Difference between revisions of "Sermon for March 15th, 2015"

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Mark 1:12-13 (NRSV)

12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Job 41:1-34 (INL)

Before I read the second scripture passage, I feel like I need to make a few comments on scripture translations. That's because the translation we're using today is my own, directly from the original Hebrew. Some of you may be wondering, "What's wrong with the NRSV?" It's what we use most weeks, it's what our pew Bibles are...and some of you may even be wondering, "What's wrong with the good old fashioned King James version? After all, if Jesus and his disciples spoke King James English, it ought to be good enough for us!

Nothing is wrong with the NRSV, or the King James. I consulted both of them and several others as I translated. But you should also know that the Book of Job contains, hands down, the most difficult and problematic Hebrew in the entire bible. There are several words in our scripture passage today that appear only once in the entire Bible, and nowhere else in any ancient Hebrew text. That means that any translation of them is an educated guess at best, and at worst, completely made up.

In some ways, my translation may be more accurate than the King James or the NRSV, because I had access to more recent, cuting-edge scholarship than was available to previous translators. But in other ways, my translation may also be less accurate because I translated with an eye toward the poetic and the artistic. Job is Hebrew poetry at its finest, but it loses much of its poetic quality in translation, so I've tried to recapture some of that.

In any case, if you are studying the Book of Job or reading it independently, I encourage you to use a variety of translations, and take all of them (including mine) with a grain of salt. Perhaps the unfathomable mysteries of the book of Job are--not without irony--its greatest message after all.

1So you'll drag out the sea-dragon, Leviathan—with hook and line you'll sink him?
2So you'll poke a twig through his terrible nose, pierce his cheek with a thorn?
3So he'll plead with you in soft-spoken words? 4You'll cut him a deal as your slave?
5You'll sport with him like a sparrow then, and strap him down for your daughters' delight?
6You'll let businessmen barter for his hallowed hide, while merchants take their share?
7You'll riddle that hide with harpoon holes, his head with fishing spears?
8You'll place your palm upon him, then? Bethink you that battle—add naught! 

9What! All expectations of him fail; one falls at the eye-sight of him.
10A cruel one, indeed, I roused him up. Who cares to contend with me?
11To whom am I indebted now? All under heaven is mine.
12I'll not silence his bellow, nor boasts of his deeds, nor the dignity of his design.
13Who could remove his outermost robe, or break through his battle dress? 
14Who loosed the gates of his grinning face—fearful fangs far and wide? 

15Shield-ranks seal the skin of his back; 16one by one, they are woven air-tight.
17Each to another they clasp and cleave and cannot be cut apart.
18He sneezes and light bursts brightly forth; He blinks as the break of dawn.
19Fire from his face-cavern and sparks fly forth; 20smoke from his seething snout,
21His billowing breath kindles hot coals; a blaze comes forth from his maw.
22Brute force abides in the strength of his neck, but nimbly bounds before.
23The flakes of his flesh together cleave—cast firmly, cannot be moved.
24His breast cage is clad in solid rock, cast like stone from far below. 

25At his rising the angels fear; they falter at his crash.
26He who finds him fails with blade—or bolt or pike or flying spear.
27He reckons hard-wrought iron as straw, bronze as rotten wood.
28No arrow's offspring makes him run; rocks from slings reduced to rubble.
29Bludgeons counted blades of grass, he grimly laughs at shaken spears;
30Jagged shards his belly gird; with barbed broom he sweeps the mud.
31The deep he brings to cauldron-boil, like chemist's brew he stirs the sea;
32A highway shines in his watery wake; a white-haired wave it seems
33He is unrivaled on the earth—without any fear is he formed.
34He beholds all those who are lofty-born; of the proud he alone is Lord. 

Job: The Monsters and the Critics - Leviathan

Every fisherman has a big fish story. And they all start with the words, "I once caught a fish this big..." I thought today I might show you a few famous ones you probably didn't know about. (funny big fish pics here).

You might say that Job chapter 41 contains the biggest fish story of all time: God's big fish, Leviathan. The Hebrew word לִוְיָתָן (Livyatan)is from an even older word that means garland or wreath (think twisted coils). This is how he sometimes appears in early art (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codex Gr. 749). Unlike his counterpart, Behemoth, Leviathan shows up a few other places in scripture. Isaiah 27 describes the day (in the future) in which God will punish Leviathan and slay him with a sword (however, this may be a coded reference to a foreign nation that Isaiah is prophesying against) (Dore Illustration).

Psalm 74 describes the day (in the past) in which God killed Leviathan, breaking his heads (plural) into pieces and feeding him to the people. And Psalm 104 describes Leviathan as God's creation, which he made to play with in the sea. In the Jewish Talmud, God plays with Leviathan three hours each day, as a break from judging people and feeding the world. So is Leviathan God's future enemy, past enemy, God's friend and playmate? None of these descriptions quite match the others, and unfortunately, Leviathan's extensive treatment in Job doesn't help much, either.

A Mythological Journey

There is a serpentine sea-monster in the mythology of just about every ancient culture. In Norse Mythology, it's Jörmungandr, the serpent who rings the world, and eats his own tail. In Egyptian and Greek Mythology, it's Ouroboros. In Mayan mythology, it's Quetzalcoatl. Notice the similarity between this and last weeks image of Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz from the Abrosian Bible. (images)

There's another mythological strand that connects even more closely to the Biblical Leviathan. In Egyptian mythology, the monster Apep is the embodiment of Chaos. Each day, Apep lies in wait just below the horizon and swallows the sun god, the bringer of light. Light is associated with order, and darkness with chaos. (image)

There's also a Native American legend about a snake swallowing the sun. (image)

At some point in his development, Leviathan takes on similar characteristics. Listen to Job's words in chapter three. This is the first of Job's speeches after he loses everything:

Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, A man-child is conceived. Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds settle upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. That night—let thick darkness seize it! Let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. Yes, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it.

And then, remarkably, Job invokes Leviathan, saying:

Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning—because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, and hide trouble from my eyes.

So Job (not God!) is the one who first asks for Leviathan to be roused, to come forth and swallow the light, plunging the world (and Job) into complete darkness and chaos.

Fast forward to Anglo-Saxon England during the medieval period, where the giant fanged mouth of Leviathan, described in Job 40, gets mixed together with the Norse legend of Fenrir, also a god of Chaos who, incidentally, also swallows the sun (1908 drawing by W.G. Collingwood). Fenrir morphs into Leviathan to become "Hellmouth," his jaws depicted as the very gates of hell. (Winchester Psalter of about 1150). Images of Hellmouth become popular throughout Medieval Europe (Bourges Cathedral, ca. 12th century) and right down to our own day (Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi)

John Calvin and other 16th century reformers speculated that Leviathan was a whale. Herman Melville, in his classic novel Moby Dick, unsurprisingly does the same. Thomas Hobbes named his famous book about civil government "Leviathan," and the original book cover quotes Job 41:24. Other modern interpreters (including the footnotes to the NRSV) have concluded that Leviathan must be a crocodile, generally on the basis of the verses in Job that describe the creature's scaly back. Creation-science advocates point once again, implausibly, to the dinosaur. Of course, neither crocodiles, nor whales, nor dinosaurs (or any actual creature) are known to breathe fire, so all attempts to classify Leviathan are somewhat problematic.