42 chapters of this, the oldest book written to appear in the Bible, is placed before Psalms, which are largely prayers for social affliction. Social collapse due to various natural disasters: astronomical, earthquake, drought, flood, blizzard, famine, disease and warfare are addressed. The sections break down roughly into 4 sections:
-1. God and Satan afflict Job, is the briefest section.
-2. The Three Wise Men Debate Job in his Distress, the most extensive section.
-3. The Young Man Exhorts Job, the second most extensive section.
-4. God Answers Job and the Wise Men, Blessing Job, which is slightly longer than the tail of Job’s affliction. God's power shown in creatures is a delightful sketch of the monstrous.
I happened to read this book in light of Hesiod, which I have read four times this past month, and The Babylonian Woe, the book on ancient financial conspiracy by David Astle. There are many aspects of Job that bear on the perennial suffering of the bound working class, of the various cults of experts that control the values of society expressed in Edward Bernays’ Propaganda: The Public Mind in The Making, which I am currently rereading while reading Job. In fact, the plight of job and the young man who exhorts him, is well reflected in the puppet aspect of the Public Man by Tiziana Matarazzo in the 2024 Martino Fine Books edition.
I offer a brief representative list of quotes from Job that seem to bear upon the individual and mass cognition under conditions of social affliction. The one phrase that appears most often outside of normal verbal convention of cadence and affirmation is the concept of Deep Shadow, of the under girding of reality known only to God. The arrogant wise men, faithful Job and God all use this phrase in relation to exclusive understanding or the impossibility of understanding. The dialogues remind me much of the bipolar bickering over pervasive social issues from 2016 thru 2024, a time of great psychological social affliction, characterized by previously unknown levels of mass hysteria and delusion.
2: 1-2: Satan is among “the sons of the [true] God [who] entered into their station before Jehovah, and Satan also proceeded to enter right among them to take his station before Jehovah.”
Satan is shone to be a disliked but tolerated administrator of God’s will on earth and is also permitted to debate with God before the other unnamed minor gods. The general denial of this relationship by modern Christians seems largely to be related to a notion of unified singular creation imposed by atheists in humanistic debate. I see the resulting ignorance of all parties on this question to be instrumental in the modern secular and religious belief that there can be no conspiracy against humanity, among us, or above us.
1:17: The Chaldeans, who later are placed over the Hebrews exiled in Babylon, and who seemed to operate a financial empire from 1850 B.C. to A.D. 1240 when the Mongols waste the city, are depicted as rapacious actors.
7:2: “Like a slave he pants for the shadow,” perhaps meaning the shade from labor, is couched in the contexts of lunar confusion of the reordering of months.
13:4-5: “...you men are smearers of falsehood; all of you are physicians of no value,” claims Job of the wise men who have come to judge him in his affliction, easily assigning the cult of experts who rule us to this day the greatest biblical antiquity.
13:27: “You also keep my feet put in the stocks,” declares Job, against the modern Christian and secular experts who declare stridently that no slavery existed in the ancient world, despite the prevalence of bondage equipment.
15:5: “For your error trains your mouth,” gaslights a wise man taking the afflicted to task for failing God and deserving his misery. This is behavior that has been rife since 2020 in our time, serving to blind and therefore bind both arguing factions.
15:7: “were you the very first man to be born, or before the hills were you brought fourth with labor pains,” is a clear statement that must make ancient astronaut theorists thrill with joy.
16:11: ‘God hands me over to young boys, and into the hands of wicked ones he throws me headlong,” is a statement to earthly life as a test of the soul, as a crucible.
17:10: “as I do not find anyone wise among you,” calls out to tormentors as ignorant dupes of an unseen hand, that being Satan whom God charged with working evil upon Job.
18:10: “A cord for him is hidden on the earth, and a catching device for him on his pathway,” presents the ancient mind as aware that the world is ruled by conspiracy.
19:15: “… my slave girls themselves reckon me as an outsider,” is a measure of the fallen man of power’s woe, a harvest elsewhere in Job compared to the harvest of ripe wheat, and of great value to international money systems, which are referenced in Job. Slave girls are again noted in offense to our modern view of the ancient world.
19: 23-24 “Oh that now my words were written down!
“O that in a book they were even inscribed!
“With an iron stylus and with lead, forever in the rock O that they are hewn!’” suggests this, the most ancient book of the Bible, placed curiously near the end of the Old Testament, as having been written at some point after the introduction of Iron, yet still in the Bronze Age, making the recording of that entire sacred document younger than international banking by thousands of years, and younger than the Chaldean Inception in Babylon by very little, as Iron might be reckoned as in special use by about 1750 B.C.
Job has many lessons to learn for the modern seeker into the past, most having been skipped in this light treatment. An extensive use of Job as a reference to faith in times of earth changes is present in my omnibus science fiction trilogy, Who Writes the Songs of Night, in Volume 3: Night Song of the Nords or Eye of the Dictor.
Thank you for considering this inquiry.
-JL, East Baltimore, 11/24/2024
