Devotional Short Note on Job 20

Koot van Wyk

Our modern understanding of the Old Testament and related a book like Job, is layered with a number of misunderstandings. Let us deal shortly in brief with some of them. Hebrew is a language that is as old as man. Dictionaries contain the words of Hebrew in its smallest form either with two or three consonants. Originally only consonants were written. The Masoretes of the 10^th century A.D. were the ones who supplied vowels to the text based on Arabic Grammar rules since the 7^th century A.D. The vowels are open to criticism and are not the original Word of God although for about 85% it is because it is repetitive and clear. The Masoretes were Arabic influenced scholars. Mostly four consonants are loanwords and many times from Egyptian. An /m/ before the root can make it sometimes a participle. The order of the alphabet resembles that of the English. Some letters can be easily misread since they look the same. The preservation of the consonantal text of the Word of God was painfully precise like a Xerox copy and we know that with a test, the text of Daniel from Qumran cave 4 compared to the Codex Aleppo of 1008 A.D. (over a millennium). 99.9% exact. No preservation team in any culture or language has this millennial precision. The Holy Spirit preserved the original Word of God contained in the consonants. Judaism is not the original Old Testament religion and going to a synagogue does not give you a feeling of religion in the days of Jesus or in the Old Testament times. The practices of Jewish religion, dressing, prayer habits, swaying, chanting, music, art, philosophy, cultural habits [are sometimes based upon one Old Testament text but] are deviations from the original Hebrew religion of the Old Testament since additions and borrowings were made from Christian and Arabic influences. In modern times also included are Rationalism, Enlightenment and secularism influences. It is the same with Christian and Arabic religions that they borrowed from Judaism. Modern colloquial Hebrew can help one read the Old Testament faster for the 85% that is correctly understood but that 15% margin of rare words needs the employment of languages like Egyptian, Old Persian, Akkadian, Hittite, Sumerian. Someone may say: get me all the ancient versions plus the consonantal text of the Old Testament and I can pick and choose the right meaning from seeing how the Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopian language dealt with the text. No solution. They borrowed from each other or used the same degenerative “notebook” or original Hebrew text with marginal corrections giving rise to the same errors repeated or reproduced in their translations. Eclecticism will not help. Trust the original consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition like Codex Aleppo, as the original Word of God. Anything else is secondary, para-biblical (paraphrases), derivative, or degenerative. This conclusion is made after I used this very method to see how to find meaning in the Books of Judges, Hosea, and Daniel. It is the same for Job now. The same principles above applies. None of these languages will give one a better translation except if one is willing to bring Middle Egyptian in since that was the language of Moses, or Sumerian or Akkadian, but not Arabic. Some thought that Satan is only mentioned in chapter one and two of Job. Eliphaz had a séance with Satan in Job 4:15ff. In Job 7:19 Job knows his opponent [singular for Satan and not plural for his friends] needs to be swallowed. In Job 9:21c Job knows that “one it is that destroys both the innocent and wicked”. This is a reference to Satan. He knows Satan is involved in the pain but his question is why did God permitted this? Job balance God and Satan’s actions on opposite sides of a seesaw since he said of Satan and God: “Who[ever] [Satan] gives me to Sheol/the grave, You [God] hide me” Job 14:13. In Job 16:9 Job is speaking of Satan as his Adversary and that God delivered him to a fool [Satan] (verse 11). Healing is to come through the hands of evil, he complains. He is a target for Satan (verse 12). Satan runs to him like a warrior (verse 14). Does Job hate God for his pain? No. “To God my eyes pour out tears” (verse 20). God did not “*perverting* my cause” as the Arabic laden meanings of the Middle Age Rabbis navigated modern translators into misreadings of the semantics of Moses in Job 19:6. What he is experiencing was “*paved* [Middle Egyptian w-3t nṯr = “sacred road” for the Hebrew word עותני] by God”. Again 7^th century Arabic coating over Moses’ original Egyptian words is not going to help our modern understanding. It puts blame on God and this concept is contradicted elsewhere in Job. He does not blame God. That was the whole test in the book of Job. He will not blame God even though Satan engineered the pain. In Job 20:2 the Rabbis with their Arabic translated “agitation in me” (Metzudath David 17^th century); “my sense” (Maimonides 1135-1204); “my haste” (Ibn Ezra 1092-1167); “my silence” (Rashi 1040-1105). These are Arabic related meanings in which they changed the consonants of the Hebrew original to fit a related chosen Arabic “look-alike”. There is nothing wrong in searching for look-alikes in rare words, but it has to be Middle Egyptian or Akkadian as said above. Actually, this word is not *agitation is in me* but “*my constructions * in me” (Middle Egyptian ḫws for Hebrew חושי).