Book of Job

Back in January 2000, I was in a multi-car crash on a local highway in Toronto. I thought I had only physical injuries: whiplash and shoulder sprains (from the seat belt). But eight months later, an abnormal SPECT scan confirmed that I'd actually fared much worse, that I had suffered a closed head injury.

A closed head injury is when the brain bashes around inside the skull, tearing neurons and blood vessels. There's no physical breakage of the skull, no other dramatic sign of injury; the signs are all cognitive, emotional, behavioural, sometimes speech and perhaps subtle physical signs. And so people see what they want to see.

I began years and years of rehab, therapy, and finally real treatments, and things got pretty bad along the way. At one point, I heard that a man who'd suffered two traumatic injuries, putting an end to his passion or purpose, read the Book of Job 10 times to find out why all that had happened to him. After the tenth read, he suddenly realised God loved him. It transformed his whole outlook on his injuries and his life. I wanted to experience that. But I had one problem: trouble reading and learning from reading. Trying to read Job on my own was a mug's game.

In the fall of 2008, I got some help. My Pastor worked with me to help me read and understand Job. It was difficult, and it was transformative.

Many years ago, I asked the experts I knew which translation of the Bible was closest to the Hebrew. Hebrew is a very old language that is not as precise as Greek, the language of the New Testament. Also, scribes centuries ago may not have been too accurate in their transcriptions, and so perhaps a letter got lopped off, which would change the meaning, and, as well, verb tenses aren't always a given. Several times my Pastor and I would discuss at length just what a certain passage in Job meant because translations would differ or standard theological understanding would differ from my knowledge of how the English language works. For example, a pronoun doesn't generally refer to two names back but to the directly preceding one. Luckily I don't believe that the key theme of Job, the deep understanding the text provides, is not greatly altered by translation differences. It's more what people want to see or don't want to see in the text that makes the difference.

I used the HarperColllins Study Bible with the New Revised Standard Version translation. Another good translation is the New International Version. The King James is beautiful to read, its language melodious, but its translations are a bit off at times.

I recommend reading the whole of Job as you go through the sessions. But I will give specific passages to read, and it's helpful to have your own bible at hand. As for references, I have only one to suggest, for all but one that I was either referred to or found myself, I found unhelpful. The one I found fascinating is by Robert Sutherland. It's a complete analysis of the book by a Canadian criminal defense lawyer and is called Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job.