Was Job a Righteous Person?

by DeWandelaar 9 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  DeWandelaar

  I was reading a passage from "The Book of Jasher" in chapter 66 which I want to share with you:

  14 Now therefore our lord and king, the eyes of all Egypt are upon thee to give them advice with thy wisdom, by which they may prevail over Israel to destroy them, or to diminish them from the land; and the king answered them saying, Give you counsel in this matter that we may know what to do unto them.

  15 And an officer, one of the king's counsellors, whose name was Job, from Mesopotamia, in the land of Uz, answered the king, saying,

  16 If it please the king, let him hear the counsel of his servant; and the king said unto him, Speak.

  17 And Job spoke before the king, the princes, and before all the elders of Egypt, saying,

  18 Behold the counsel of the king which he advised formerly respecting the labor of the children of Israel is very good, and you must not remove from them that labor forever.

  19 But this is the advice counselled by which you may lessen them, if it seems good to the king to afflict them.

  20 Behold we have feared war for a long time, and we said, When Israel becomes fruitful in the land, they will drive us from the land if a war should take place.

  21 If it please the king, let a royal decree go forth, and let it be written in the laws of Egypt which shall not be revoked, that every male child born to the Israelites, his blood shall be spilled upon the ground.

  22 And by your doing this, when all the male children of Israel shall have died, the evil of their wars will cease; let the king do so and send for all the Hebrew midwives and order them in this matter to execute it; so the thing pleased the king and the princes, and the king did according to the word of Job.

  I am like: WOW!!! ... How on earth can a man that counsils to kill the firstborn of the SONS of ISRAEL be a righteous man in the eyes of the writer of the biblebook Job? Would Moses, who escaped this crime against humanity (and not to forget to the people of Yahweh), be writing what we read in bible book Job? Are we speaking about the same Job? According to the scriptures itself it is highly likely!

  Read these bible verse please:

  Job 1:1 says:

  There was a man in the land of a Uz whose name was b Job, and that man was c blameless and upright, one who d feared God and e turned away from evil.

  A big bit of a contradiction isn't it? Would it not mean that Moses wasn't the writer of Job (or Genesis for that matter?)...
• 

  Phizzy

  There are at least five books of that Title, The Book of Jasher, all written after Bible times.

  As to the Bible book of Job, it strikes me as a very old story that someone saw fit to add to the Hebrew Bible (Ezra ?) and of course is a fiction that intends to teach, an extended Parable if you like.

  I would say, Author unknown.

  As to Genesis etc and the authorship by Moses, possibly he had some input, but it in itself is a bit of a mish-mash with all the editing and redacting that has gone on. The same with all the early books, all have been tampered with by a later hand, again Ezra may be a main culprit, certainly the Priests after the return from Babylon had a lot to do with what ended up as Holy Writ.
• 

  DeWandelaar

  I took this version:

  Faithfully Translated

  FROM THE ORIGINAL HEBREW INTO ENGLISH

  "Is not this written in the Book of Jasher?"--Joshua, x. 13.
  "Behold it is written in the Book of Jasher."--II. Samuel, i. 18

  SALT LAKE CITY:
  PUBLISHED BY J.H. PARRY & COMPANY
  1887.

  this is one of the apochrypal Books of Jasher . There are several (as many as five) separate works by this title, all composed much later than Biblical times. This particular one is a translation of a Hebrew book printed in 1613. Sepir Ha Yasher, the Hebrew title of this book, means the 'Book of the Upright', or 'the Upright or Correct Record'. This title was misread as 'Jasher', and at some point Jasher was treated as a proper name; however the pronoun 'the' (hebrew 'ha') never preceeds proper names.

  There is also another spurious Book of Jasher, published 1750, in which Jasher is treated as the name of the author.
• 

  adamah

  A big bit of a contradiction isn't it? Would it not mean that Moses wasn't the writer of Job (or Genesis for that matter?)...

  Who's claimed that Moses was the author of the Book of Job? Is that what JWs believe?

  (Remember too that Moses would've had to have been a poet: most of the book of job is written as Ancient Hebrew poetry)

  As pointed out by Phizzy, many versions of the Book of Jasher are late writings of recent times (note the SLC publishing company: Joseph Smith's "seer stones" ring a bell?).

  The Bible account of Job twice declares Job as righteous, where God himself is quoted as saying that Job was righteous. So if there's a contradiction, it's only going to be written off as a strike against the Book of Jasher, and not the Bible.

  Adam
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  Sapphy

  adamah - the Watchtower teaches that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the bible, & Joshua himself wrote the book of Joshua.
• 

  adamah

  adamah - the Watchtower teaches that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the bible, & Joshua himself wrote the book of Joshua.

  Yeah, but who do they say wrote the Book of Job?

  Adam
• 

  frankiespeakin

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job

  Origin and textual history [ edit source | edit beta ]

  Modern scholarship dates the work between the 6th and 4th century BCE. [15] While "there is an intentional editorial unity with a cohesive purpose and message in the canonical form of the book," Job contains many separate elements, some of which may have had an independent existence prior to being incorporated into the present text. [16] Scholars agree that the introductory and concluding sections of the book, the framing devices, were composed to set the central poem into a prose "folk-book", as the compilers of the Jewish Encyclopediaexpressed it. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Targum of Job 11Q10. Another example of text from the last chapter or epilogue of Job can be found in the book The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, showing examples of how fragments of The Book of Job found among the scrolls differ from the text as now known.

  Origin and textual history [ edit source | edit beta ]

  Modern scholarship dates the work between the 6th and 4th century BCE. [15] While "there is an intentional editorial unity with a cohesive purpose and message in the canonical form of the book," Job contains many separate elements, some of which may have had an independent existence prior to being incorporated into the present text. [16] Scholars agree that the introductory and concluding sections of the book, the framing devices, were composed to set the central poem into a prose "folk-book", as the compilers of the Jewish Encyclopediaexpressed it. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Targum of Job 11Q10. Another example of text from the last chapter or epilogue of Job can be found in the book The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, showing examples of how fragments of The Book of Job found among the scrolls differ from the text as now known.
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  Sapphy

  adamah - sorry - JW teaching is that moses wrote job in it's entirety
• 

  St George of England

  That's correct according to the WTS

  Moses wrote the book of Job,in the wilderness, c1473 BCE and it covered over 140 years between 1657 and 1473 BCE.

  George
• 

  adamah

  LOL! Moses, in the Sinai, no less, eh? Who knew he had a flare for poetry?

  Makes sense, as I guess Moses had alot of his time on his hands, with all the wandering about in the Sinai peninsula for 40 yrs (leading 2-3 million people).

  From this site, it seems God's holy cloud apparently had a typical male ego and made a wrong turn early on, but didn't want to have to admit it was lost by stopping to ask for directions.

  Adam