Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. I am here once again with my good friend Mike Chu, and we are going to talk about the Book of Job, because we just can't let a good thing go for too long. So, welcome Mike.
Mike Chu: Thanks, Carey. Good to be back. Just seems to be one of my favorite topics, apparently.
Carey Griffel: Yeah, and it seems to be something that a lot of people are interested in. And the Book of Job is something that has been taught in certain ways in Christian circles. And so we have kind of these ideas in our head about what the Book of Job is, how we should read it. The important points in the Book of Job. And I think some of what you've said in the last two episodes about the Book of [00:01:00] Job, kind of blows a lot of our normal thoughts out of the water. Like, the Book of Job is not necessarily the type of theodicy that we often want it to be, or think that it is.
And the idea that we have these patterns and allusions to other parts of scripture, and things that would be in the ancient Israelite's head that is just not in our head. So I wanted to get together again and have another conversation to kind of pick apart some of these things that people do think about, and the structure of Job as well, as far as how we can see what the structure of Job is telling us about the message that the author wants to convey, and lots of other details we'll probably get into as we talk today.
Mike Chu: Absolutely. I do think, you know, the reason we can dig back into Job so much is because there have been a lot of different conceptions and [00:02:00] assumptions that have been made about the book. And that many people don't realize. You know, for example, most people don't even consider that the Book of Job is actually poetry and not a historical narrative.
And I think once, like, if you even just learn that, that can really change the way that one interprets or understands the messaging of the book. If you know that it's not meant to be a beat reporter's, you know, line by line, timestamp by timestamp account of what is happening. Right? It is a book of poetry where time is super compressed.
We're not told explicitly in the text how long all this goes and then in later versions of the book, such as the Aramaic versions, well, they'll add in certain things like, hey, we think the first judgment or the first testing of Job was around the time of the new year. And we think later the second testing of [00:03:00] Job comes around the time of Yom Kippur, but again, those are more rabbinic commentaries being added into translation.
So they're more akin to like reading the message or the new living translation, like something that is more paraphrase, but it isn't. It isn't a slam dunk. This is, as well, that ancient readers, too, are making guesses, educated guesses of what is going on within the book.
Carey Griffel: Yeah. So, reading a Targum is kind of like reading the text as it was, plus reading a commentary and acting like that commentary is kind of conflated with the text, like what the commentary is saying is what the original author meant.
And the way we currently understand something is, well, that's just the way that the text is in its original state. And I think that's actually very parallel to the way we read the Book of Job, right? Because we're reading the Book of Job through the lens [00:04:00] of the New Testament, and through the lens of what we see this word "satan" is, you know?
Mike Chu: Mm, yep, yep.
Carey Griffel: And people like Dr. Heiser have pushed back on the idea that the satan in Job is not Satan with a capital S. Right? And he'll say these things and I see over and over and over in so many discussions that people instantly react like, Well, we think he's Satan. Doesn't the New Testament tell us that this is the Satan figure? And they aren't quite grasping this point that it's possible to read a text in its original context without the later lens and that there's some value to that. Right? So, you know, we're, importing all of this knowledge and all of this information we have of the figure of Satan and saying, it starts here in Job, our understanding of who Satan is, or [00:05:00] at least this is a key part of that.
Mike Chu: I think, you know, sometimes we don't realize how easily and quickly we substitute our own modern understanding of the world into cultural gaps of knowledge that we have when we're reading the scriptures. I mean, even for me, like, there was this moment the last couple of days I saw a posting where someone wanted to talk about the napkin of Jesus.
Was it scrunched up? Or like, apparently there's a story that goes around like that. And I thought, like, is this true? And eventually when I looked into it, I realized, wait a minute. I didn't even ask the question, did the Second Temple period, did they even have napkins? Right? It's like, it doesn't even occur in my mind of like, does that even exist?
And it's actually more of a European assumption that napkins, yes, napkins are a thing. And not realizing that maybe 2, 000 years ago, they didn't think about using scraps of, you know, like [00:06:00] paper to wipe their mouths and have that as a napkin. It's kind of funny, but it's just like a very built in cultural thing that I just naturally just put right in there and trying to make sense of the world that I'm reading of.
And so we have to be careful , and, you know, always kind of rechecking and testing ourselves are like, am I doing something where I'm just bringing a modern understanding or what I think is what the ancient world is like, and then just superimposing that on there.
Carey Griffel: Yeah, well, in my opinion, I think a lot of the reason people do this and really want to hold tightly to this idea of the figure of Satan, and I say this because I was one of these people, you know, back in the day when I first heard Dr. Heiser, he was the first one who brought this out for me, the idea that the satan in Job is not necessarily Satan from the New Testament... see, but even that, the way that [00:07:00] I'm thinking of it in my mind, is this tit for tat of this is what the conversation is about. And it isn't necessarily even that's what the conversation is about, because it's like I can't get away from the idea of reading Job with my lenses on, right? It's really, really hard to read Scripture in the Old Testament and not import all of these ideas from the New Testament, all of these ideas that the church has developed over time. And I'm not saying it's wrong to do that, necessarily, because we should have this Christological reading of the Old Testament.
But there's also something to be said for reading the Old Testament without that. Because the original Old Testament readers would not have had the Christological lens that we have. And so, if we're reading a book like Job, and we're understanding it through the lens of Christ, and through the lens of the New Testament authors, [00:08:00] Well, we're not reading it like the original author wrote it, which means to me that we're not getting the point that the original author would have been putting forth. I mean, maybe we are, but maybe we're not.
Mike Chu: I think what I see about this, and I'm in the same boat with you, Carey, because the way that I had learned about Job was really just focused on Job chapters one and two. Right. The priority as I look back on it now was that those chapters are supposed to tell me, as the reader, as a Christian, this is what happens every time I go through some sort of suffering, that the Satan, like Satan the devil came up to God and basically challenged, Hey, like, I don't think he really loves you. I want to test that theory out. Let's do it. And that's like almost how it's portrayed in so many, like countless sermons that I have heard. Right.
And, and [00:09:00] then there's always that little, you know, disturbing question that the pastors always have to kind of like preface like, like, but don't worry, but you know, like, it's not going to just happen like haphazardly because, you know, we can see clearly here in chapters one and two, God puts a little, like a leash on Satan, he can't do this to you. He can't take your life, for example, or however we like to describe it. Like, cause, cause you, you could start going down that road of, Wait, Satan can attack me anytime? He can like, bring up a charge or accusation against me anytime in the courtroom of God? That's like a scary idea. So then we immediately just run right to that moment where it's like, Okay, but you, you can't take his life. And we build an entire theology, a theodicy of suffering, of like, what can go wrong and not go wrong,
Carey Griffel: And we're using this text as if it's showing us the limits of Satan's power, right?
Mike Chu: Exactly. And assuming that it's, you know, the Satan, like the [00:10:00] devil, the rebel from Genesis three, however you want to call it, but like, that's so often the way that these passages are interpreted. And. It misses out on, like, even just simple things such as the book of Job is not obsessed with chapters one and two.
Carey Griffel: And it's not part of that poetry that you are pointing out. And this matters when we're looking at the structure of the book, because poetry is about the language. And Hebrew is not English.
Hebrew is going to have its own patterns. And if we're not reading it in Hebrew, and even if we can read it in Hebrew, but we're not fluent in Hebrew, then we're not going to be catching all of these things.
Mike Chu: Exactly, and there is a danger, right, in just assuming that you can look at certain patterns or, or make certain interpretations, right? You're making certain assumptions about the text, but you're making it based off English or whatever your heart language is that you're reading the [00:11:00] scriptures in, it's great. I'm glad we have multiple, you know, English translations available, but in the end, if you're really going to study a biblical book to do the real study, you'd have to eventually engage with the language on some level, and that can come in, you know, at least engaging with the grammar books, at least engaging with, like, other scholars who did their own personal translations, and they're trying to tease out from their own translations what the words behind the English is saying.
But you have to deal with that. You cannot get away from the fact that the Book of Job, in this case, is written in Hebrew. And so the poetry, which is the majority of the book, is going to be read out loud and spoken out loud in Hebrew. Meaning, as poetry, the sounds that the Hebrew words are making, can also impact meaning and interpretation, something that I think many, you know, [00:12:00] folks don't ever even consider that the sound of a word can impact how you interpret.
Carey Griffel: Yeah. Well, we'll get into a little bit more of that in a minute, but first I want to ask you the question that I always get when I'm talking about how the satan in Job, because it is the satan and not Satan as a proper name, how like the book of Revelation refers back to the book of Job because the satan can mean the accuser, right?
And Revelation connects the serpent in the garden with this language of the accuser. So, doesn't that mean that we should read, the satan in the book of Job as the same as the serpent, because when we're reading the book of Revelation, it seems to suggest there's this correlation, because it's using similar language.
So that, that's the thing that usually gets pointed out to me, like, [00:13:00] Well, of course, we can still connect it because of John's work in Revelation.
Mike Chu: The reason why, like, that comes up so often is, yes, John is the one that makes the connection of the serpent or the rebel of Genesis 3 is connected to words that are used in the New Testament called the devil and Satan. That, however, does not mean that there was not an original intention of the word. And also, I mean, it makes a couple of assumptions, right? First, it assumes there is only one divine being that will ever be given the title accuser. That's a problem. If you assume that, then you have to wonder what in the world is going on in the book of Chronicles when David is doing the census.
And then two, the other instance is when you have to look at the prophet Balaam is meeting an accuser. In our English [00:14:00] translations, it doesn't translate it Satan. It translated as an adversary or an accuser, which is from the same word, satan. And who's technically the satan at that moment?
An angel of the Lord or an angel of Yahweh. And depending on how, where you land on who is the angel of Yahweh. Like you got problems, right? Like you got problems if you're making an assumption that when you see a title, a name that it has to, it must refer to the same person. But we know in our normal everyday life, we don't do that.
The name Michael, it was like the most popular boy name, especially, I don't know how many decades, but especially by in the eighties when I was born, that was a popular name. I met so many guys named Michael. And even Dr. Michael Heiser, but just because you see Michael, that doesn't mean they're [00:15:00] referring to the same person,
Carey Griffel: Right? The one other place that I see it showing up, and this is kind of an important point is in the book of Zachariah. And this is important because in the book of Zachariah, it's another court scene. And this is also where we see the other instance of Ha Satan. as opposed to the word without the article. And so one thing I've seen suggested is that when you see satan with the article, when it says the satan, then that is a particular title for a particular being.
So not only do we have the serpent in the garden and we have Satan showing up here, but we also have Satan showing up in the court in Zechariah. That's the idea that I'm getting from some people, is that when it's used with this word, then it's going to be different [00:16:00] than when it's used without the word.
Now, it's still not going to be a name, so there's that. But the idea is that it's like, I think that the parallel in thought here, is that when you have the angel of the Lord, then That is a definitive title for a specific person like so if we're thinking of the angel of the Lord as the visible Yahweh, or the instance of Jesus in the Old Testament, as some people say.
Like, that's a particular, it's referring to a particular being. Every time you see "the Angel of the Lord," it's a particular thing. It's a particular person. So the idea here is that when you see "the Satan," it's also referring to a particular person.
Mike Chu: And the irony though, to me, is that many folks who want to make that argument, like the [00:17:00] Angel of the Lord, you know, Dr. Heiser, believe that this was like an instance, for example, of God, the Son, the second person of the Trinity, yes, having some sort of pre incarnation, you know, display that God, the second power, you know, for example, those, those kinds of things, but that itself is not a slam dunk, not every scholar, and I would say probably a majority of scholars, even ones who are evangelical in their confession would not necessarily come down on even that conclusion that the angel of the Lord is connected to the triune God, right? It's up for debate. And that's why I think like, we have to be careful of making those kind of logical leaps of assumption.
Plus also, for example, if I'm thinking about Hasatan or the Satan, this to me is akin to how I would say the attorney general. It's a title [00:18:00] and the attorney general, whoever is the attorney general, changes every couple of years, changes out due to retirement or like, okay, I got a promotion or I became governor or whatever else, like I'm not doing this job anymore.
And so it's a title. And so even if we were to try to make a connection, like, oh, you know, maybe it's the same person, I would argue and push back technically whenever the events of Job occurred, and the events of Zachariah and we can determine when the events of Zachariah was happening. This is post exile Babylon, right. And if we were to entertain the idea that a lot of folks like to assume that the Book of Job is like a historical beat reporter account of something happening during the patriarchy period. That's thousands of years in between. I would like, I would even just push back that, how do you know? How do [00:19:00] you assume that that is the same spiritual being with the title?
Like, I can't assume that for, like, the President of the United States. Every four years, that will change out. But the title is still there, the office is still there, the job, the nuclear war codes, the White House, all that is still associated with the title. But the person that is given that title is not necessarily the same person. And definitely not the same person after eight years.
So, people have to be careful in making those assumptions, and I, I think it's, it's our over eagerness at times because, like, to be quite honest, right? We don't have a lot of information about the devil. We don't have a lot of information about the rebel of Genesis 3.
Carey Griffel: And what we have is very, very complex, like the number of names assigned to him and the qualities, and it's not really comprehensive.
Mike Chu: [00:20:00] And I think people forget that the reason why it's not comprehensive is because the devil, rebel, however you want to call it, or him, he's not the center of the story.
He isn't the center of the story. He isn't the main character. He isn't who we're focusing on. And so we have to be careful because there are only little bits and pieces of information. And at times, sometimes it really could also be proof texting. And even if they are from church fathers rabbinic commentaries that we could say are reliable and we want to trust, it's still a limited amount of information.
You only can go so far before you start, you know, conjecturing. And that's not a problem. That's not a bad thing if you conjecture, but recognize and admit that it is conjecture, right? That it's, my own guess. And I could possibly be wrong. It is not authoritative. It is not the final say. [00:21:00] And so we have to have some, leeway in our interpretation.
And that's actually, you know, even in the past podcasts with you Carey, you know, I did mention, I personally don't think that the figure in chapters 1 and 2 is the rebel from Genesis 3. But, I did give the space to acknowledge the way that this particular being behaves, or you know, the decisions that this being chooses to do in 1 and 2, right, Yahweh gives this accuser the power to do what he wanted to do to Job.
And it was completely in his hands how far he was going to take that power. Was he immediately going to go to, you know, dial to 11 or were you doing it to a four or a five? He obviously went full tilt every chance he got. And I look at that and I wonder, yo, that's...that's [00:22:00] a lot. You didn't, you didn't necessarily have to, like, wipe out all the children. You could have maybe gave them some, like, you know, a sniffle or something. Give them a flu or something. Like, you, like, could have done something like that instead of just, like, killing them all.
And so, like, I do recognize that there is something that bothers us about that character in chapters one and two, but I'm not comfortable in just assuming that is the devil, right? to me, I need that space to have that not be set in stone because if I do, then I start restricting myself on certain ways of interpreting the rest of the book. And we hadn't even gotten to the poetry part.
Carey Griffel: Yes, or God directly interacting with Job. And a few other points that I would bring up here. When we're talking about the idea of the devil and how he is talked about and thought about, it is [00:23:00] so, so blatantly obvious when you're looking at Second Temple literature, when you're looking at the Old Testament, when you're looking at the New Testament, there is not just one way of describing him.
He doesn't have just a single name. He doesn't have just a single description and different authors in different contexts are ascribing different kinds of ideas here. So, we come along and we want to swoop the whole thing into our little systematic dogmatic basket and say this is the picture we have and we think it's very complete and very full, whereas each individual author might disagree with you there.
They might be like, now hang on here, that's not how I saw this figure. That's not how I was talking about it. And so when we're kind of doing this systematic theology of we have to get this really complete full picture of understanding, [00:24:00] that's not what the biblical authors were doing to begin with.
You know, so we're bringing out in these episodes this amazing idea that I hadn't previously thought about of the reflection of Eden here, right? So we have that going on. We have Job as seemingly this second Adam who lives in the East, and we're going to recall that narrative of Genesis. And so, we're going to start thinking about the serpent in relation to the satan in Job. As well, I think, we probably should, now that I'm seeing all of these patterns that are prominent in the text.
But does that mean that we then jump to saying it's the same being just because? And the reason I think we can't is because of other ways that we see archetypes and patterns in scripture, right?
[00:25:00] We see the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent discussed in Genesis. Well, that doesn't mean that we then take every time we see something that harkens back to that, that doesn't mean that those are genetically related. We're not looking at this biological connection here because we have to see them as the same lineage or the same bloodline or anything like that.
When we see the Bible talking about Jacob and Esau, or Israel and Edom. That doesn't mean we're talking necessarily about the same exact nations, but they are literary patterns. They are typical designs. And so, because that's so strong and happens again and again and again in Scripture, why don't we take the serpent in Genesis and the satan in Job [00:26:00] to be this kind of thing that's, we're seeing the pattern happening over and over and over.
Mike Chu: And I think, you know, like to that point, right? Like, if we want to even say that there is a pattern and there is some sense of an echoing, right? Because that is kind of where the spin was that I think Balentine is onto something is that Job and his wife are in many ways, an echo. Or another spin on the narrative and simply the main differentiation is what if man and woman in the garden, in their idyllic paradise, did not choose to sin, did not choose to disobey.
They stayed loyal to Yahweh. What would have happened? And would suffering still have come into the world? And the answer that Ballentine basically came out with was yes, they still would because you cannot control the actions of other free will [00:27:00] agents and they can introduce the chaos into your world. They can break in. And there's nothing ultimately that we can ever stop something like that. It was just a beautiful thought experiment. And it was like, wow, that is an intriguing concept. And it really actually is relatable to so many people who would ever encounter the Book of Job, because there will be suffering and hardship and pain that comes into our lives when everything feels idyllic.
And we had no clue that some sort of disaster was about to strike. Right. And thus, when you see it from that pattern, you realize this is then very, very relatable. This is connectable to me. And so I think we have to be careful, and again, this is why the genre is important, right, because the Book of Job is poetry, and poetry, as my Old Testament professor [00:28:00] in that course, he reminded us is that poetry is meant to be as applicable, as broad, as possible to all readers.
It's, it's trying to promote universal agreed truths, and so, like, it's not specifically just Israelite- only vantage point. It's trying to encompass as much of if you're not an Israelite, but you're an Egyptian, and you're reading some of the materials from Israel, can you actually get around to their ideas of like, this is actually a really good thought.
This is a good way of approaching life. That's part of wisdom literature. Wisdom literature is meant to be as broad and as applicable to as wide a set of people as you can have. Because in many ways, wisdom literature is dependent also on the general good wisdom from all around the known world at that time.
I [00:29:00] mean, there's a reason why the Proverbs have almost direct quotes to other wisdom literatures, other Proverbs from other cultures like Egypt. It's not like they're copying us. We may have copied them, or they may have copied us, but it doesn't matter. It's part of the whole entire literary world.
Everyone's reading each other, and this is one of the things in my paper that I brought out was like, who is the possible writer, what kind of person would be, like, what kind of training, like, their skill set would they need in order to write this kind of Book of Job? And another thing that many people don't realize is that the Book of Job is seen often by scholars as the epitome. It is the best example of Hebrew poetry anywhere.
And so what kind of person would have the skills to do this? And I think Ballantine and Hartley and a few others, they came to this kind of general picture that the author, the writer of Job [00:30:00] probably is some sort of government, bureaucrat, some sort of administrator, a person that has access to multiple different types of literature, wisdom, and also has a very fluent working knowledge of multiple languages. Because in order to read those materials, you have to be able to not just read Hebrew, you also have to be able to read Akkadian, you have to be able to read Ugaritic, you have to be able to read multiple different languages in order to incorporate that material.
So when people are talking about this. Right. These are the factors that now run through my mind when I think about the book of Job. And I think that is something where, you know, that's why it's hard for me to just say, absolutely, this is going to be the Satan that we think of from Genesis chapter three.
Carey Griffel: Well, and these kinds of levels of understanding can also be looked at with different elements of the text, right?
Like, we [00:31:00] talked a little bit about the ambiguity of the answers and how Job is seeing things, and then we read about Leviathan in here, and we want to then apply everything that we understand about the ancient context of Leviathan onto this reference. So the question then, we ought to ask, is the Book of Job actually taking the concept of Leviathan and using it as typical, or is it taking the concept of Leviathan and kind of twisting it and using it in a different way?
Like if Leviathan is to be connected to the Serpent in the Garden, for instance, is the mention of Leviathan like a nod to that? It's like, aha, you guys know we're really talking about that Serpent in the Garden, right? Because we got this mention of Leviathan here. So you ought to be thinking about the serpent and bringing in all of those [00:32:00] associations or is the Book of Job maybe flipping that a bit on its head and not necessarily importing everything about Leviathan into the context here.
Mike Chu: Yeah, I think that's something and I, again, this is where I, you know, over the years I've become less and less comfortable with proof texting, right?
Because if you're just simply like doing a word search for the Book of Job and Leviathan, you're going to find a bunch of references. And if you're just reading one line, at best, each time, wherever the word Leviathan shows up, then you might miss actually what is going on here, right?
And also, here's the trippy thing. When you're reading about Leviathan or Behemoth or other primordial chaotic creatures, as John Walton likes to call them, you don't necessarily get the same portrayal throughout even the whole book of Job, right? People are coming to Leviathan, [00:33:00] you know, if you're an ancient Near Eastern, you know, person from this time period and you're reading this literature you have a concept of Leviathan. And so the writer is going to do things to you with the knowledge that he knows that you probably are bringing into this.
And one of the interesting little bits that he does with Leviathan is that Job compares himself to Leviathan. That he actually makes a connection of like, like, am I just like, no better than essentially like, I'm disdained just like the sea creature, like Leviathan, and so then you got to ask the question, wait, so, so Job's evil. Of course not. And, and we can even go to later to the near the end of the book and we know God's answer is like, no, Job was right. You three friends, you guys are morons. And, and essentially like, so like, what is Job doing? It's like, well, the writer's doing something to you with your preexisting knowledge of Leviathan, [00:34:00] what you think Leviathan is, and then now challenging you with the depiction of Job thinking about himself as though he's like a Leviathan.
That he feels like he's despised and hated like how people don't like Leviathan that it's what Job feels. And then you got the other problems that when finally God, you know, the Creator, is speaking by Job 41, and he brings up Leviathan. People, again, if you're only doing a word search, you'll just read maybe the first line where it says, like in the NIV, Can you pull in Leviathan with a fish hook or tie down its tongue with a rope?
And it's a question mark. And that's all that people will ever read, which is frustrating, because if you read more of this, you'll start realizing that the way that God is talking about Leviathan, almost as, how J. Middleton would, term it, sounds almost like a proud parent talking about a rambunctious [00:35:00] child.
And, even like in the podcast recording I just recently did with Dr. Ronn Johnson, I mentioned this, I was talking about this with him offline and it's just like almost as though like, you know, like you just got now like a newborn and he wants to crawl everywhere and it's just like be rambunctious and just do stuff and whatever else. But of course you can't just let the, the, the toddler just, you know, crawl around wherever because you might find the child in the weirdest spot now in the house. And so what do you do? You put a baby crib or some sort of like fencing to allow the toddler to be able to play and roll and do whatever inside this safe enclosed space.
But there are boundaries of how far the toddler can go. And here in chapter 41, that's what's happening with Leviathan. Leviathan is like untamable, absolutely wants to do all this great stuff. And God is talking about it as [00:36:00] though he is a proud parent of like, I am so happy about Leviathan. Have you seen it? It's awesome. Like the way he talks about it. But you know, what I had to do was I definitely had to set a boundary. Basically, where the sea and the land meet. That's its boundary. And, you know, it brings really into question, is Leviathan immoral? Or is it amoral? Does it necessarily have to have a good or evil nature to it in the way that especially the way that God talks about it here.
And the other challenge that I would, you know, particularly point out to readers is again, this is part of the whole entire section that most commenters typically assume God is shaming Job. The way that Middleton he describes it is that a lot of people come at this [00:37:00] assuming that God came from the whirlwind to essentially put Job in his place of like, how dare you question me?
How dare you try to talk back to me and I'm going to set you right. And a lot of old commentaries did that, too. Ballentine, I think, he didn't actually go down that way. He went down a similar pathway as Middleton. That there seems to be something else where God is talking about the creation of the world, the world that functions. But he's genuinely trying to have a real dialogue with Job and not like putting Job in his place. And so even that assumption of what all this text is saying, if you're coming at it, for example, that, Oh, God is putting Job in his place. He's, he's, he's correcting his rebellious child. Then you're going to be reading even all this text very differently.
Carey Griffel: If Leviathan was a callback [00:38:00] to the Satan in the earlier chapters, this description of Leviathan of, Oh, look, this is the Satan and God is, like you said, he's corralling him. And this is why we don't have all of the evil, but we have some evil. But that's just not how we see Leviathan portrayed here. Like, it's, it's not this idea that... Leviathan isn't being judged for pushing the boundaries.
Mike Chu: No, God is bragging about Leviathan.
Carey Griffel: Yeah. He's, he's not being judged for what he is doing in creation. It's just part of creation. And this is, you know, in some sense to be celebrated because he is kind of parading Leviathan around, like, look at this awesome beast, and this is one of my creations, and it just seems like a different perspective of Leviathan than you normally can think about, like, [00:39:00] Leviathan's this crazy, scary, terrifying thing, but God has him under control, and God even seems to be using him for purposes.
So to me, it's like, do we have the Satan? Do we blame the Satan for everything that's going on, or do we see God's sovereignty here? You know, what is the point of what we're supposed to be seeing? And usually it's, ah, look, Satan is why we, we struggle. Satan is why we suffer. Satan is why we have all of these problems in our lives.
That's the answer we want to come away from, but you have to restrict yourself to those first few chapters, and then you have to read it in a certain way that you're not seeing what God is doing there.
Mike Chu: Like, I think the challenge, and I've shared this with people before, that, you know, because I had the assumption so many years that [00:40:00] the Ha satan, the Satan, the accuser in Job 1 and 2, is the Satan, the devil and running throughout the entire thing.
And so I never really bothered reading the book of Job, or paying attention to it a lot. And I think once I got to a place where that filter, I could lay down, I was able to really appreciate the poetry and really the beauty of the poetry, the material that is written in it in of itself. And, and it evaluated based on its own merits and not on whether it provides me proof texts of this is where Satan shows up again, is in Leviathan or in Behemoth, and it isn't. Like I was able to get past that kind of like, almost like this block in my logic thinking of how to process this data that I'm reading.
Like, for example, I mean, not just Leviathan, but the Behemoth is talked about. And that's another thing [00:41:00] that we see, is that the Behemoth and Job are connected somehow. That these two separate creations are somehow connected to one another. That God is comparing Job to Behemoth. And people are wondering, no, he isn't, that can't be.
It's in Job chapter 40, verse 15. And this is God explicitly speaking to Job. Look, Behemoth, and I'm reading the Lexham English Bible. Look, Behemoth, which I have made just as I made you. The you being Job. It eats grass like the ox. And then he goes on, and again, just like Leviathan, God is bragging about how awesome and majestic and scary powerful this beast is called Behemoth.
And the reason I'm reading the Lexham English Bible is because they actually do an interesting translation choice by verse 19 that the only other Bible [00:42:00] I know that does the same thing is the Net Bible. And it's in verse 19 where it says, It, Behemoth, is the first of God's actions. The one who made him furnishes it with his sword. The one who made it being the Lord being Yahweh. He furnishes it with his sword Yahweh's sword.
And there's a footnote in the LEB that says, see NET the NET translation. And then the footnote also continues on saying, nearly all other English translations will say it this way, only his maker can draw the sword against him. And so a lot of translators, again, because you're coming at this at times, if you have it locked in your mindset, that the Satan in chapters 1 and 2, is the evil one that has [00:43:00] dogged Christianity and the Jewish people for millennia and millennia. That's where he is. He's appearing here again. And you're trying to find proof of him showing throughout the rest of the book of Job. This is how you can possibly end up translating a verse in the scriptures that goes towards that particular bias, versus the Lexham English Bible and the NET is trying to be a little more pulled back from, well, if we didn't come with it, that assumption, how would this be played out? And it's interesting that God could possibly be saying, Hey, the Behemoth, I gave it my sword so it can protect itself so it can do its thing.
Again, not sounding like making a moral judgment on Behemoth like Leviathan. But a proud parent bragging about his very strong and powerful child, his creation. And I find that [00:44:00] fascinating, and that the Behemoth is compared to Job. Right, so like, how can we make an assumption that these two creatures are demonic evil beings when God is making the connection to Job and even bragging about them to Job?
Carey Griffel: So, even if we were to see the Behemoth here as the same, or a parallel, to the Satan earlier in the book, still here we have the idea of God's sovereignty. And so if we want to take the Book of Job and split it in this idea that Satan is the reason we have suffering and God is the reason we don't have suffering, and make this dichotomy and separate it.
That's just not what we're seeing even when we want to bring the Satan up in these chaotic figures here. Right. So I mean, I think you're right in that it makes a lot of sense that instead of bringing up the Satan again, it's [00:45:00] putting that on its head like no, evil is not what you think it is. Or perhaps I should say, chaos. You know, we tend to say chaos, Satan, rebellion, evil, all of these things are one in the same and they are absolutely opposed to God. Well, when you approach God, you get order. When you don't approach God, you get chaos. So there is that dynamic there, right? But we want to suggest that the very function and existence of chaos is because of rebellious evil creatures like Satan, like this arch nemesis of God that we have this idea of that we don't have in the Old Testament.
We don't have this arch nemesis of God and what we have is God's actions. What we have is God's sovereignty and it makes us uncomfortable because we don't want God to be the one to cause [00:46:00] sickness. And to be involved in any of our suffering. We want to get God off the hook for that. But I've already talked about sickness in a previous episode, and like, you go through all of these verses where sickness shows up. It's God taking credit. It's people giving God the sovereign power over what is going on in all things. And, you know, it's, uncomfortable to think that suffering and chaos might be something that God uses for his good.
Mike Chu: Thank you, Carey, I love how you brought up that. So like the way that I would say it is that a lot of people tend to feel this very strong desire and need to protect the reputation of God.
Right. And, and we, we feel this, this urge to try to make sure like, Hey, our God is great. And like, and great in every positive way. Like he's like super sweet, like a ice cream sundae with banana and chocolate on top. [00:47:00] Like he's awesome. And he certainly is. But when one is going through hardship and suffering, sometimes you don't want to have a sweet tooth, like it doesn't help. And so it's funny you bring this up, right? Because the whole entire thing of what happens with Job, right? Job does not have a clue of why any of this happened. He doesn't know what caused it.
And unlike the other versions of the story of Job in other cultures, Job is unwilling throughout the entire poetry to ever give in to the idea, I must have somehow sinned. I must have somehow have been responsible for this, even if I don't know that I sinned, I must have still sinned somehow because every version of the suffering of a righteous man that is just like terrible [00:48:00] ends up in the end, this righteous man will just say, you know what, I guess I must have sinned somehow. I'm just going to put down an offering of sacrifice and just pray that this God will let up and, you know, and heal me and restore me because I am a sinner and oh, forgive me. That's the way that a lot of these other stories play out. The Hebrew version, the Israelite version of Job is so dogmatic in going against that idea.
Job fights not just, like, three friends, he is willing to bring that up before God and demanding an audience saying I want you to talk with me. What in the world is going on? Like this doesn't make any sense. And this goes back to like, you know, that Job sermon series we did last year at my church. We kept on repeating this phrase that the that we assume so oftentimes, the way we live our lives that the world is built on justice. I do good, I get good. I do [00:49:00] bad, I get bad. It makes no sense in our worldview so many times that if I do good, that all of a sudden bad comes.
But we all honestly know, if we're really being honest about it and humble about it, we have all suffered through some sort of pain and hardship that we had never wrought on our own. A sister passing away. A cancer diagnosis that came out of the blue. A friend in a car accident and being killed instantly. And they weren't drunk. Right? It's, it's all these things and we can't explain it. It breaks that worldview.
But this is what wisdom literature is ultimately getting at. All of the wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, even the Psalms, Song of Solomon, maybe at times, you know, like the wisdom literature is pointing out this idea of fear of the Lord. That's the beginning [00:50:00] of wisdom. And if anything, the way that I loved how Walton put it is that the world is not built on justice. The world is built on God's wisdom, not any wisdom, God's wisdom. It was wisdom that was there at the beginning of creation. And, you know, this is again, my preacher hat comes on my Christocentric or theocentric, however you want to call it, will merely kick in off like, and who is called wisdom by Paul in the new Testament, Jesus.
And if Jesus is the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of God is what built the world, what does it mean to me that the wisdom of God was crucified on the cross, died, and then was resurrected? Like, these are the kind of questions that excite me these days. Instead of trying to figure out like, oh, where can I find Satan? In the Leviathan, it's in [00:51:00] the Behemoth, and that runs right against the grain of the text when the text seems to be pointing out that God is actually quite excited to talk about these two creatures to Job, these scary, magnificent creatures. And God is like, these rambunctious creations of mine, they are awesome, aren't they? And, and we don't know how to jive with that.
And I want to challenge people of like, let's dance with that concept. Let's look into that concept. Maybe that can actually provide us some comprehension of like, how to deal and how to live in a world that oftentimes feels so chaotic. With forces and creatures and beings that are more powerful than we are. How should we live our lives if the point of the wisdom literature is to remind us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Carey Griffel: [00:52:00] Oh, I like that. All right. Thank you, Mike. What I'm going to do in this episode is something I have not done before and that is I am going to split this conversation up into two pieces.
I think this is a really good stopping point in the conversation. Next week we will get more into the structure of the Book of Job and some thoughts on Job as part of the Divine Council.
I want to make sure to give another plug here for the Divine Council Worldview Podcast, which Mike is co hosting with Dr. Ronn Johnson. So if you haven't checked that out, I really suggest that you do. They are getting into Genesis, and it parallels very well with what we talk about here in this podcast.
I really hope you enjoyed this segment of the conversation. What really fascinates me is that we can really go back and forth in [00:53:00] two different directions with this topic of the satan versus Satan the Devil. Now, as with most things in this topic, which includes, like, the Divine Council, and the gods of the nations, and the dark powers, and the principalities, and all of these kind of matrix of ideas that we have here, with everything that we're talking about, my concern often is that we get a little bit too into the weeds of trying to figure out that side of things.
And I'm not really sure that that's what the Bible is trying to present to us. What's going on instead is that the biblical authors and the biblical readers were steeped in this context that included these elements. That took these elements seriously, and today we're steeped in a bit of a different context, right? We're steeped in the idea of Paradise Lost, and often we [00:54:00] have the idea of the fall before creation, and this new set of ideas that the ancient writers just didn't have in their heads. So it's really interesting how we have that progression, and even within the Old Testament to the New Testament, we have a progression there, of the way that these kinds of things were seen.
And we tend to kind of broad brush everything, don't we? Like, we see Leviathan come up, and we're like, aha! Leviathan, that's the chaos monster! And we're gonna import a set of ideas into that. But what's fascinating here in the book of Job is that Leviathan and Behemoth are kind of the same conceptual world as the devil, as the satan, we might say, at least in some form, right? We have God, we have chaos, and those are kind of opposites, and yet what we see here is that God is using chaos. [00:55:00] So what does it mean that the chaos creatures are kind of turned on their heads, as they are here in Job? Rather than being fearsome chaos creatures, they're kind of God's pets. What does it mean that Job himself is kind of like one of these creatures? That's a new thought to me, and I will leave that thought for you to ponder and if you've got some things to share there, I'd love to hear them.
Today in our Bible studies, we tend to try to harmonize everything, right? We see the serpent in Genesis, we see this figure in the book of Job. We see Satan, the devil, in the New Testament. We want to put all those together into one conceptual reality. And that's perfectly natural and normal because our tendency in Christianity is to systematize everything with [00:56:00] things like just different modes of thought. And the fact that we are separate in time and space to the narrative elements of these things, it makes quite a bit of sense that we're going to take what we have in Scripture and then go our own direction with it. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but we've seen quite a fruition of new ideas and new ways of understanding the text when we kind of set that aside and look at the text for itself and try to steep ourselves into that narrative structure.
When you're looking for a harmony of the text, then you're looking for similarities. You want to find the things that are the same from one place to another, right? And that can mean that you're not looking carefully enough at the differences.
I just put up a blog post this week, a new blog post that is kind of tangentially [00:57:00] related to this topic. If you want to go check it out, it is on my website at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com and it is called Is All Creation Cursed? And I get into the idea that we often see in many places in Christianity today, the claim that creation was cursed at the fall of man in Genesis 3.
The problem with the idea in general is that the language of cursing is actually quite limited in Scripture. So, again, our tendency is to squish things together, to compact them, to swipe them with the same brush. We see a term over here, we see something else over there, and we just squish them together as if they're the same thing.
Now, a lot of times, in the end, we kind of come away with something that is actually very similar. Like, if [00:58:00] you want to think of the fall of Satan as before the creation of the world and that kind of thing, well, you can still take the idea of Satan and an embodied evil that affects people today. Well, that's not demonstrably all that different from thinking of a wider scope or a wider cast of characters for the divine realm on the chaotic, evil, dark side, right?
In the end, the application might be quite similar, right? We could still have the idea of spiritual warfare, it might look a little bit different, but it's still going to be about spreading God's will amongst humanity, right? And bringing humanity into alignment with God. But at the same time, if we have a more nuanced view, it helps us to read our Bible better. It helps us to [00:59:00] understand these strange passages that we often struggle with, and it helps us to see nuance in what we actually see in the world. Why is this area over here so vastly different from that area over there?
And perhaps above all, it helps us to not read things into the text, or at least we'll read fewer things into the text, because I'll give you a secret. We all read things into the text. We all come to the Bible with preconceived notions, with a culture, and with ideas that we already have preloaded into our heads, and the idea is to get less of our modern baggage and more of the ancient baggage.
And I put it that way because you realize that the New Testament authors had ideas in their heads and beliefs of the way the world was in their heads [01:00:00] from things that weren't scripture, right, from things that weren't inspired. They were steeped into their own culture. And that was part of my point in my blog post about creation being cursed. It's not necessarily the case that Paul in Romans 8 only had Genesis 3 in his head. There was a lot more going on there. So if we're reading Romans 8 against the idea that Paul is drawing everything from Genesis, well, we're gonna miss some points there.
It's the same way with the book of Job. If we import our meaning of Satan and chaos dragons and all of these ideas into the book of Job and say it's got to be reflecting exactly those ideas, then we might be missing these nuances of how it's presenting something maybe a little bit differently.
But the other danger [01:01:00] that we have is to say, this satan figure in the book of Job has absolutely nothing to do with the garden narrative. See, we can see that contrast. We can see the differences, and then we can go entirely a new direction with it instead of finding this middle ground of, yes, it might be talking about it in this way or in that way over there. And that's one reason I just enjoy exploring new ideas, challenging my thoughts and going new directions so that we can find these middle grounds.
So at any rate, go check out my blog post if you have a interest in doing so. And I hope you look forward to the conversation with Mike that's going to resume next week. In the meantime, you can go listen to the Divine Council Worldview podcast, and you can check out my website, you can ask me questions, you can look at [01:02:00] my other blog posts, you can look at my guest profiles, you can leave a review there, you can sign up for my newsletter, and you can go look at some artwork I have there under the store tab.
I am physically working on getting merchandise in order. If you help support my podcast financially, we'll be starting some regular meetups. And I want to thank all of you who do support me in the various ways, whether you are supporting me financially, whether you're sharing the episodes, whether you're telling other people about the podcast, or whether you're just engaging in these ideas yourself. I really appreciate everything that kind of coalesces together with all of that. Alright, I will go ahead and wrap things up, and wish you a blessed week, and we will see you later.
