Let us return to the outline where it says theories of blank and blank. See where that is. This relates to chapters 27 and 28. And the two words you want to fill in are theories of dislocations and additions. I'm not talking orthopedic or cosmetic surgery there, but theories of dislocations or additions in the text. Okay, in these chapters. And it flows from these observations. So just hear these observations, maybe jot down a note on what these are. The first observation is that the third cycle of dialogue seems to be truncated, that is cut short. Remember, Elephaz is the first of Job's friends to speak in each cycle. Then comes Bill Dad. Bill Dad's speech is quite abbreviated in chapter 25, his third time at bat. He has only six verses to say as compared to 22 verses in chapter 8, 21st spoke, and 21 in chapter 18 when he had his second opportunity. So he had 22, 21, and then a mere six verses. Zofar, moreover, who is the third of Job's friends to speak in each cycle. Zofar does not speak at all in the third round. So the third cycle has the appearance of being cut short, or truncated, and some have suggested that something has fallen out of the text or gotten messed up. Secondly, something I mentioned earlier, the declaration of the principle of retributive justice in 27 seems more appropriate, in the opinion of many people, in the mouths of one of Job's comfortors than in the mouth of Job. In other words, he's talking like they talk, but remember he's been saying all along who couldn't, who doesn't know all these things, who couldn't say these, and he's kind of showing them. I can say all this, I know what you're talking about, I can teach on this. If this is from Job, so that might be the explanation there. And then thirdly, the submissive tone of chapter 28 is very different from the vehement protests that we hear from Job elsewhere as these debates, this dispute with his friends gets heated up. So these three observations, the abbreviated third cycle of disputes, the fact that Job appears to be speaking like one of his friends in articulating retributive justice, and then the submissive tone that we find in chapter 28 in that poem about where can wisdom be found. All of that is suggested to some people that maybe there's been some textual dislocation at the end of the third cycle. Others would suggest that chapter 28 is the work of the author of the book, and not the work of Job himself, not meant to be understood as the words of Job. Now there's nothing striking in the text that indicates a change of speaker at the beginning of chapter 28, beginning of chapter 27 it says, and Job continued his discourse. Okay, he's been speaking already in chapter 26, beginning of chapter 27, and Job continued his discourse that flows right into 28 with no apparent break, which doesn't make it impossible that the narrator could have inserted his poetic interlude, but it's certainly not demonstrated by the text. Chapter 29, it does say Job continued his discourse, but remember we saw that already in 27, so that doesn't mean that someone else was speaking prior, any more than it was the case when 27 followed on 26. Have I confused you? I've certainly confused myself. Okay, good. It just trust me. It's not necessarily the case that 28 is from someone other than Job. Derek Kiddner, I think in his book, suggests that I think that's probably his opinion. Am I right? Read that chapter. Read those chapters carefully by the way, particularly notice in Kiddner's book, the first chapter on a particular biblical book is his sort of analysis of the book, his take on the book, his drawing, the spiritual meat from the book, and then his next chapter is on the state of scholarship and discussion and study of the book. All of which is also very interesting, but it may not strike you as immediately relevant. It is indirectly relevant, and I hope will become relevant at times. Now, how do we respond to these theories? Well, first of all, among those who believe that the third cycle has been messed up and messed up, there is little agreement as to how it should be put back together. That in itself doesn't prove that they're wrong to assume that it's been messed up, but it would be nicer if they came to the same conclusion about how to put the puzzle back together if in fact it's been jumbled. One might also say that even if they were right that the third cycle is confused, the end of the third cycle is confused, and has been reconstructed in some way, it would still be necessary to interpret the text that we have before us. This is the text we know, and we would still want to interpret it. It does exist and demands interpretation. Reward child in his book, Introduction to the Old Testament, a scripture, makes that point on page 542, and he says it's necessary to explore the present form of the text, and it's always more relevant to explore the present form than some hypothetical form that may have existed or may not have existed, except in the mind of some interpreter. However, I would say that it's by no means certain that the end of the third cycle has suffered any textual confusion at all or dislocations. Childs, Brevard childs who teaches a Yale, by the way, and others have mentioned that the truncated third cycle tends to dramatize the failure of the arguments of Job's friends. They've just run out of steam, they've said it all, they haven't convinced him, they haven't proven their case, and they've gotten nothing else to say. I can't remember the situation exactly, how many of you have seen chariots of fire, the movie? A goodly number, therefore I can use this. But you remember when Eric Little is called in among the little group of British Olympic committee members, and he's set front and center and has to face them. Remember the grumpy old man that was there? I can't remember for sure, but it seems that he had a few things to say at first, and eventually he was reduced to grunts and grimaces and scowls. Is that right? I kind of get the same impression in terms of these cycles of dialogue that in fact, so far was the more ordinary of the three if we had to choose one, and he just seems to get fed up with it eventually. He keeps charging, he keeps calling Job to repent, repent, run the race kind of thing, and eventually when he sees he's not going to win, maybe he's just run out of steam. That might be the better explanation then to begin to hypothesize about how things have been fallen apart and had to be put back together. Moreover, we have, I've already responded to this to some degree, we have seen that Job himself does not disagree theologically with the principle of retributive justice, so he can teach a course on it if necessary. He can tell them all about it using terms that they had used, but he has resisted their over rigorous application of this particular theological point to every single case his own in particular. And so it's possible that he excels his companions in propounding wisdom just to show that he understands, and he knows what they've been saying. He can explain the power of God and the fate of the wicked and the like, but he refuses their deduction that his own suffering proves is guilt. I will never admit that you're right till I die, I will not deny my integrity. That is his consistent refrain. Now, chapter 28 is maybe a little less clear, it may be the author's parenthesis, as Kiddner suggests, but again, Brevard Childs suggests that we really should link 27 and 28 together. And he says this, in chapter 27, beginning in verse 11, that this section serves now to introduce the great wisdom point of 28 as a speech of Job. And he goes on, the effect of placing chapters 27 and 28 in the mouth of Job is to re-instate Job as a sage. Job has refuted the false application of the sapiential tradition, that means the wisdom tradition, to explain his suffering. He's refuting his friend's application of that tradition to himself. But the present role of these chapters rules out any theory that Job is therefore rejecting Israel's wisdom, per se. This is far from the truth, Job can even describe the certain fate of the ungodly in terms reminiscent of his friend's arguments. And then he goes on to say, the effect of assigning chapter 28 to Job, that's the one on where can wisdom be found, is that it supports the move which will be made also in the Elihu speeches to which we come very shortly. Job also recognizes the divine limitations set on human wisdom. Only God knows the way of wisdom, the inclusion of the rubric summary of the chapter, behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, offers an explicit canonical directive on how the critical stance to wisdom found in the book of Job relates to the wider wisdom corpus. But what he's saying is that this brings the book of Job back into sync with the rest of the wisdom corpus, which has expressed the limitations of man's ability to understand all that goes on out there. Remember, there's much that we can understand, it's at our feet, but there's much that we cannot understand. And then finally he says, the effect of chapter 28 is to provide a link between the portrayal of the patient Job of chapter 2 and the impatient Job of the dialogue. Remember, Job has become increasingly impatient in his debates with his friends, and he's anything but calm by this point, and this calming chapter 28, as he kind of regains clarity and sanity for a while, does reinstate him and remind us of the earlier Job who had said, you know, should I receive good from God and not evil also or not trouble also? So I would say, again, we can only work with impressions, but my impression is that there is a reading possible that would allow this chapter 28 to be from the mouth of Job, and I think that may well be part of the dynamic of the text, as he is sensing that this may be the answer that he can't know the answer, where can wisdom be found? Only God knows. Well, after chapter 28, then Job turns to God in a final protest, this is also on your outline, chapters 29 to 31, Job longs for a time of past blessedness. He recollects his earlier days, but God has stricken him. He didn't proclaims his innocence one last time in chapter 31, and chapter 31 is a very interesting read because it shows that nothing's changed. I mean, we're more technological in everything, but if you read the sins that Job is saying, I'm not guilty of this, this is not the cause of this suffering, you notice that the sins are very much the same as the sins we deal with now. Honesty in business, sexual morality, social justice, right on down the line are very same things that are part of the human condition now, and then Job concludes with the call to God to answer him. Now, it's at this juncture that Elihu, the angry young man, interrupts, and we hear a new voice. He's angry both with Job and with his friends, with Job for justifying himself rather than God, and with the three friends for being unable to refute Job. Now, again, you know, if you've read Kidner's book or other books on the book of Job, you know that the Elihu speeches are questioned in terms of whether they're an original part of the book, or whether someone has added them to the book at some point along the way. Now, depending on whether we take Job as a historical book or not, you know, as telling a story of real people in real time, that's more or less problematic. We do know that books were augmented, we had the book of Proverbs, remember, where some salamonic material was added to the book of Proverbs. So, on the face of it, yeah, maybe okay, that something could be added to a book. However, if we're taking this as a historical account of something that went on in the life of Job, it's a little more problematic to introduce a fictional character into a historical account, a bit of a problem there. And again, I am not attracted to the notion of seeing these verses as an insertion, I mean these chapters as an insertion, I think again it's possible to read and answer the objections that would leave these chapters in their rightful place here. Well, what are the reasons for this claim that they don't belong here? Well, one is that when God finally appears to Job, he has something to say to Job, he has something to say about the three friends, but he doesn't mention Elihu at all. And so, this is trouble some people and they thought, well, Elihu deserves a response. Well, the fact of the matter is that Elihu really makes no charges, he doesn't issue any charges. And so, there's nothing really that God would need to respond to in Elihu's speech. The second observation is that Elihu's speech seems to interrupt Job's plea that God answer him. Job calls on God to answer him and then we hear Elihu begin to hold forth, and we don't really hear God responding. Furthermore, third comment is that Elihu's speeches seem to presuppose an extensive and exact knowledge of the speeches that have preceded so that the speaker seems to be working from a written transcript of the proceedings as if someone down the line read the book, familiarize themselves with the book and thought, I have an answer to that. I'll insert my answer on the basis of my clear and concise and precise knowledge of what has gone before. Well, again, that's an argument that is not overly compelling because it is quite possible that if this was a situation and an event that was taking place over a period of some days, it is likely that this would have been recorded. When people are giving speeches like this, even political speeches are recorded, and these are far more worthy than most of the political speeches we hear. And so, it's quite likely that someone would have been described recording these speeches could well have been Elihu. Now, again, we're speculating left, right, and center here, but so are all the other theories. So, it's quite possible that yes, he did have a knowledge of what went before to say nothing of the fact that often we are astonished by the capacity of other people, particularly ancients, but sometimes people in less literate cultures than ours were astonished by their ability to remember things. They don't have the crutch of pencil and paper, and so they train their minds to remember things that are far beyond our capacity. And so, Elihu may have had a very commanding knowledge of what had gone before. The other observation is simply that Elihu adds nothing new to the discussion. Now, I would really beg to differ on that one. I think he does add some things that are new to the discussion, one of which, in fact, and let me... I'm going to pick up on this next time because I've got my computer set up here and I want to show you something on the computer, unless you think, why did he do that? Why did he set that up and leave it there for low these mini hours and never show us anything? But let me see if I can turn down the lights, the appropriate lights, and show you a little something on a program called Accordance. And by the way, if you own computers or if you own a computer, this is the wave of the future, particularly if you can see it, computer. Now, if you've never seen this program, let me just show it to you very briefly. I'm not going to try to explain it all, but I'll explain what I'm getting ready to do. I could type in a verse reference and have it show, or I can do a search for a particular word. I can search in the RSV. You see in the upper, what would be your upper left hand corner. You see my little arrow up there. RSV. I'm going to change that to HMT, which is Hebrew, Maseretic Text, because I want to do a search in Hebrew. You'll be able to see the results in another language here. And I'm going to go down and rather than doing verse references, I'm going to do a search criteria, or criterion, and I'm going to do the Hebrew word for to know, simply to know. And if we run that search, oh, let me stop that, I don't want to do the whole Bible. I'm going to limit my search to the book of Job. I choose that, and then we run that search on the book of Job. And you see that there up here, toward the right, you see that there are 74 occurrences of the verb to know. So what one can know would appear statistically to be an important issue of knowing. And in fact, remember, Job and his friends have been struggling to know. They're seeking answers the whole time. Now, what is really fun about this program is that it can do things like, it can do an analysis and tell me all about the parsings of the Hebrew word, which is not important for us right now. But what is fun is the plot, and I'll make this bigger. Oops, I don't want it that big, because it's covered up. There you can see even statistically the frequency of the occurrence of that word. And notice where it really begins to peak, as it's getting toward and into the Elihu speeches, and into the confrontation between the Lord and Job, and the issue of knowledge and knowing. And what you can know really becomes very, very important. Now, that I would suggest is something that's a little new that is introduced by the Elihu speech. What I want to do is I want to pick this up next time there. I think if I continue on into that right now, we'll run out of time to get where we need to go on that particular topic. So I'm going to reserve that for next time. Let me take the next, we'll take about five minutes before we quit, and we'll quit about four minutes early. And we will, next time, we'll talk about lessons that we can learn. We can sense a lesson to be learned there very easily. Yes, Sandra? Okay, the question is, is that what God is talking about when He says they did not speak the truth about me as Job has done? Let's reserve that for when we get to that section. We haven't quite gotten to that section, so we'll take that up next time, Todd. Right, yeah. So Todd's basic comment is that in our discussion of chapter 28, rather than seeing it as some kind of a narrative, a narrator's ploy to link the Job of the prologue with the Job. Of the prologue with the Job of the dialogues and such, that this may simply be an indication of the direction of Job's own experience in the dialogues where he is now exhausted, and this is the point to which he comes. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't put those two at odds with one another. I would say that in seeing this, we see that, yeah, this is the same Job who was once so patient. Now he's gotten pretty heated up in the meantime, and he will be heated up again. That's the thing. He doesn't reach this place of repose and then remain there. He will begin to challenge again. But if it is from Job, if 28 is from Job, it is a moment of repose and lucidity when he's asking the right questions. Where can wisdom be found? Or maybe we're barking up the wrong tree. Maybe we need to realize that God is still God and we still are not. Or we are not still not. I've got to get the quote just right. Yeah, Mike. Right, the question is, assuming that there is a historical basis to this book, real experience of a real Job and real friends and so forth, are we to assume that they spoke as we are reading in this poetical idiom, or is this the work of a poetical genius? That's a question that's very hard to answer. We don't tend to think of carrying on a dialogue in this elevated style, but simply because we don't think of it would not mean that others would not. In fact, if you go to a scholarly society meeting, you do see people who have carefully crafted their rhetoric in order to twist the knife where necessary or cut the obscure the evidence where necessary. People do take very great care with their words when they're in debating situations. So it's possible that these could have been carefully prepared responses back and forth. So we really don't know. Well, let me say one other thing. It is quite true that for most of scripture, even when we have what appears to be direct speech, we're not necessarily dealing with the Ipsism of Verba, the very words themselves that were spoken but with adequate accurate depictions of what was said. So we speak in terms of the Ipsism of Vox, the very voice. The meaning the message is rightly depicted in summary fashion often, but not necessarily in terms of a tape recording Ipsism of Verba. And all you've got to do is compare certain parts of the synoptic gospels, or the synoptic histories in the Old Testament. Look at the divine promise to David in Chronicles and in Samuel, put those side by side, and if it's a tape recording, we've got some problems. But if it's an accurate, fair and accurate depiction of what was said, both explicitly and maybe what was implicit in those words, then we're fine. Okay, the question is, I've alluded to the book of James a lot tonight, but have hovered around. That was a very kind way of saying you have overlooked or evaded the very significant point that James makes that God does not test us, let no man say when he is tested or tempted by evil, that he has been tempted by God. I will think about that, Brian, and talk about it a little bit more maybe next time. I need to jot myself a note as an absent-minded professor, lest I make a promise on tape that I don't keep. But it is interesting in that first chapter of James, that Greek word, pedosmos, is used both for testing and tempting. Okay, it's the same word, which we don't get in our English translation when we're reading, and we think we're talking about different things, and really it's the same word in its broad range of meaning. Let me think about that a little bit, because you cannot absolutize that. You can absolutize the specific application that God does not tempt one to evil. In other words, God is not the author of evil. But there is a certain mystery there related to the sovereignty of God over all things. Okay, well, we'll end on that inigmatic note, and we'll see you next time.