Job Chapter 10

MILK!!!!!

“Did you not pour me out like milk, and curdle me like cheese?” - Job 10:10

“Milk a bull and you have a friend for life” - Yaakov Smirnoff, Cold War Comedian

“Your mother would still be a milkmaid, had I not squirted you into her belly”

- Walder Frey, Wedding Planner

This chapter has several oddities, but the milk verse bothered me. I looked up the Hebrew. I explored translations. I assumed it was an analogy for destruction; only it came in the middle of G-d shaping, molding and knitting Job.

Finally, I figured it out.

Milk is a cum metaphor.

There are racier passages in the Bible. Song of Songs is an erotic poem. Only, if I was reading Song of Songs, I'd expect to read sex. I didn't expect semen to show up in Job. Job is the book about suffering, toxic positivity and sea monsters.

Distracted by semen, I dismissed the other possible articles, including:

G-d is unfair, like Facebook Standards

“Does it please you to oppress me,
    to spurn the work of your hands,
    while you smile on the plans of the wicked?” (3)

The most important question posed by the Book of Job is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The second question is “Why do good things happen to bad people?” If G-d is punishing Job for his perceived sins, then why is G-d ignoring the truly evil.

If you've been on Facebook for any length of time, two things have probably happened.

1. Facebook has blocked you from posting for a ridiculous reason. Say “blue eyed white devil” ironically. Post that joke about stabbing Julius Caesar and Facebook brings down the ban hammer.

2. You reported an outright racist or violent post, only to receive a gaslighting form letter stating that the post did not go against community standards.

Facebook is evil by design. Facebook's business model requires engagement, aka drama. It programmed the AI to seek and destroy phrases like “All Men are Trash” or “Cathy Brennan is a Fake Goth,” while encouraging posts to ferment genocide in Myanmar. If people are insulting racists on Facebook, they are on Facebook.

G-d is supposed to be fair. G-d saves the innocents and punishes the wicked. Or at least that's what G-d is supposed to be doing. Only look around. The innocents suffer. The wicked prosper. This seems like a bad way to run the universe.

The Bible Endorses Abortion

Please stop quoting the Bible out of context to win an argument. Many Biblical passages state that birth is a burden. Better you were never born. One of those verses is in this chapter, letting us all know that abortion is really the best option.

If a billboard in favor of forced birth can include a cute baby or ugly fetus next to a Bible quote, why can't a pro-choice billboard include the Bible verse “I should have been as though I had not been” - Job 10:19.

I don't think it'd be effective, but it'd be funny.

Why go to all this trouble just to destroy us?

Job is asking why G-d would frame, fashion, milk dad, curdle Job like cheese, clothe Job in skin, knit his bones and sinews only to destroy him? This was almost the basis of the entire article since the existential question of why are we here gets even more complicated when you consider how complicated the journey from sex to angst gets. We are all miracles of chance and biology, whether our parents used expensive IVF technology or met in a bar. Our genes and experiences make us unique and weird in so many ways. Yet, we have on average 70 years to struggle, laugh, fail, create, fuck, love, dream and read comic books. Then we die.

In the making-of documentary for Land of the Dead, the special effects guy talks about how much work went into a scene where a zombie rips off a man's head. The special effects guy went through a lot of trouble and time to make sure that it looked perfect. The scene lasted about five seconds.

Is that all we are? Brilliantly designed and complicated creatures? We show up for a few seconds in the second or third best Living Dead movie?

Back to the Milk!

I too grew up in a household where the Bible collected dust. Even though I've spent most of my adult life arguing that the Bible is a crazy, dynamic and beautiful book that should not be relegated to preachy talky words that you throw at friends, I still didn't expect semen to show up.

Yet, I should have recognized the metaphor. Our culture loves the milk as semen metaphor. Cosmopolitan talks about milking the prostate. Ludacris raps about milk da cow. Hot milk was a 19^th century British metaphor for semen. A common meme claims that Oreo cookies sold boy milk brands.

Yet, when it comes to this passage, it's...sorry to say...Aristotle.

“When the material secreted by the female in the uterus has been fixed by the semen of the male, this acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk, for rennet is a kind of milk containing vital heat, which brings into one mass and fixes the similar material and the relation of the semen to the catamenia is the same, milk and the catamenia being of the same nature. When, I say, the more solid part comes together, the liquid is separated off from it, and as the earthy parts solidify membranes form all round it.”  - Generation of Animals.

Aristotle might have heard the analogy from shepherds. No way was this book written in the 7th or 6th century BCE.

Last thing. You might think that Aristotle (and Job) thought that the woman was just a motel for the curdling “milk” but he thought that the semen interacted with menstrual blood. Hippocrates thought that everyone had seeds.

Sperm wouldn't be discovered until 1677. The ovum was discovered in 1827.

Patriarchy is weird, but not so weird that we should assume that the ancient believed women to be empty vessels for gestation or curdling “milk”.

Next week: Zophar is angry

Work is picking up and I am actively seeking better day jobs but I’m still behind on my rents so if you could help out, it’d be greatly appreciated.

For more weird Bible stuff, buy my anthology She Nailed a Stake Through His Head with stories by Catherynne Valente and Romie Stott.

Job Chapter 9 —————————- Job Chapter 11