update from sparkleup
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@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>“If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012,” I asked myself some years ago, “Was Madison born then?”</p>
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<p>That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary<sup id="fnref:intro-intercalary"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-intercalary">5</a></sup> years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.</p>
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<p>Matthew died and then I don’t remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded into something new until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later, if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later,<sup id="fnref:intro-fractions"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-fractions">8</a></sup> if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then?</p>
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<p>In reply to asking myself that, I say, “If Matthew died on September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle.”</p>
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<p>He’d been sick for months. He’d contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind.</p>
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@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>The editors of the NOAB take a more sympathetic view of the exchange. Job’s wife is seen as far more sympathetic: “The outcome of all Job’s piety has been to rob his wife of her ten children, her social standing, and her livelihood.” \parencite[737]{noab} Curse God, then. Who else could be responsible? How can you continue to praise after our ten (admittedly unnamed) children have died? <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-bless" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:intro-intercalary">
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<p>Between the two halves of the fable — Job’s fall and God’s reinstatement of him — lies an intercalary period of at least a week wherein his friends,<sup id="fnref:intro-friends"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-friends">6</a></sup> Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar<sup id="fnref:intro-elihu"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-elihu">7</a></sup> commiserate with him, sitting silent for seven days and nights. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-intercalary" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>Between the two halves of the fable — Job’s fall and God’s reinstatement of him — lies an intercalary period of at least a week wherein his friends,<sup id="fnref:intro-friends"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-friends">6</a></sup> Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar<sup id="fnref:intro-elihu"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-elihu">7</a></sup> commiserate with him, sitting silent for seven days and nights, before the last chapter of the book with the conclusion of the framing device. God commands that Job’s friends offer up sacrifices on his behalf, and when they do, all of Job’s wealth is restored twice over. 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels and so on, down to seven more sons and three more daughters (which he gives the delightful names Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Eyeshade). Job lives another hundred and forty years, long enough to see four generations of offspring, until he dies “aged and sated in years.” (Job 42:17, Alter) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-intercalary" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<li id="fn:intro-friends">
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<p>Though perhaps this ought to be put in qualifying quotes: “friends”. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-friends" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
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@ -71,6 +71,16 @@ forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<li id="fn:intro-elihu">
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<p>There is also Elihu, but more on him later. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-elihu" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<li id="fn:intro-fractions">
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<p>Job’s life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is one that divides ones life into finite fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary’s second visit to the sons of God and the Lord. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number of years.</p>
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<p>This centers God’s response as the sticking point. He spends four chapters responding to Job the conversations that have taken place between him and his friends. While these conversations make up the majority of the book, His response solely in the context of this framing device (which, we must remember, is an older folktale which has been re-cast as a framing device for the rest of the book) gives us a particular flavor of ‘God works in mysterious ways’ with more nuance than one commonly finds when that phrase is employed.</p>
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<p>God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do — nor indeed can — possibly understand the ways in which he works. They’re not just mysterious, they’re vast and incomprehensible. This makes the most sense in a panentheistic view. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are beyond even our causal domain.</p>
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<p>Even in a grounded, Jahwist, immediate and physical view of God<sup id="fnref:intro-exist"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-exist">9</a></sup> (He is, after all, there in the form of a whirlwind), his entrance comes off as bizarre and unnerving. He passes through the physical plane as the Sphere does through the Square’s planar existence. Even in so physical a form, He proves His very incomprehensibility.</p>
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<p>These interpretations are doing a lot of heavy lifting, however. They accept at face value Job’s capitulation in chapter 40, where, after being thoroughly excoriated by no less than God Himself, he says, “Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?” (Job 40:4, Alter) and “I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.” (Job 40:5, NRSV) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-fractions" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<li id="fn:intro-exist">
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<p>And if He does not exist? The folktale and the book as a whole do not depend on the existence of God in their interpretation. They still work to repudiate the idea that, if bad things happen to you, it is because you’re a bad person. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-exist" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</div>
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</article>
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