Job Chapter 38
The Art of Biblical Poetry
These chapters are akin to “Defying Gravity” or “What's Up Danger.” After pages of arguments and counterarguments, here comes G-d to talk about planets and sea monsters. The universe is bigger than our temporal concerns. It's full of stars and supernovas and lions and roosters. It's a mass of contradiction and chaos forming sublime poetry.
In these chapters, G-d conveys all the grandeur and scope that we expect out of G-d. Frankly, the poem is almost too massive to discuss in an honest and comprehensive way. Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Poetry devotes an entire chapter to this speech alone. He's a major scholar. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur.
With brilliant poetry - bombastic and hilarious – G-d helps Job through his pain and the reader through troubling questions by showing the greater universe. Life is always bigger than our attempts at cataloging it. The author uses several strategies, including humor and scope.
Humor
Typical Christian apologetics distinguish the “loving” G-d of the NT from the angry vengeful OT G-d. G-d is not mocked, you sonofabitch. However, read the Hebrew scriptures without the Christian filter and you find a G-d in many moods - wise, patient, jealous, open to negotiation, frustrated, showing off, manipulative and a hilarious. G-d is just as contradictory and dynamic as the humans struggling to understand Him.
In this speech, G-d is sarcastic, but also funny. Repeatedly, his response to Job is “who are you to complain?” and “did you create heaven?” and “I guess you know because you were there when I made light.” G-d is not just challenging Job; G-d is being a total prick.
Throughout the book, Job has been accusing G-d of being unfair and cruel. Yet, when G-d talks, G-d almost agrees, but it's different. The G-d of chapter 38 is a messy bitch who lives for drama. Usually when G-d speaks, he's getting the best lines, but rarely does he use floodwaters, constellations and roosters to go full Kendrick vs. Drake on someone.
Scope
This chapter sets up the speech and goes big. G-d is talking about the entire universe with the earth and the stars and the constellations. The winds and the ice and the light and darkness all join in the great picture that G-d is painting with his words. G-d's tone may be snide prick, but the poetic imagery is much grander. The universe has a purpose and a design, but it's vast, approaching infinity. Sure, pray to G-d to help you find your keys, but don't expect G-d to be entirely responsive when G-d is setting up the next supernova and helping the lion eat a gazelle.
The natural world has only become more fascinating with discoveries that take us out of the geocentric universe with “mercury in retrograde” bullshit. The more we learn about quarks and supernovas and black holes, the more we know that we don't know. One day scientists may come up with a workable theory for dark matter, but that will only produce more mystery. As much as we want to shrink the universe to fit our biases, we cannot coddle ourselves with fantasies of creationism, astrology or accurate predictions based on goat innards.
G-d is not explaining the universe - merely referencing parts that Job and humanity couldn't begin to understand.
Weird Metaphors
Shakespeare is so ingrained in western culture that it's hard to appreciate his eccentricities. Yet, read or watch Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, King John or one of the many non-famous plays, you will be struck by the unpredictability and rule breaking. Characters get built up as major players, only to die in the third act. The protagonist changes sides without warning. Timon retreats to a cave. Just because we are familiar with Macbeth and Hamlet doesn't means that they aren't very strange.
Similarly, these verses might sound familiar, but they are full of the most bizarre metaphors. Earth is a house complete with a cornerstone and foundations. Morning stars are singing even as G-d binds them with chains. With water, G-d is either birthing it or closing it behind sea doors. G-d is the father to rain. G-d is the mother to ice. Biblical literalists are too concerned with Adam and Eve, but wouldn't it be fun to make them justify a literal interpretation of the Bible where G-d has an icy vagina attached to a freezer uterus?
Then we have storehouses for all the hail and the snow. You know this book was written in warmer climates when G-d brags about keeping all the snow in storage for something really big like a war or an apocalypse. G-d also enjoys tipping over the water jars of heaven, so G-d is not only a woman with a very cold vagina, but sometimes a cat.
By the time G-d waxes poetic about giving wisdom to the ibis and understanding to the rooster, possibly one of the dumbest fowls in creation, the metaphors have become so strange that they go beyond weird and ridiculous to sublime, like a Tyler Perry movie. G-d is not just talking about the universe and everything in it from the stars to the earth to the lions; G-d is conveying a heavenly perspective, and as the cliché goes, G-d is not human. G-d's ways are not humanity's ways. G-d is suggesting ice birth and wind storage, because these are not realistic metaphors. The writer is giving G-d a speech that goes beyond logic and proportion into the surreal.
It gets even wilder.
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Of course, you should read Robert Alter’s take on these chapters in The Art of Biblical Poetry.
Speaking of G-d, feel free to buy the Dybbuk Press biography of Rashi (a medieval rabbi). The biography was published in 1905 so it has interesting biases.
Better yet, buy King David and the Spiders from Mars. Really good stories.