#58 Job Reads the Same As Alice in Wonderland with Dr. Ryan Armstrong

Job’s Trial, Honest Faith, and the Book’s Strange Ending

Job's trying to sue God, it's diss track after diss track after diss track until he finally gets to battle against rap. God. God blesses him for being honest and says, Job, your friends were not very honest here.

It's the moral of the story that like there's a different way to go about this Christian thing.

Job's last word could mean I repent, it could also mean I'm comforted, but it could also mean I'm heated up.

It comes to a clean conclusion.

I personally go back and forth every day.

Okay, so tie it back to Alice in Wonderland. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our creator, better.

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In exchange for the support, I personally promise to you to always create the highest quality production possible. Thank you so much for listening. Now, let's get to the show. Hello, hello. My name is Cassie Imbolino, and I'm the host of Biblically Speaking.

Today, we're going to be talking about one of the books that are the most mind-bending in the Bible, the book of Job. And I don't know about you, but when I first read that book, I was so confused. Like, is it about why bad things happen to good people or whatever it might be?

And this is something that we've already discussed with Dr. John Walton, if you were around for that episode, which was amazing. But today, we're going to discuss it in a completely different light. Before, we discussed it from a theological protest.

What was it saying from a theological standpoint? But what if understanding Job, the secret there, is understanding it in the same way we might understand a book like, I don't know, Alice in Wonderland?

More so than understanding Proverbs. Bear with me. Bear with me, because we are going to see this book in a completely new light today. We have an expert here that has dedicated his life to understanding it and making reading scripture so interesting, so fun, and so much deeper than what we knew before.

I have today Dr. Ryan Armstrong. You are a Hebrew Bible scholar, a linguist, and a literary mind behind your new book, The Book of Job in Wonderland, Making Nonsense of Job's Mediators, that was released last year.

But you have education from Oxford. I'm sorry, a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. You have a master's in Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, my favorite topic, from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

And you have a dual graduate degree from Southeastern Seminary. Wow, you have so many accolades. I'm so excited for you to be here. This is really going to set apart Job yet again in a way that is maybe weird, absurd, but also helps us understand the character of God, which is really why we're here.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Armstrong.

Thank you so much, Cassie. What a great introduction.

It's great to meet you.

Love your podcast. I grew up reading John Walton and some of those big boys, so I feel like I get to sit at the adults' table for the first time today. So thank you so much for having me on here.

I'm so glad you're here, and you and me both. I mean, it's so amazing to be around such wonderful minds that are so wise. How did you get into this? You know, you would think somebody with a Ph .D. would be like, you know, ancient Near East exegetical understandings, but you're like, fictional fairy tales.

How did that happen?

Job as a Legal Drama and Wonderland Parallels

Yeah, this is a great question. I, part of it is due to my preaching classes at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I always try to open with a hook now for everything that I write or when I teach a class.

I want a little hook to kind of, we're going to talk about something unrelated, and then we'll bring it back around. And so, for Job...

You're really keeping up with the algorithm these days. I like it.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

So for Job, I was trying to think of a way to talk about his trial. I was like, you know, this is a guy who says, this is not just, and I want to sue God. And some scholars, like Ed Greenstein, think that Job literally sues God.

It is not a metaphor for Ed Greenstein. I was like, man, this is so huge. And I feel like the past couple of decades of scholarship has really brought out the legal aspects of Job's book. And so I was like, what is a good trial that is similar to this, where it's larger than life?

It's almost an absurd idea. It's almost impossible to get justice. Job thinks that this God is up there, like, you did this wrong. You did that wrong. You did this wrong. No matter what he does, he can't get any justice.

And everybody is taking the side of this authority that they're all scared of. And it took me a week to think of another trial that was similar to it. And I just kind of came across the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I had read the book a few years before, and I was just like, wow, this is very similar. And even to the point where the Queen of Hearts is called a thunderstorm several times in the book, just the way God speaks to Job from the thunderstorm.

And from there, I just started seeing more and more parallels. And I was like, this is such a helpful way of understanding the book of Job. It was through the trial. It was through the legal aspects, actually, that got me into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Whoa.

Okay. So that is insane. A book that you heard years ago. I'm not going to lie, that was the scariest of all the Disney movies. I've never liked Alice. It freaked me out. But just the fact that a corner of your brain was like, you know what this does sound like?

Did you watch it recently and you just saw it all just came together?

No, it was actually the book itself. I met somebody who took children's literature at Princeton University. And she said, I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as homework this week. And I was like, what?

That's awesome. I want to read that. And I just ended up picking up a $5 copy from Amazon and I read it. And as I was reading it, one thing that was really interesting to me was the way that Lewis Carroll mixes together poetry and story, poetry and narrative.

And as I was reading, I was like, wow, this is how the Bible is written. You know, like when you read the Torah, when you read the book of Exodus, they cross the sea on dry land and the water stands up on both sides.

And you're like, wow. And then while you're reading it, the whole nation turns and looks at you and they all start singing a song together. The Song of the Sea, Exodus 15. And it's like this whole, the whole nation sings in unison.

They break into a musical, you know? And I was like, wow, all these poems embedded in these stories. I was like, this is how the Bible is written. And so I was reading Alice and I was like this fun juxtaposition of the story and the song.

I was like, man, there is, this is really fun. And I just kind of put it on the shelf and forgot about it until it was kind of the last stages of my dissertation. I was like, what kind of trial do I have?

And I just thought about this Knave of Hearts. I was like, let me dust this off the shelf, pull this back. Maybe this has a little bit more, maybe this has a little bit more parallels with the Bible than what I thought the first time.

And sure enough, it was the Queen is thundering across the pages, just like God is. Everybody's so scared. They're taking the Queen's side, just like Job's friends are like, God would never do anything wrong.

And just, you know, trying to defend God all the time without listening to Job or really looking at the evidence. They're like verdict first and then the evidence. Exactly what the King of Hearts says, right?

There's so many nonsense words in there. Scholars, they always talk about how, I think it's funny that you say Job is confusing because you're probably just reading it in English, right?

Yeah, mostly.

It's even worse.

It's even worse than Hebrew.

I know.

Every chapter contains about eight to ten words that never occur anywhere else in the history of the Hebrew language. And so he's writing all this nonsense poetry together, putting all this together in this crazy zany book with these zany characters and this over-the-top authority figure.

And Job's trying to sue God, you know? It's like everything is just over the top. And I was like, wow, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is just a great way to help me think through the book of Job.

I love this because you have so much education on this topic that you're able to say like, you know what this is similar to? A much shorter book that us lay people can wrap our head around. So this just like not to demean or like diminish the Word of God into something small, but it's like the concepts.

It's like the Queen of Hearts. Obviously, the Queen of Hearts is not God. I'm not trying to say that at all, obviously, but it is something that allows it to. So you're talking a lot about the trials and kind of story.

Let's say somebody's listening and they don't know Job because they've been, they don't know him or they don't know Alice in Wonderland. They're in a different country. Could you, in like a couple sentences, because we'll dissect it right now, just in a few sentences, just kind of hierarchy, the parallels that we're about to get into.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. So the book of Job, real quick sum up, the book of Job is about the most righteous human on the planet and then he just suffers horribly. And then his friends come and they mourn with him for seven days in total silence.

And he's just devastated. And that's just the very beginning of the book. And then there's 40 chapters after that of Job fighting with his friends. And every chapter is a beautiful, eloquent poem with insults.

And it's diss track after diss track after diss track. And the rest of the book is a rap battle where Job is spitting rhymes at his friends. He's using sarcasm, making fun of them. And they're making fun of him.

And they go back and forth, back and forth until at the very end, Job battles his way up every level of the pagoda until he finally gets to battle against rap God. And God comes out of the sky and starts spitting all these rhymes at Job.

And Job is like, okay, let me just cover my mouth, my hand for a few minutes here. And then at the very end, though, Job gets the very last word, which is really significant, I think. And then God blesses him for being honest and says, Job, your friends were not very honest here.

They just blindly took my side without weighing the evidence or without considering the situation. And that is a quick summary of one of the most complicated books in human history. Let's move to Alice real fast.

So Alice Adventures in Wonderland is about an ordinary little girl in Victorian England. And she sees a rabbit with a waistcoat go running down a rabbit hole and checking his pocket watch. And she's like, well, there's something odd about this.

This is quite curious. She chases him down the rabbit hole and then she ends up talking to all these fantastical creatures. It seems like normal logic isn't working anymore. Everything is upside down.

The normal ways that you're supposed to do things, like at a tea party, which she trains every single day. She knows how to how to sip from the teacup, how exactly how a Victorian tea party is supposed to be.

All of a sudden in Wonderland, all the rules are backwards. The logic isn't adding up anymore. And so she actually also is a verbal gladiator like Job. The fantastical creatures in Wonderland are not kind or sweet to her.

They are antagonistic and they are yelling at her and debating with her constantly. So she is in a series of debates, just like Job, where she's going back and forth with these creatures, filling it with also with beautiful poetry.

And until at the very end, she goes back to an ordinary life, wakes up from a dream. It was all a dream. She wakes up from the dream and goes back to ordinary life. And there's a moment, a little sense at the end of the book, that as she grows old, she never loses that wonderful heart that she had as a child.

So they seem like very different books at first, right? There's a little girl who's tumbling out of a rabbit hole.

I read it at first and I was like, this sounds familiar.

Job is like this suffering servant whose children have died. But like I said, both of these are filled with poetry. Both of them are series of debates. And at the very beginning of both books, logic just stops working.

Job is doing sacrifices. He does this every single day. Seems to be working great. His kids are all safe. He's rich. He's got everything going for him. He does these sacrifices every single day. And then one day, it just doesn't work.

And he's like, well, I did everything right. In the ancient world, the way that you do sacrifice is extremely precise. And so he's, you know, I cut the animal in a certain way. I put my hands on the altar in a certain way.

I sprinkled the blood and all this stuff. He did everything perfect. He does it every single day.

It's routine.

And then all of a sudden, at the end of the book, he makes a sacrifice for each one of his children. At the end of the chapters, each one of those children is dead. And so he's like, what's going on? This logic is not adding up.

Like this is supposed to protect them. It seems like it's been working every day and it's just not working anymore. At the end of the book, Job is blessed again. Job gets his riches back, gets 10 kids.

Probably not the same ones. Although there are people that argue that he gets his same kids back. But yeah, but in any case, Job has to go back to an ordinary life after these wacky adventures, after the logic didn't work at all, after he had to question his presuppositions about life.

He has to go back to an ordinary life after these adventures. Alice also, you know, logic just gets pulled out from under her. The rug comes out from under her. None of the logic makes sense anymore. She goes through all these wacky adventures.

And at the end, she has to go back to an ordinary life where she's changed by all these adventures. She has to question her presuppositions. I assume that everybody knows this is how you hold the teacup.

But now she's like, well, maybe it doesn't always work the way I think it works. Job says, maybe the world doesn't always work the way I think it works. And both of these books, they have this frame tail, right?

And then they have all the wackiness inside and they have all these debates inside. But they also, the genre that they use, the way that they play with your mind, they never let you feel safe as a reader.

They never let you feel like, okay, I'm getting my mind around this. Never. You are always like, okay. So the rabbit sends in a little bill waiting for that invoice and then Bill starts talking. You're like, what is Bill the Lizard?

Like you're, wait, that makes no sense. You have to go back and reread things that you just read that don't make any sense anymore. You're constantly having to question your own presuppositions the entire time you read it.

And that's how the book of Job is, always making you question, even the basic words of Hebrew. If you're, it's written in Hebrew. It's written probably to Hebrew speakers. But if you're a, you know, a Second Temple Jew and you're reading this in your native language, you're going to have to keep rereading it and figure out, wait, what is that word?

What is that word?

Job, Deuteronomy, and Second Temple Questions of Justice

Well, this is, I feel like something you said of like, nobody feels safe because I feel like even me as a Christian and maybe someone listening is like, what do you, what do you mean? There's like not one way, you know, like if Job did everything right, like is the moral of the story that like, there's a different way to go about this Christian thing.

And so kind of getting right into it. I mean, the way that I understand Job is that it starts off with Job being perfect, doing everything right. And then Satan, the enemy, and you know, there's arguments that this is hypothetical, but the enemy comes up to heaven, the divine council, and is like, well, of course you're, he's blessed.

He worships you. Like what if, or, you know, of course he worships you. He's blessed. I'm sorry. What if he took all of that away? And so God's like, all right, go ahead, like pop off, but don't kill him.

And that's a very strange start to a biblical book, more so than like, I would say like Ezekiel, which is also wild. But how does that compare? Like Alice in Wonderland, she falls asleep. She sees a rabbit, like that whole book is absurd.

So it's hard to be like, that was also weird, right? Like, of course, but why does that matter here with Job? Because we don't see it in any other book of the Bible.

Yeah.

So that's, this is a great point. This is a really insightful point because Job is extremely different from the rest of the Bible, right? Like if you're reading the Bible, you're like, and then this happened in Israel and this happened in Israel and this happened in Israel.

And then this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Who is this guy? What does this have to do with anything?

Right?

So you're, how did this end up in the Bible? I mean, it's crazy. And then there's also, it's the only place that I can think of in scripture where we get a behind-the-scenes look at heaven. Any other time this happens, like in Daniel, there's like a mediator that's like explaining what's happening behind the scenes.

But this is the only time where an author takes the liberty to just tell us what is happening in the heavenly realm behind the scenes. And so we have these two storylines that start off and then they kind of head to a collision at the end of the book, right?

Where we have this behind-the-scenes look at heaven and then it kind of collides with Job's own reality where it seems like Job is completely separate from the divine world. One thing that is really important about this is that most scholars now say that Job was written pretty late in the game.

Second Temple period. So he used to be, and you probably hear this still in sermons, that Job is the oldest book in the Bible and there's a rich tradition of Jews and Christians thinking that Moses wrote it actually, which is also really fun.

But more and more scholars are saying that Job is written to look and sound older than it is, that there's a lot of these foreign language words, even the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was written in an outdated script in at least one of the scrolls where it was made to look like it's this more ancient book than anything else in the Dead Sea Scrolls, except for the Torah also was written in this ancient script.

And so it seems like it was written to look and sound a little older than it was, or a lot older than it was. And so it's written kind of maybe in the in the Second Temple period. In the Second Temple period, you've got Ezra and Nehemiah that are saying, hey, we went into exile.

We really messed up bad here. All these gods that we were worshiping, probably that one god that we should have been worshiping the whole time. Let's try to stick with this one.

All right?

And so they pull out Deuteronomy. They pull out the Torah. They read the Torah in the street. Everybody's crying in the street and making confessions. We were wrong. We really messed up. And that's Nehemiah 8.

And then five chapters later, it's all falling apart. Everybody's like, well, okay. Yeah, I want to obey God, but I don't know if I'm down with all this stuff. Nehemiah's beating people up in the streets.

If they married a foreign woman, he's like pulling their hair and cursing at him.

He's yelling at the priest.

You need to sanctify yourself better than you are doing. He's yelling at people that are breaking Sabbath. He's like going crazy, right? And so there's this younger generation that's like, is this really what Deuteronomy is telling us to do?

And I think that's how Job was written. I think Job was written at this time when, what if there's a guy that does everything right? What if there's a guy that does everything perfect? Is he really going to get blessed?

Is this what Deuteronomy is really trying to tell us? That you do everything right. You're going to get blessed. You do everything wrong. You're going to go into exile. Maybe we should ask some more questions about this.

Whoa, whoa. I wasn't ready for that. That's a hot take.

Yeah, I guess so.

It's like a pattern interrupt.

Yes, a pattern interrupt. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. Yeah, it's this younger generation that I think the author of Job is very serious about his faith. But I think he also wants to rethink his faith a little bit differently maybe than his society or than what he's being taught all the time.

And this again is very similar to my man, Lewis Carroll, who is in Victorian England. Victorian England was a time where England went from this humanist, Enlightenment-style party culture that was drunk all the time to a super prim and proper religious culture where we do what is right all the time.

And so the Victorian England is...

I wasn't ready for that.

That's how Queen Victoria would have said it.

Great posh accent.

And so they're in Victorian England and especially the kids books are like the most horrifying part of the culture. There is a woman named Mary Martha Sherwood. Martha wasn't enough. She didn't marry and Martha in her name.

Mary Martha Sherwood. She wrote a book. The bestseller while Lewis Carroll was growing up was called the Fairchild family. And so, or sorry, the Fairfield family, the Fairfield family. So the Fairfield family is about this group of super Christians, this family that is super Christian and they learn all these moral lessons all the time and everything has a clear-cut moral lesson and everything is black and white and this is how you do and this is how you don't do.

There's one chapter called the fatal effects of disobedience to parents where the parents tell a little girl now don't play with fire and then and the next page she burns herself to the ground and all the kids are crying and they're like, oh no, if only she obeyed her mom, then this wouldn't have.

Happened.

This is why we always need to obey our parents. And then it's even worse because she wasn't a Christian. So now she's still burning in hell. It's what all the kids say. So this is the kind of books that was bestsellers, right?

And this is how Lewis Carroll grew up reading these books and with Alice in Wonderland, there's a Lewis Carroll scholar named Edward Giuliano that says Edward and Alice in Wonderland is a revolution in kids literature where what if this little girl just has fun?

What if she asks questions about everything and there aren't answers for everything? What if there's no moral of the story? There's one point where she's arguing with the Duchess and the Duchess says everything has a moral if you just look for it, right?

And if you just ask the right questions, you can find the moral and Alice's what if there is no moral to this story and she says what a stupid child. This is very similar to Job's friends, right? Job's friends.

You wouldn't even know about that like sarcasm or like the satire of that statement unless you were there unless you like understood the Fairfield family in comparison to like what he was writing. Like we would understand that because like we we couldn't reference VeggieTales and be like wasn't that crazy because we experienced it and how different Christian faith is today.

But like that is the type of context that I feel like we miss when it's like that's why it relates. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, okay. So some of the language that is referenced within speaking on context.

What is it? What are some examples of like the the words that even Hebrews when they were reading it in Hebrew were like what's going on? I want to take a minute and say thank you to the recording service that has made this podcast possible.

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Hebrew Nonsense Words, Poetry, and the Book of Job’s Humor

Yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of these and they're really fun. And I think one thing that I'm really proud of with my scholarship is that scholars for generations have been trying to figure out these words, but they've been kind of quick to say that maybe scribes also don't understand these words and maybe they've been making mistakes and from my research.

It seems like looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls and comparing it with the medieval manuscripts that we have of the Book of Job seem like the scribes were very careful in preserving the things that look like mistakes even when something doesn't make sense.

They seems like it's very intentional to keep that going for a thousand years and even in today's printing like we don't.

Know what this means, but we're going to write it as it was as it was seen.

Yes. So for example, when God comes out of the sky God speaks to Job from the storm wind and it's all written as one word in.

Hebrew.

It's all written from the storm and one word and the word in the middle the letter in the middle the it's kind of like from is written in a in an odd way that makes you read it all as one word. It would be kind of like if I wrote from the storm wind all as one word and I put the M in the middle as a capital letter or something like this where I'd really try to put it draw attention to this and so God comes out of the sky and speaks from the storm wind all in one word, which is odd and unusual and you know at no point was a scribe like okay.

Well, let's just separate this the scribes like this is whoever wrote this you could call it a mistake, but it seems like it's maybe more than just a mistake. It seems like it's an intentional subversion of your expectations that maybe you have certain expectations when you come to wisdom literature or kids little books, right?

You have these genre expectations where this is what I'm going to get and then the rug gets pulled out from under you and you're like, well, I don't know what to expect anymore. And then even the very language itself the rug is pulled out from under you and you're like, well, I don't know what to expect anymore.

Another good example of this is actually in the Elihu speeches Elihu uses a couple of terms here. There's one but the a who with the Hebrew word but the a who which is people have debated for 2 ,000 years what the word is supposed to be.

There's there's two words in Hebrew that are pronounced by dot one is with one letter and another was with another.

Letter.

So one means to ransom or redeem and the other means to set.

Free.

They're kind of synonyms, but people have just debated which one it is for 2 ,000 years. You've got the medieval rabbis arguing about which Hebrew word is supposed to be and why it's spelled like this, but you have both letters there when Elihu says it both letters are there but the a who and so it's like wow, why are both of those letters there?

This makes no sense. Hebrew language is written in three letter roots. The whole language is with three letter roots. And so when you see a four letters four letters, he really stands out in Hebrew really pops in Hebrew.

It's yeah, it's like I can't think of any parallel in English really but maybe you know, like something like what's the one that everybody says disestablishment arianism or something where you have tons of morphemes all packed in together and you're like, well, can't you just say that in like three different words and tell me what it really means.

Is it possible that some of these language some of these words are either a idioms like you vote by the skin of our teeth, you know, or like it's raining cats and dogs. Or could it be like made up words like when Shakespeare made up a bunch of words that like now we now we understand that because they're used so often they have their denotation.

But is that possible here? Would that be expected from that time?

Okay, Cassie. I like your I like your thinking here. That's pretty good. Yes, I think that they are made up words. And so I actually compared for Elihu from the a who or he says is it to ransom or to set free?

I compared this to some of Lewis Carroll's made up words like frumious and Lewis Carroll says in his introduction to Sylvia and Bruno. He says, you know, if you decide in your mind that you're going to say fuming and furious at the same time, he said your mind might drift a little bit to the left and you're going to say fuming furious.

If it drifts a little bit to the right, you're going to say furious fuming. But if you have that rare gift of a perfectly balanced mind, you're going to say frumious. And so Lewis Carroll has all these terms like this frumious and frabjous and brillig and all these terms that he makes up and a lot of them follow this this pattern where they will combine two synonyms.

So fuming and furious, they're two synonyms, but you put them all together into frumious and you get a new word. He just coined this word for the poem Jabberwocky and the Book of Job. A lot of these nonsense words actually fit this pattern where like something like Padaehu where it's like double the length that it's supposed to be is two synonyms to ransom to set free and Elihu says this mediator is going to fransom you from the pit is how I like to say it to fransom you where he kind of creates this new word where we actually do know what it means.

We know what it means. We intuitively, right? We kind of figure this out as to we know what ransom means. We know what to free what to free somebody you fransom somebody you don't have to ask too deep too many questions about it.

Yeah, I am guilty of saying how are you? Gruel, you know, really gruel. Grud, grud mostly actually. I'm great and good great.