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Section Reading the Bible Again for the First Time
A Cyberspace Discussion Group

Foundations: The Hebrew Bible -
Reading Israel's Wisdom Again

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SUMMARY COMMENTS
Introduction
The third division of the Hebrew Bible is called "The Writings" and includes "The Wisdom Books" which are Proverbs, Ecclisiastes, and Job. These three are all he deals with in this very compact chapter. The other "Writings" include Psalms, Daniel, Esther, Ruth, Song of Songs, Chronicles I & II, Ezra and Nehemiah. There are two more books, Ecclesiasticus and The Wisdom of Solomon included in the Christian Apocrypha but not in the Hebrew canon, nor most Protestant canon. Much of this "wisdom" is traditionally attributed to Solomon in 10 BCE but are considered now to stem from the post-exilic period from 539 BCE until as late as 180 BCE. The common thread through this period is that Isreal was living under foreign domination, and so their identity could not be political and became instead theocratic centered on the priests in Jersusalem. The Writings are a most impressive collection from such a small people in such continuing adversity.

The voices are "diverse and provocative". This literature focuses "on the individual and the world of the everyday." "How shall I live?" "What is life about?" But at the same time when we read modern concepts of individualism into these words, we must remember that in those days, and in these words, an individual is looked at "as embedded within family and kinship systems and society". The Hebrew tradition was also able to embrace these books together although they did not speak from the same perspectives at all. In fact we will find in Proverbs, Ecclisiastes and Job three completely different perspectives as to what life is about.
Proverbs - The Wise Path and the Foolish Path
The book divides in two: 9 chapters of wisdom poems and 22 chapters of individual proverbs - the accumlated sayings of generations of wisdom teachers.
THE THEME throughout is a contrast between wise and foolish, righteousness and wickedness, life and death.
THE FEAR OF THE LORD, a phrase often used is to be understood not as fright and trembling, but awe and reverence.
SOPHIA is a voice in Proverbs as a female embodiment of wisdom. A voice to follow towards life, riches, honour, peace and happiness. She is understood to be with YHWH during creation. (See also notes on Sheckinah). There is also a personification in the poems of the contrasting female voice that leads to folly, wickedneww and death.
AFTERLIFE. These words did not have any allusion to afterlife, but spoke always to this life. Heaven and Hell were ideas a few centuries in the future.
The subjects of the individual proverbs include Elegance and Humour, Children and Family, Wealth and Poverty, the Rewards of Right Living, Conventional Wisdom,
SOME DISHARMONY. Borg brings to our attention that in a male dominant society there are proverbs about good and bad wives, but not good and bad husbands. And that there is an implicit understanding that if you follow this path you will be healthy and wealthy and well, so if you are not these things you must not be following the path - you are the author of your own troubles then. However this shortcoming is addressed in the next two books.
Ecclesiastes - All is Vanity
Because one doesn't need to know anything about ancient history, this book is a favourite - it just reads well, and "its meancholic tone seems to fit the modern spirit". Again, the attributed authorship to Solomon is rhetorical. Scholarship places it 300-250 BCE. However the attribution to Solomon was excellent strategy because of course Solomon represented having everything good in life. And yet having everything did not satisfy. Therefore the stage is well set to answer what might satisfy.
Opinions about Qoholeth (Teacher) vary widely. They include atheist, skeptic, pessimistic, burned out, aimless, and exceptionally wise.
TWO CENTRAL METAPHORS are "All is Vanity" and "Chasing after Wind".
SUFFERING THROUGH NO FAULT. The message of Proverbs that following the right path will lead to prosperity just simply isn't always true, and this is well discussed here. So is life even worth while Qoheleth asks. DEATH is emphasized at every turn as inevitable and random.
HOW THEN LIVE? After well dismissing the simple perspectives of conventional wisdom, the teacher then makes his answer.
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved of what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might. Eccl 9:10
To put this in context and to understand its brilliance, Borg suggests considering the well known passage 3:1-8 (For everything there is a season...) from 3 perspectives.
1. THIS NOT THAT. A simple poetic meaning, as when rendered in a song.
2. A DEPRESSED CYNICAL PERSON. Life is bleak - an endless cylce of meaninglessness.
3. AS FROM THE DELAI LAMA. Live fully, whatever time it is.
Borg hears Qoheleth this third way. And that makes him think of Lao-tzu and the Buddha. For in these traditions, our troubles come from "grasping" rather than "acceptance". The Tao of Life is essentially ineffable. In a most similar way, "for Qoheleth, God is not absent but simply beyond all."

Borg concludes "True wisdom means carpe diem: "seize the day." Don't miss it; don't let it slip by unnoticed; don't live it in the fog; don't waste it chasing the wind."
Job - Innocent Suffering
Many respected people over time have regarded this book as most excellent: Luther, Tennyson, Carlyle. It composes a "radical questioning of conventional wisdom," has "... magnificent language, provocative content, and (a) stunning climax ..." Written during 6th century BCE in exile.
TWO STAGE STORY. First all Job's possessions taken away. Second Job's health taken away. But Job did not deny God so God won the wager with Satan.
The meaning and framework of the story however are to place the questions "Why be religious? Why take God seriously?", and to provide a framework for Job's friends in the events.
JOB's FRIENDS. Poetic dialogue 3 times Job speaks to each of 3 friends in turn. We speak of Job's patience but he was anything but patient - he was rather angry. He cannot understand why he is suffereing as he knows himself blameless. But his friends say he must have done something wrong. The point is that conventional wisdom cannot help explain suffering. The idea that the good are rewarded and the evil are punished just doesn't fit human experience.
JOB and GOD. The last 5 chapters are remarkable nature poetry. It lays the ground to point out the gulf between creator and created. It is so magnificent a display that it becomes an epiphany (or experience of God) for Job. He "sees" God. "Seeing" and "Knowing" God is the way mystics have always described their encounters with God. They do not "believe", they "see" and "know". In consequence he is changed. An answer is not required.
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Job 42:5
Conclusions
The Hebrew Bible has two conflicts. The first was that between the the royal theology and the call to justice and charity: Pharoah and Moses, Kings and Prophets. This is the second conflict: that the conventional wisdom is not sufficient to explain the relationship between God and the living. These are the tensions that pass into the Christian Bible.
COMMENTS
SHEKHINAH: God's indwelling presence, conceived as female. Here is an excerpt from Rodger Kamenetz's Stalking Elijah, (1998 Harper San Franscisco) where Rabbi Judith Halevy enjoins some of the special perspectives and difficulties of a women in theJewish tradition.
Apart from the Torah, Judith's favourite teaching texts are the tales of Rabbi Nachman, ... " The Beggar with the Crooked Neck." At one level, it's simply the story of two birds. "The female was lost," Judith told me, "and the male went to look for her. He searched for her and she searched for him. They searched for one another for a very long time, until they got comletely lost."
The two birds symbolize many things. They are God and the Shekhinah; the Shekhinah goes into exile with the Jewish people at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. T;hey are also the two cherubs on the ark of the covenant, the small box or coffer at the heart of the mishkan that carries the tablets of the covenant.
Aryeh Kaplan comments that, "As long as the ark with the cherubs stood in the Temple, the relationship between the Holy One and the Shekhinah was perfect, and prophecy could exist. However, after the Temple was destroyed, and the ark hidden, prophecy ceased. The concept of bringing together the two birds is thus that of reuniting the Holy One and His Shekhinah wwhich is the redemption."
Beautiful - but for me, as for Judith, the question is how to make this reuniting real today."
... an exercise is then described whereby students are paired up and share weeks of working together. Then they are brought together and she teaches of ...
... the pain of loss, displacement, exile. She described these broken partners calling to one another.
"Everyone is blindfolded," hse said. "I tell them, "Find your partner in the room by sound."" The students wander, calling to one another in the welter of competing sounds. "Ach,"she said, "incredible longing! At the end there's silence; in that silence the Holy One comes. At moments in this room the holy spirits are here. As that last class ended, for twenty-five minutes, no one spoke, no one moved."
C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain (Collins, London, 1940) makes an interesting division of the origins of suffering. In Ch 6 Human Pain, He later attempts a Christian answer to Job.
... pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. ... and this perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men. It is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; it is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. But there remains, none the less much suffering which cannot thus be traced to ourselves."
C.G.Jung in Answer to Job (1954, Bollingen) speaks with the special insight of one of the founders of modern psychology.
Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man's mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance. Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which has no effect upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature." (end 19)
"...even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky." (end 20)

St. David's United Church.Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
The United Church of Canada.

November 12, 2001, feb 22, 04