Arrows of God

Arrows of God

Essays on Job, the Apostle Paul, Immanuel Kant, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, René Descartes, Bob Marley, and More

Gerhard Venter

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Copyright © 2019 by Gerhard Venter

All rights reserved. This work is self-published by its author. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is compiled from edited excerpts out of my 2011 book Teach Me — And I Shall Be Quiet.

Gerhard Venter

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All Biblical quotations from:

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Note that all quotations from the New International Version in this book will be attributed with the abbreviation (NIV).

Authored by Gerhard Venter

Job and the Arrows of the Almighty

This chapter comes with a warning. To the devoted Christian, this part of the book of Job contains some shocking language. Here Job, who has just lost all his possessions, his ten children, and his health, puts two and two together and realizes: God is behind this. All this couldn’t have happened to me, he reasons, without the will of God. But I haven’t done anything wrong, he says. There is only one conclusion, and Job makes it — God is being unjust. Job is angry, and Job rails against God. So let us examine this fascinating and challenging part of the Bible.

The Book of Job in the Old Testament tells the story of a rich and happy man whose livelihood and life were destroyed with the consent of God. As part of some sort of heavenly rivalry, God allowed the satan (the adversary, a celestial being, only later identified with the Christian Satan) to strike Job not only with the loss of all his possessions, for Job was a rich man, but also to kill his seven sons and three daughters, and to finally to affect his health by afflicting him from head to toe with painful boils.

In the beginning, Job takes these blows stoically, unbearable though they are, and still worships God. But when after all his misfortunes his health is ruined, he puts two and two together: this is no accident. His God has not only forsaken him, despite his lifelong piety, but is taking an active hand in his destruction.

Job rebels. He wants to know Why?¹ He is a man who has nothing left to lose. He holds on to his integrity to such a degree as he is able, but he is now recklessly threatening apostasy and daring God to kill him. He is not alone in this: sufferers in the ancient near eastern world, for example in the Babylonian Theodicy, and also in the Psalms, have asked uncomfortable questions of God and lamented that God has forsaken them. But this is the only text in the Bible where a rhetoric of anger can be found that is sustained throughout a large portion of the text.

The language of Job’s rebellion is not only highly emotional, but even contains biting sarcasm and irony toward God. For instance, Job says in chapter 7:17-21 (NIV):

¹⁷ What is mankind that you make so much of them,

that you give them so much attention,

¹⁸ that you examine them every morning

and test them every moment?

When I read an utterance as astounding as the one made by Job in chap. 6:4 (JPS):

For the arrows of the Almighty are in me;

My spirit absorbs their poison;

it prompts me to take a closer look at the second speech from chapter 6-7, in which Job does as good a job as any human being has ever done in putting mental suffering into words.

Outline

Job’s second speech (chap. 6:1-7:21) can be outlined as follows:

Job expresses the extent of his vexation. (Job 6:1-13)

He reproaches his friends for failing him. (Job 6:14-30)

Time seems distorted to a sufferer. (Job 7:1-10)

Job addresses God, the Watcher of men, directly. (Job 7:11-21)

After Job’s initial outburst in which he curses the day of his birth (chap. 3), and after Eliphaz has started down the road of refuting Job from traditional wisdom, Job begins his second speech, in which he tries to express the depth of his suffering, addresses the unfaithfulness of his friends, and finally speaks directly to God.

Let us take a look at Job 6:1-13 to examine Job’s emotional state which he expresses as the arrows of the Almighty and the effects of their poison — a devastatingly effective description of how intensely he experiences his affliction.

Being metaphorical arrows, their poison affects not only his body, but also his spirit. With this in mind, I structure vv. 1-13 as follows:

Job expresses the extent of the anguish caused by his affliction: (Job 6:1-13, NIV).

The extent of his anguish

His anguish is so great that it cannot be measured or expressed.

How heavy is Job’s grief?

His grief would weigh more than the sand of the sea, vv. 2-

God has declared war against him

His anguish is so great that he feels as if God is waging war against him. The arrows of God are in him and their poison is toxic to his spirit, v. 4(a). God has arrayed spirit shock troops against him to terrify him, v. 4(b).

He feels like a starving animal

His anguish is so great that he has reason to bellow like a starving animal. He is bellowing like an animal because he is starving for relief (food), v. 5.

His life has lost its meaning

His anguish is so great that his life has lost all taste (meaning). His life is as tasteless as food without salt, v. 6(a). … or it is as tasteless as the juice of some barely edible plant, v. 6(b). In fact, if his life were food, it would make him throw up, v. 7.

His suffering has made him lose the will to live

His anguish is so great that he does not fear the punishment of God (i.e. death) any more. He expresses the wish that God should make an end to his life, vv. 8-9. Then at least he would have spoken his mind against God and received some symbolic semblance of justice, v. 10.

Job is beginning to wonder if God knows what he’s doing

His anguish is so great that he has doubts about the rationality of God. (1) How long does God think he can endure? v. 11 (2) Does God think he’s made of rock or bronze? v. 12. (3) He cannot endure this any longer v. 13

Job has made some drastic statements in his first speech (chap. 3), and his friend Eliphaz confirms in his reply that Job’s speech is reckless. In v. 2 Job explains his wild words by saying that, if his anguish could be weighed on scales, the pan containing his anguish and calamity would outweigh a balancing pan containing all the sand of the sea.

Job’s anguish is so great that he feels as if the arrows of the Almighty are in him. This is how he connects to the reason for his harsh words in a striking and surprising statement. He goes further: his spirit is imbibing or absorbing their poison (vv. 4a-b).

This is the first time Job names God as the cause of his suffering.² This passage evokes the image of God as a warrior, attacking Job with weaponry and shock troops (terrors, v. 4c).³

In v. 4c Job augments the imagery of God’s war against him by adding that God’s terrors are drawn up against him. Arrows, disease, and terror are often mentioned together in the Old Testament, as evidenced in Ps. 91:5 You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. (NRSV)

These strikes against Job, deeply wounding him, are in contrast to the painful but salutary punishment doled out by God according to Eliphaz in his preceding speech (5:17-27).⁴ Job is saying that God is not just spanking him to get him back on the straight and narrow: God has declared war on him and is drawing blood. This is not about discipline—God is out to get him.

In v. 5, Job continues to develop his expression of the depth of his anguish by using a couple of rhetorical questions that further explains why he is speaking outrageously: in his circumstances, i.e. being deprived of food, even dumb animals would be braying/lowing to high heaven. The food that Job does get is so tasteless that it makes him want to throw up. This text carries many implications:

i. Job, like the animals, is innocent;

ii. As the animals need food, Job needs the sustenance of true friendship;⁵

iii. Job’s words might be as unthinking as the bellows of animals, but they are driven by the same basic needs;

iv. Job will not be quiet and just eat up his punishment: he will reject his just desserts by spitting it out;

v. The punishment he is getting is not suited to his so-called crime (which he still denies).

It is not so much a question of the animals desiring to be sated with an abundance of food: what they need is to be given the right type of food;⁶ Job is saying that his punishment is not fitting his crime, whatever the crime may have been.

As The Message puts it:

Do you see what God has dished out for me?

It's enough to turn anyone's stomach!

Everything in me is repulsed by it—

it makes me sick.

— Job 6:6-7⁷ (The Message)

Job rejects this food. He’s not taking this anymore; he’s spitting it back in the face of whoever is feeding it to him. Job is not going to cry out for more of this stuff.

Now things get really serious: in vv. 8-9, Job’s anguish is so great that he utters a parody of a prayer. This can be perhaps be taken as analogous to a disillusioned Christian praying: Thanks for nothing, ‘Our Father which art in heaven!’

If God will not, as it were, go back in time and prevent his birth in the first place (Job’s first speech in chap. 3) then let God crush him now. In contrast to the psalmists who prays for relief, Job wants God to finish the job he started with the arrows.⁸

Job latches on to the hope held out to him by Eliphaz in 4:6 and 5:16: Job’s hope is anti-hope. He is holding up to view a black hole that swallows the very light of hope. If this is not depression, the definition of depression should be widened. Perhaps God’s instruction to the adversary to spare Job’s life is the cruelest thing God has done to Job.

In 6:10 (NIV) Job says:

Then I would still have this consolation—  my joy in unrelenting pain—that I had not denied the words of the Holy One.

There is an alternative way to interpret this difficult phrase: the JSP reads: I did not suppress my words against the Holy One. The Hebrew word for ‘suppress’ can also be interpreted as hide or conceal, so the phrase can be read as I did not conceal my words . . . Job has nothing to lose and he has a terrible secret that he needs to let out before he dies—one that will probably cause his death anyway: God is not always fair.

Just when you think it cannot get any worse, he says: A friend owes loyalty to one who fails, though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty; Forsaking the fear of the Almighty has a name: it is called apostasy — abandoning one’s faith. In Islam, it carries the death penalty.

The emotional profile of Job thus far would support the worst case every time. Job’s integrity is all he has left. He’s not going to curse God and die. But he is going to talk straight; he’s going to say the unsayable because it’s true. Job has hit 6 on the emotional Richter scale.

Finally, in our passage under consideration, Job gives up. He is the patient whose organs have begun to fail. He is only human, not made of rock or bronze. Could the rock perhaps refer to a fortress to protect him (Ps. 18:2, 27:5, 61:2 ) or the bronze to weapons (Ps. 45:3, 63:10, 144:10) to defend him? Job’s last ounce of strength has been knocked out of him. It is as if this emotional roller coaster ride — of which almost every inch is spent in free fall — ends with the very modern sounding cry: I wish I was dead!

Attempting to Weigh the Anguish of Job

It would be no stretch of the imagination to place Job in the same category as a dying patient; in fact, he has no reason to believe that he will survive this ordeal, and it often seems as if he has no desire to do so.

Job’s situation reminds Balentine of Reynolds Price’s battle with cancer and relates how an oncologist turned away when Price attempted to exchange a few words with him. The doctor, stuck in the medical orthodoxy of his time, had nothing to say to a patient who was practically already dead. Price was in desperate need of companionship. Some of his friends recommended books that intimated that his cancer was caused by his own unhealthy habits—⁹echoes of Job’s friends.

One doctor who was angered during the 1960’s by the traditional wisdom of doctors not to engage in frank conversations with dying patients but rather to spend their time with those who had a chance was Swiss-born doctor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In her book, On Death and Dying, she pioneered what she called the stages of grief. This concept was popularized in the 1979 Oscar-winning film All that Jazz:

There's a lady in Chicago, man, wrote a book—Dr Kübler-Ross, with a dash. This chick, man, without the benefit of dying herself, has broken the process of death into five stages. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Sounds like a Jewish law firm.¹⁰

Kübler-Ross emphasized that these stages did not always occur in sequence and also explained that dying patients could get stuck in one of the stages and not be able to move on. After the bombshell of bad news bursts, for example, a person who has lost their job could continue taking the train to work every morning and sit on a park bench all day long—denial.¹¹ Another problem occurs when a patient moves on to the next stage before the previous one is completed, for example, from acceptance back to anger.¹²

What if we kept these stages in mind during the exegetical analysis of this speech of Job and plotted the emotional stage indicated by his words in each semantic unit? We could obtain a view of the anguish of Job—an anguish which is, after all, the lot of every human being—from a new angle.

For the purpose of this paper, I equate Job’s integrity (Job 2:3, 2:9, 27:5, 31:6) with Kübler-Ross’s neutral emotional state on a scale of active, neutral and passive emotional responses, since his integrity does not allow him, at this stage, to bargain, deny, get depressed, or become angry.

As I bend the grief cycle to this somewhat unusual purpose, I reinterpret the various states to some extent: Active is where Job is actively fighting his situation: he is cursing the day of his birth; he is reproaching his faithless friends. Stability is what his life was before the disaster. Bargaining is if he would follow his friends’ advice and sue for peace with God by repenting. Acceptance would be Job saying: Yes, I’ve sinned. I deserve this fate. Depression is Job saying: Life has become like food without taste. Job’s entire speech (6:1-7:21) can be plotted on the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle.

If one looks at Job’s reactions the viewpoint of the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle, it becomes clear that Job doesn’t even come close to acceptance. He briefly bargains with his friends when he says: Did I ask you for money?(6:22-23) and Look at me, it’s me, Job! Would I lie to your faces? (6:28-30). But he spends almost all of his time between anger and depression. The gives us a picture of the prose Job as an experiencing the perfect emotional storm; this poor soul exudes almost palpable grief, and in chaps. 6-7 is nowhere near resolving it.

Compare this to the prose narrative (Job 2:20-22) where Job receives the news that he has lost all of his possessions and that all of his children are dead. In the prose, Job simply flat-lines on acceptance, and doesn’t even begin to approach the other stages of the cycle.

Analyzing the extent of Job’s anguish using his own words, the commentaries of the ages and of modern times, and a simple tool from popular psychology, leads not so much to a conclusion as to a feeling for the crushing grief that this man, fictional though he may be, experienced at the loss, not only of his property, animals, servants, wife, children, friends, self-esteem, and social position, but also of the protection and goodwill of his beloved God.

It leaves me in awe of the power of this ancient text to move and teach, and of the God portrayed in it: a God who, in this text, while destroying his human creation for reasons unknown and unknowable, loves him so much that he allows him to ball his fist against heaven and ask, with a breaking heart, the oldest question: Why?

Movement in Acts of the Apostles

More Than Itinerant Philosophy Teachers

The rapid expansion of early Christianity under the leadership of the apostle Paul was the result of carefully planned but vigorous schedules of travel throughout the ancient Mediterranean. In addition, the fact that so