 22

One of the bibles I read adds subheadings. The subheadings aren’t part of the bible. They’re just tip-offs the publisher plugged-in to signal key break-points in the text.
One of those subheadings is added just before Proverbs 22:17 and it says Thirty Sayings of the Wise. A couple of verses later Solomon says: I have written thirty sayings for you.
So I’m expecting to read thirty more proverbs. But the chapter ends nine verses later and there are only five. I scan forward through chapter 23 and then 24. I spot another subheading after 24:22: More Sayings of the Wise.
From 22:17 (where Thirty Sayings of the Wise begins) to 24:22 (where Thirty Sayings of the Wise ends) there’s roughly 70 verses. I do a quick count and find 33 proverbs in those 70 verses (I won’t take that number to the bank – it was a quick count).
I check another bible version. It adds subtitles too: Sayings of the Wise. A couple of verses later Solomon asks: have I not written thirty sayings for you? (after 24:22 it adds: Further Sayings of the Wise).
I check another bible version. It doesn’t add subtitles. And Solomon doesn’t say anything about thirty sayings: have I not written to you excellent things?
Hmmm. In English the word ‘thirty’ is quite a bit different from ‘excellent’. There’s likely a technical linguistic explanation but I don’t know about it.
So I move on and just start reading the thirty proverbs.

Note: quotes from Proverbs 22:20a (NLT NIV & NASB)