Any reasonable reading of the first part of the book of Job would identify his adversary as Satan himself, who seeks God’s permission to wage War against Job. I’m really not sure how there would be any other take-aways from the first two chapters.
In terms of battle strategy, it appears to me that Satan’s first tactic was one of blitzkrieg. I must wonder how long of a time period existed between the initial and dramatic, shock-and-awe assaults and the point where Job finally speaks with any length and specific, deeper content of expression, and battle fatigue.
When I listen with empathy to the arterial gushing out of Job’s utterances in Chapter 3, I hear a man speaking from the bottom of a personal battle that has now somehow become a War of Attrition. Job is using language of personal apocalypse.
He is pouring forth existential pain and angst at a level that just a few words cannot convey. A truly supportive, caring and wise friend or family member would not offer suggestions how to fix something, assault one’s integrity or pour salt in one’s wounds.
They would simply allow Job to gush with careless hyperbole, emotion and more and recognize that the face of pain, grief and loss takes many superficial forms at times. Their reply to Job’s 434 words – the longest word count thus far – should have been, “There are no words…”
But, it wasn’t.
But first, let’s think a bit about the content of Job’s speech in Chapter 3.
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If taken literally, Job is calling for God to change and rearrange the entire universe and orbits of planets in the cosmos – things set forth in the Genesis poem of Creation itself by Our Creator – in order that the day of his birth perish.
While I am no scientist nor cosmologist, conceptually, according to Job’s speech, for the day of his birth to perish, an un-doing of things in the Genesis creation account would be needed to accomplish this: cataclysms in the Universe itself that would altar our calendar in time as we know it, outside of eternity, into a 364-ish day calendar year, in Earth’s orbit around our Sun.
He calls for God to reverse the markings of light and dark referenced in Genesis, in order that the day of his birth be seized by thick darkness and not be included among the days of the year.
He calls for those who curse days – and I am assuming this is a reference to those that practice witchcraft – to release dark forces so that both the day of his birth and the night of conception would contain no shout of joy. That there would be barrenness in his mother’s womb.
This interconnection between pain and joy, blessing and cursing of one’s very birth day and existence, is striking, in my view. I believe the expression of these texts calls worthily for our attention and careful listening – what happened to Job, a man of such integrity and personal/spiritual fortitude, that he might utter these things?
In the gushing of his pain (yes, he finally is communicating, “this all hurts…this really really hurts…this hurts in a way no one but myself can fully comprehend…”) he questions why were there even “knees to receive him” – which I envision are his mother’s knees so vulnerably spread apart (for his existence) in his own birth. As one who has given birth twice, I can recall the involuntary quaking of one’s muscles, knees and every part of one’s body that seem to take place during and after that final push of new life into the world. It is a quivering one does not forget.
We don’t know Job’s own early life story, but whatever Satan purposed and had thus far waged against Job, reduced him to one filled with such level of personal angst manifested in the ultimate self-rejection, that we must study and empathically listen closely, to truly wrap our heads around it all.
His mother’s knees is what Job wishes had not labored on his behalf – and he goes a step further to wish his own mother had not received him to her breast, to nourish and sustain him. He wishes he had been stillborn. He states that the stillborn – those who never see the light of day nor know their own existence apart from the fully formed existence within their mother’s womb – go to a grave that alongside the wicked (emphasis the “wicked”), find more peace (emphasis, the WICKED find MORE PEACE) than (righteous, according to Chapter 1) Job has.
Job is an exceedingly weary man, with no hope.
This tells me that somewhere between Satan’s initial blitzkreig, Job then became the target of a likely complicated grinding-down of every resource he possessed – personal, spiritual, financial, family and community. The adversary that wages a War of Attrition does so from a starting place of recognizing their disadvantage. From the opening dialogue in the book of Job, Satan targets Job not for his weakness, but for his fortitude.
The Battle of Attrition does not come to the weak,
but to the strong.
Again, I have no idea the gap in time prior to Job’s gushing in Chapter 3, but I believe we get a hint in Chapter 2 that the battle tide was turning to attrition tactics when we might notice that his own wife – whom we would think would stand in solidarity with him – removes her support (Job 2:9).
WERE THERE ACTUALLY FOUR – NOT THREE – EARTHLY COMFORTERS? – PART II (JOB 2)
Sadly, when Job seems at his very lowest and we think it cannot get worse, it does. In fact, the exhausting continued draining of his personal battle resources is only revving up. He soon enters another battle with three friends whom in my view, were somehow energized by the dark spiritual forces which God permitted Job’s adversary – the one who sought his very life – to unleash.
At first, his friends see him from afar and recognize and acknowledge the magnitude of Job’s losses. Like the spiritual people of that day and tradition, they tear their garments, sprinkle askes on their own heads and sit with him in the dust. One would think these three – (and I wonder to myself, “who ARE these people and WHERE did they come from?!!!”) – would be like Aaron to Job.
In that story, Moses was carrying such a heavy weight when he raised his hands that all Israel would travel in safety through the Red Sea – every last one of them would reach safe harbor – that at one point Aaron had to come alongside Moses and prop up his hands.
We see this also when Jesus carried the weight of his own cross and a Roman soldier conscripted Simon of Cyrene to come alongside him and help Him bear his sufferings.
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Recently, about two months ago, I found myself in the culmination of an exhausting personal battle which came through an individual with whom I had underlying and ongoing interpersonal struggles, traceable back, overtly, to 2005. (And no, this was not my first husband nor either of my sons). It was, however, an individual that if it were not for the blood-kin relationship, in retrospect, would have been easier to sever with. My therapist, at points during the past several years, asked me why I continued to engage with this individual.
Because the individual’s hurtful words and complex/unclear interactions, did periodically surface into professional conversations with her.
Because, like in these types of relationships that we are about to witness in Job’s interactions with his three comforters, there are so many mixed messages and disconnects between what is said, by each, and what is meant (at face value) and what the person actually means, or thinks – with each party either correctly or incorrectly projecting their own issues into the dialogue or take-aways from the dialogue.
Anyone who has ever found themselves in this type of interaction gets clear glimpses through the spaces that exists between actual words spoken and actions taken, into the deeper actual nature of the relationship. Yet, why do we keep engaging?
I suppose that’s the million dollar question. Some people seem to simply walk away from these relationships. Others seem to employ every resources they possess to both be understood and to understand, yet to no real avail.
Like the little sucker shoots that sprout in the elbow joints of tomato plants, these shoots indeed grow bigger and bigger. But, they essentially are sapping the energy from the shoots that will actually bear fruit. Many years ago, my dear Uncle Bill, a master gardener, explained this to me while visiting in Delaware and observing my tomatoes. He said I needed to keep pinching these off.
Basically, nip these little suckers in the bud.
Yet, in my life, that is not my modus operandi – to quickly and permanently sever from someone without first making every patient attempt at dialogue. Time and time again, however, the more direct and self-assertive I become of my own thoughts, feelings and needs, the more the other party seems to dig in and interactions slowly erode.
Sure, all relationships are messy and even the perceptions of the other and the root of the real issue can be obscured. Sadly, we come to painful points where we see something we cannot unsee, as they say.
This is often an insidious Battle of Attrition. I should have learned years ago in the first huge encounter with this type of person…that the first point of access is continuing to think, “but they mean no harm.” We are in fact – through tears, anger, frustration, many words, many clear attempts to communicate that the person is both hurting and harming us – unable to be heard.
Maya Angela said, “If a person shows you once who they are, believe them.” Yet, this truth is often hard to discern, and apply. We want to give others the benefit of the doubt. We want to give grace, because we recognize our own flaws and contribution to the occasional ills and miscommunications found in all messy human relationships. Yet, things continue a slow downward spiral, and we are enmeshed.
Sometimes, I imagine this can feel like the forces of darkness have so energized hidden dynamics, control issues, agendas and judgments through an individual(s) that it feels like they are all three of Job’s comforters rolled into one. Like Job, in his devastating losses and failure to be understood and replenished in true comfort, empathy and ongoing strengthening of his fortitude, to keep fighting his particularly crafted (by God’s enemy) War of Attrition with all its particularly crafted assaults on many fronts, I too, resort to descriptive language as Job, sometimes, concerning these various encounters.
And of course, I and most of us would acknowledge from the get-go I am not (we are not) at the same impeccable starting place as Job, when the assaults of spiritual and human adversaries (or some combination of both) come looking to destroy us and all we hold dear.
I think the lesson so far in Job is to not take at face value the utterances of someone in deep pain, loss and battles of undeserved assaults – hidden battles the person is facing which we have little clue about. Many who have suffered traumas, especially in the early formative years, fight battles others cannot fix. The very first developmental goal according to Erikson is Trust vs. Mistrust. We divide people into safe or unsafe people.
Nothing is more unsafe in a person than being messaged how safe or loving toward you the person believes they are, yet, the recipient’s radar correctly picks up on the under-the-surface hidden communications in their effervescent words and emojis to the contrary.
As this word count analysis and discourse Job engages in with his three comforters is about to explode into a new battlefront of attrition for Job, who is already at his seemingly lowest point of personal and spiritual and physical exhaustion, I am wondering if we might consider and even view it, somewhat, through the more contemporary lens of what we name as gaslighting, these days.
It just seemed that many of their words are aimed at provoking Job to question his own self and understanding of himself.
These three comforters call into question so much about Job, going straight to his integrity and pressing Job into costly battles of whether he will comply with their verbal drip drip drip violences toward him in their speech (again, our battle is not against flesh and blood per se but Satan/evil can and does mysteriously energize others, with the aim of our downfall and destruction), so that he expends immense energies rightfully and reasonably defending himself.
I am thinking the word count on this will continue to be both enlightening and fascinating.
After all, the book of Job is essentially a 42-Chaptered MASTERPIECE OF MALEVOLENCE PART I (JOB 1:1-22).
Word Count of Job’s Speech: 434 words
| Job Speaks After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 He said: 3 “May the day of my birth perish, and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’ 4 That day—may it turn to darkness; may God above not care about it; may no light shine on it. 5 May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more; may a cloud settle over it; may blackness overwhelm it. 6 That night—may thick darkness seize it; may it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months. 7 May that night be barren; may no shout of joy be heard in it. 8 May those who curse days[a] curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan. 9 May its morning stars become dark; may it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn, 10 for it did not shut the doors of the womb on me to hide trouble from my eyes. 11 “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? 12 Why were there knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? 13 For now I would be lying down in peace; I would be asleep and at rest 14 with kings and rulers of the earth, who built for themselves places now lying in ruins, 15 with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver. 16 Or why was I not hidden away in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day? 17 There the wicked cease from turmoil, and there the weary are at rest. 18 Captives also enjoy their ease; they no longer hear the slave driver’s shout. 19 The small and the great are there, and the slaves are freed from their owners. 20 “Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter of soul, 21 to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure, 22 who are filled with gladness and rejoice when they reach the grave? 23 Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? 24 For sighing has become my daily food; my groans pour out like water. 25 What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. 26 I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.” (414) |
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