Job continues on about what a blameless person he has been. It is getting somewhat tiresome. The interesting line in today's reading is this:
If only someone would listen to me!This, it seems to me, is Job's fundamental inconsistency. He claims that God is all powerful. He claims that man cannot demand justice from God since God is both prosecutor, judge, and jury. Yet he seems to think that he deserves a clear explanation. If God really is the powerful, cosmic God that Job implies, then expecting a reason is just as futile as expecting justice.
Look, I will sign my name to my defense.
Let the Almighty answer me.
Let my accuser write out the charges against me.
After Job finishes speaking, we get an interjection from Elihu. According to Harris in Understanding the Bible:
Between Job's final challenge to God and God's appearance in the whirlwind that logically follows it, redactors inserted a lengthy speech by Elihu, a character whom the text has not previously introduced. Perhaps scandalized by Job's unorthodox theology, the writer of Elihu's discourse attacks Job for refusing to make things easy by simply confessing his sins (perhaps including self-righteousness) and thereby restoring the comfortable view of God's perfect justice. Rehashing the three friends' arguments, Elihu adds little to the discussion, although he claims to resolve the problem that Job's case presents. ... After six chapters of Elihu's empty rhetoric, readers may well feel that the opening question in Yahweh's first speech applies to him rather than to Job: "Who is this obscuring my designs with his empty-headed words?"What we see of Elihu's speech today support's Harris's analysis of it as redundant empty rhetoric, so I will not bother saying anything more about it.
New Testament
Paul calls the Corinthian church a living letter of recommendation on behalf of Paul. Paul then goes on to talk about how the new covenant, with Jesus, is so much more awesome than the old covenant. No one who wears the veil of the old covenant can understand the new covenant. None of this is particularly interesting to me.
Psalms and Proverbs
A nice proverb:
Blessed are those who are generous,
because they feed the poor.
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