Bible Babel – By Kristen Swenson (with a lesson from Job)

[Anonymous]

The book, while enlightening and thorough, is not deeply academic. It is written for a lay audience. For example, the author uses her great depth of knowledge about the Greek and Hebrew origins of passages to instill in the reader a broader understanding without going into exhaustive detail about the entomology of the words themselves.

The author gives a great overview of the bible, the history of how it came together, was translated and transcribed and gives various points of view without being judgmental. Main stories and characters are reviewed as is their relevance to Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

It is interesting to me that not much in the book would offend LDS sentiments or cross lines of LDS doctrine, even though she does not rely on the King James Version. I believe that LDS people would greatly benefit from the overall understanding the book provides.

The book provides great ties throughout into popular culture, which prove entertaining and insightful and underscore the relevance of the bible even today.

Now I wanted to relate some specific information that the author gives us about Job and underscore its relevance to searchers and people who are undergoing a crisis of faith:

The author spends time more or less refuting the idea that Job was terribly patient. Indeed, much of the Book of Job is filled with Job’s complaints.

To quote from Bible Babel:

“At the end, after a monologue from God about God’s greatness and the intricacies of the natural worlds that has seemingly nothing to do with the rest of the book (why the innocent Job was suffering), Job stopped talking. Job’s final words were to say that he had said too much. Many translations render Job saying something like, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. This is certainly one valid translation, but the Hebrew is very rich. The word translated as “despise” needn’t mean “despise” or “hate” with a kind of distaste, Rather, it connotes a “refusing” or “rejecting” of setting something aside. The word translated as “repent” is one that in Hebrew can bear the sense of “comfort” or “consolation” as well as being sorry, changing one’s mind, or recanting. It’s a very different word from the one the prophets regularly use to get people to repent and turn from their sinful ways. Although the verse can certainly be read in its traditional sense of an awed and chastened Job, its translation possibilities also yield the paradoxical sense of setting Self aside to discover exactly what one is – a discovery that lends comfort and consolation.

Add to that the nature of God’s speech, “out of the whirlwind,” and one finds a Zen-like moment – a koan followed by the possibility of aha enlightenment. God’s speech is radically different from what we expect after reading the rest of the book. In it, God says nothing about Job’s suffering, nothing about reward and punishment, nothing about justice. Rather, God describes in remarkable, poetic detail knowledge and control of the nonhuman natural world, from its beginnings, “when the morning stars sang together” to “the gates of death” from the “Springs of the sea” to the constellations above, and from the care and feeding of baby ravens to the midwifery of wild goats. It could be that, like a Zen koan, God’s speech invites a radical shift of thinking and being that takes Job outside himself to look categorically differently on the world and his place in it. Job’s response, then, is not necessarily to say that he is puny and worthless, but he recognizes deeply and profoundly exactly who and how he is and this is a comfort.”

Now I hesitate to try and comment on this beautiful language for fear of detracting. I could not however miss the parallels to much of what we talked about and liken it to a person who is having a faith crisis. The trials. And maybe the importance of stopping to listen to the divine! And maybe a view that change can and should occur without despising ourselves!

I love the idea that at some point, you set yourself aside to actually discover what you are, and that effort leads to comfort. I see parallels of self-discovery in the lives of people of faith who are undergoing a faith crisis and who are thinking outside the lines of the traditional boxes provided by their institutional religions. Such self-discovery is big and scary, as is the shift from traditional thinking, but in the end, hopefully, the searcher arrives at a new level of self-awareness.

Then, when God finally does communicate, it is not about any of the things that the searcher has been taught are important to Him, like traditional guilt-ridden to-do lists. Rather, the divinely shared information is about a cosmic view of deity and a sacred view of the cosmos and the searcher comes to a new view of his place within it, another stage of faith, so to speak.

Great book. Easy read, but lots of good information.

[Anonymous]

Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the review.

[Anonymous]

silentstruggle wrote:

Then, when God finally does communicate, it is not about any of the things that the searcher has been taught are important to Him, like traditional guilt-ridden to-do lists. Rather, the divinely shared information is about a cosmic view of deity and a sacred view of the cosmos and the searcher comes to a new view of his place within it, another stage of faith, so to speak.

I love the parallels and find application in my own life. This leads me to a question. Every so often, I read about someone who is struck by a car and killed trying to help a family of ducks cross the freeway etc. I am left to ask… is it tragic that the person died trying to do something relatively insignificant (as in they should have stayed in the car), or is it profound that this person died in an act of service to “lower life forms” and perhaps died as they lived – always caring for others?

Thank you for this review!

[Author]

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