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The High Cost of Preserving God's Honor
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12049 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
3,521 Words |
| Author
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James Crenshaw
James Crenshaw is professor of Old Testament at the Divinity
School of Duke University and is editor of Theodicy in the
Old Testament and author of Old Testament Wisdom. |
The denial of death and the impulse to exonerate the deity pose the supreme intellectual challenge to every generation. The Book of Job exposes the integral link between the two facets of this existential dilemma. It exquisite language has provoked such widely divergent responses as Blaise Pascal's gamble on behalf of a benevolent deity and Ernst Bloch's vehement denial of theism.
In Mitchell's view, however, the voice in the whirlwind ushers Job into a new dimension of reality to where his eyes light up with joy inspired by the dance of death and life. Engulfed in primal energy, Job recognizes the triviality of his quest for justice. Despite Mitchell's insights into the language of the biblical masterpiece, he misses its pathos. Divine perfidy and human suffering ought to evoke a loud outcry that can be heard above Job's enforced silence.
The suffering of the innocent
For millennia, students of life's mysteries have known that prosperity and adversity introduce tests into human lives that both disclose and shape character.
In the oldest myths of origins, even the gods encountered opposition, both during the initial creation of the universe and subsequently when representatives of chaos, supra-human and human, cavorted within restricted boundaries. Ancient Babylonians adapted a Sumerian myth describing mortal combat between the gods Marduk and Tiamat, which resulted in the creation of heaven and earth from the slain Tiamat and, as an afterthought, humans from the blood of her consort Kingu. Ugaritic texts celebrate a struggle between the Canaanite god Baal and his rivals Yam or Mot, and the Egyptian literature records a battle between the sun god Re and the nocturnal demon Apophis. Within the Hebrew Bible, echoes of the Babylonian myth resound in the priestly creation account of Genesis 1:1-2:4a. The continuing fight with agents of chaos forms the subject of poems in Psalms, Second Isaiah, and Job that extol Israel's God for domesticating these mythological creatures, identified as Rahab, Leviathan, Tannin, and Behemoth.
The outcome of this struggle assured law and order, a universe that operated on a principle of reward for virtue and punishment for vice. This conviction that goodness paid worthy dividends and that evil produced an unwelcome harvest became axiomatic throughout the ancient Near East. This step was taken subsequent to the shift in metaphors for the gods from natural images to personal ones, such as king and
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