Today we’re getting intertestamental. This contradiction involves one text from the New Testament and one text from the Hebrew Bible. There’s an obvious objection to this sort of thing: since they’re from completely different contexts, they’re probably talking about completely different subjects, so how can they be sufficiently related to contradict each other? Of course, if you take a hard line on that, then no Hebrew Bible prophecy can relate to anything in the New Testament, and there aren’t going to be a lot of takers for that proposal in the churches.
More to the point, our New Testament text is so totalizing, so universalizing, that it is like the statement, “There is no such thing as a yellow squirrel.” One photo of a yellow squirrel suffices to disprove the statement—if such a thing can be found. (I don’t know. The one above… I guess it’s kind of yellowish?)
Paul’s letter to the Romans is his most thought-out treatise, philosophically, where he tries to lay out in general, categorical terms what he thinks. He is given to very black-and-white boxes of ideas, as exemplified here, from Romans 3:
9 What then? Are we any better off? No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, 10as it is written:
‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who has understanding,
there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned aside, together they have become worthless;
there is no one who shows kindness,
there is not even one….’
19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20For no human being will be justified in his sight by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. (Romans 3:9-12, 19-20, NRSV)
The first three verses are a quote of two psalms with very similar beginnings, Psalms 14 and 53. Here an objection can be made on the basis of genre: surely poetry can tolerate contradictions! Just ask Walt Whitman. But Paul transforms this poetry into a discursive, philosophical genre by the way he uses it. Remember that a genre is a habit of reading. Paul is not reading Psalms the way Whitman did.
Further, Paul is leading up to an absolute statement: “‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law.” Paul’s point is that since every human has done bad things, the only thing the Torah can provide is awareness of one’s own sinfulness. (Here Paul completely ignores the means Torah provides for forgiveness of sins (e.g., Leviticus 16), and that moral perfection was never the point.) If there was one person who did not sin, Paul’s argument falls apart, and he knows it.
The problem is that the Bible as it is now constituted for Christians (since everyone else can safely ignore Paul) contains just such a counterexample: longsuffering Job.
The narrator (who is not God, interestingly) begins by saying:
Ish hayah be’eretz Uz, Iyob sh’mo. V’hayah ha’ish hahu tam v’yashar, viyrey Elohim, v’sar meyra.
There was a man in the Land of Uz: his name was Job. And that man will be unblemished and righteous, and will hold God in awe, and will turn from evil. (Job 1:1, my translation)
My translation is very literal, down to the odd future tenses in the second sentence. The word v’hayah at the beginning of the second sentence “and he was,” but in that form it should mean, “he will be”—and so with the other two verbs in the sentence: “he will hold God in awe, he will turn from evil.” The narrator knows what story he or she is about to tell, and is assuring us that in all that follows, Job will not sin.
Secondly, Hebrew does not require the verb “to be” to actually appear in a sentence. V’hayah could have been omitted entirely, and the sentence would have still meant, “That man was unblemished and upright…” and so on. I take this unnecessary inclusion to mean emphasis: “he certainly will be.”
So that is definitely a good resumé. But it also sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale. Do we have another genre problem here? Of course. We’re only going to run into trouble here if we read the Bible flat, like a biblical literalist. If we have multiple habits of reading while reading the Bible, we’re not going to find as many contradictions. But let’s see what kind of trouble the flat reading can get itself into.
Famously, Satan—at this point in the evolution of the Bible, definitely a member of the divine court of angels, a kind of prosecuting attorney—waltzes into Heaven and mentions offhand how he’s seen pretty much everything in the world. God particularly points out Job:
“Have you set your heart on my servant Job? There is no one like him in the land, unblemished and righteous. He fears God and he turns from evil.” (Job 1:8, my translation).
So God agrees with the narrator, who stands in relation to his or her narrative the way any author does: as a mini-God. In saying, now from two sources, that Job is unblemished and upright, he has achieved precisely what Paul said no human had: Job is accounted righteous, precisely on account of what he does every day.
But there is a twist of course, since the story is only getting started. After all, Satan has definitely set his heart on Job. He bets God that Job is only perfectly behaved because God has so richly rewarded him. Take everything away, and Job will curse God.
Job loses not only all his property but also his many children. He mourns, but still he worships God: “In all this Job did not sin or say something foolish to God.” (Job 1:22, my translation) Satan talks God into letting him give Job a horrible disease, but even then, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” (Job 2:10, my translation)
But maybe he will! Three friends of Job’s come and sit with him and mourn with him for three days. But then Job opens his mouth. He does not curse God, but he does demand to know what God is up to by punishing him. (Job is not fooled by the Satan-dodge; he knows who’s responsible for this.) Job wants to meet God face-to-face and plead his case and get an answer for why he’s being punished. He, like God, believes himself blameless, but this isn’t pride. As the old saying goes, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.
Job’s fairweather friends are appalled and each of them argues that Job has said something bad. So maybe he has sinned after all. One of the friends, Bildad, even offers the very Pauline argument that, since no one can be perfect, Job must have already sinned somehow. Too bad Bildad doesn’t have the access the narrator does, because then he would know this was untrue.
Someone finally has to shut Job up, and no one is up to the job (ahem) but God. The Lord appears in a whirlwind and asks Job a series of unanswerable questions about the natural world (many of which we can answer very well today, thank you); then he asks Job whether he can handle a crocodile or a hippopotamus by himself, and of course the answer is no. So Job does the only thing he can do under this assault, and shuts up.
So that means God thinks Job said something bad, right? Job finally sinned?
Wrong.
After browbeating Job, God threatens Job’s friends with some indeterminate but awful fate if they don’t convince Job to sacrifice on their behalf: “‘because you have not said about me what is enduring, like my servant Job.’” (Job 42:8, my translation) So there is some tension here: God disliked what Job said enough to show personally to shut him up, but what Job said is nonetheless “enduring.” It certainly is, more than 2000 years later.
So Job never sins, neither before nor after being cursed by God. We have a yellow squirrel. Maybe there are yet more colors of squirrel not yet suspected, a continuum of righteousness and sin that would horrify Paul with his binary categories. But that’s what you get when you say, “No, not one…”
Stewart Moore: Stories 
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