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    Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature
    Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature
    Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature

    By Ed Hurst

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    The Bible is Ancient Truth, but must be read in its own ancient context to be fully understood. Even the people among whom Jesus lived no longer understood their own Hebrew heritage because the leadership had embraced Western intellectual assumptions which were then foreign to Scripture. Where we stand today is even more foreign. The burden of responsibility is upon us to travel back into that world, to the context in which God chose to reveal Himself. This volume examines Job, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon in light of those Hebrew mental assumptions. (Psalms and Proverbs will appear in separate volumes in this series.)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Hurst
    Release dateFeb 21, 2015
    ISBN9781311848116
    Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature
    Author

    Ed Hurst

    Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.

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      Book preview

      Ancient Truth - Ed Hurst

      Ancient Truth: Wisdom Literature

      By Ed Hurst

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2015 by Ed Hurst

      Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – be sure your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23)

      Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

      Cover Art: Caves by Leon Petrosyan; used by permission under CC 3.0. Author’s modified version is available by request under the same license -- original source.

      Other books in this series include Ancient Truth: Isaiah and Ancient Truth: Old Testament History by the same author.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction to the Ancient Truth Series

      Introduction to the Wisdom Literature

      Job

      Introduction to Job

      Job 1

      Job 2

      Job 3

      Job 4

      Job 5

      Job 6

      Job 7

      Job 8

      Job 9

      Job 10

      Job 11

      Job 12

      Job 13

      Job 14

      Job 15

      Job 16

      Job 17

      Job 18

      Job 19

      Job 20

      Job 21

      Job 22

      Job 23

      Job 24

      Job 25

      Job 26

      Job 27

      Job 28

      Job 29

      Job 30

      Job 31

      Job 32

      Job 33

      Job 34

      Job 35

      Job 36

      Job 37

      Job 38

      Job 39

      Job 40

      Job 41

      Job 42

      Ecclesiastes

      Introduction to Ecclesiastes

      Ecclesiastes 1

      Ecclesiastes 2

      Ecclesiastes 3

      Ecclesiastes 4

      Ecclesiastes 5

      Ecclesiastes 6

      Ecclesiastes 7

      Ecclesiastes 8

      Ecclesiastes 9

      Ecclesiastes 10

      Ecclesiastes 11

      Ecclesiastes 12

      Song of Solomon

      Introduction of Song of Solomon

      Song of Solomon 1

      Song of Solomon 2

      Song of Solomon 3

      Song of Solomon 4

      Song of Solomon 5

      Song of Solomon 6

      Song of Solomon 7

      Song of Solomon 8

      Introduction to the Ancient Truth Series

      Mankind is fallen, in need of redemption. The one single source is the God who created us. He has revealed Himself and His will for us, the path to redemption. The pinnacle of His efforts to reveal Himself came in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

      Most of us understand easily enough that Divine Son was born into a particular historical and cultural setting, one that is frankly foreign to us, and we to it. The distance is more than mere years of time, or language and culture, but a wealth of things that fall between Him and us. At a minimum, we could point out the Post-Modern culture, Victorian feminism, Enlightenment secularism, European feudalism, and Germanic tribal mythology – so much we can point out without much difficulty. What no one in our Western world today seems to realize is the single greatest barrier to understanding Christ is the thing which lies under all of those obscuring layers of influence: Western Civilization itself.

      That is, the ancient Classical Greco-Roman world is built essentially on Aristotle and Plato. Those two are not simply alien to the people of the Bible, but their basic view of reality is frankly hostile to that of the Bible. Aristotle rejected Hebrew Scripture because he rejected the underlying worldview of the people God used to write that Scripture.

      This book is not a long academic dissertation on the differences; that has been very well covered by far better qualified writers. But this should serve as notice to the reader how our Western intellectual heritage, including our basic assumptions of how a human can know, understand, and deal with reality, is not what’s in the Bible. If you bring that Western intellectual heritage to Scripture, you will not come away with a proper understanding of God’s revelation. If the rules, the essential assumptions, by which you discern and organize truth about your world remain rooted in the West, you will not fully understand the precious treasure of truth God left for us in the Bible.

      We do not need yet one more commentary on the Bible from a foreign Western intellectual background; we need something that speaks to us from the background of the Hebrew people. God spoke first to them. He did not simply find the Hebrew people useful for His revelation; He made the Hebrew people precisely so He would have a fit vehicle for His revelation. Bridging the divide between them and us is no small task, but to get readers started down that path, I offer this series of commentaries that attempt to present a Hebrew understanding for the Western mind. Not as some authoritative expert, but I write as another explorer who reports what he has found so far. I encourage you to consider what I share and heed the call to make your own exploration of these things.

      A note about Scripture translations: There are dozens of English translations of the Bible. None of them is perfect, if for no other reason translation itself is shooting at a moving target. More importantly, it is virtually impossible to translate across the vast cultural and intellectual gulf between that of current English-speakers and those who wrote the Bible. This author recommends the New English Translation, AKA the NET Bible – http://netbible.org/

      Introduction to the Wisdom Literature

      This volume includes Job, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. By tradition, the Wisdom Literature of the Bible includes Psalms and Proverbs. However, those two each warrant a separate volume in this series.

      Scripture makes reference to two kinds of wisdom, that of mere men and that which comes from God. The latter is moral wisdom, a faculty for discerning God’s character, particularly as woven into Creation. In the Hebrew mind, this was a clear view of reality itself, the way things really were in this world. Such wisdom permitted one to act appropriately in any context. Not merely because it was one’s duty, but this wisdom was precious gift from God to make life here worth living. It simply didn’t get any better than that.

      Job

      Introduction to Job

      This is Hebrew poetry at its finest. Unfortunately, we are forced to read it in a very different language, bathed in a completely alien intellectual tradition. Here it is enough to note that Hebrew focuses on the interplay of thoughts on multiple levels of consideration. Each thin page of Hebrew verse can be several meters thick with meaning.

      Of primary note here is parallelism. There is a first line asserting some thought; the second line may echo the same thought in different words, or it may offer a contrast, perhaps the same idea reversed. In some cases, the lines following a statement will carry off the thought into implications that vary. Linear thought is almost absent; multiple branches and less-than-obvious connections are often given. In terms of this being a long-winded debate, a great many responses are not direct to our Western thinking. Instead, the answer to an assertion may come around from behind and answer from a different perspective. Sometimes it’s necessary to back up and rip out the underlying assumption. Western logic is feeble by comparison, left in the dust trying to grasp such broad thinking.

      Job is likely a descendant of Abraham and the setting seems around the time Israel lived in Egypt. The description fits several locations, but most scholars prefer the notion he’s living somewhere between Damascus and Edom. Everyone in the narrative believes in the God of Israel, but from a time well before the Covenant of Moses. It would be reasonable that Job’s story was known to Jethro who would have shared it with Moses. The entire drama of conversation could have taken place in a single day with time to spare. The book is typically ascribed to Moses as editor.

      Job is described to us as a powerful and wealthy sheikh. The man is quite pleasing to God, but is nevertheless smitten with great tragedy. We are permitted to know why, but Job is never told. Rather, Job is beset with shallow-minded and legalistic men who assert he must have sinned. Job knows better, but slips into blaming God on the basis of human justice. The answer offered by Elihu and confirmed by God is that we may never really understand why embracing God’s justice doesn’t always bring worldly justice. This is the great unanswered question: Why do the innocent suffer?

      In typical Hebrew fashion, the real answer isn’t directly stated, but implied: In a sense, no one is innocent. At our best, every human remains a sinner. Our fallen nature fully deserves every bad thing this existence can offer. Suffering is the default. In the face of God’s holiness, only His mercy keeps us from damnation on every level. Suffering is not about buying a good place in Heaven; the most it can do is make us despair of this life. After suffering, the only thing left standing is the otherworldly viewpoint, that this life isn’t that important in the first place. God’s person defines justice; the scales of justice are not in this world. Job lacks a fully developed view of

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