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God and the Sea in Job 38
- Author(s):
- Collin Cornell (see profile)
- Date:
- 2013
- Group(s):
- Biblical Studies, Hebrew Bible / Old Testament
- Subject(s):
- Bible. Old Testament, Theology
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Comparative theology, Hebrew bible, Old Testament
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6SM3M
- Abstract:
- Job 38:8-11 plays an important role in the first divine speech at the end of Job. This article makes a text-critical and literary argument that the stanza primarily emphasizes God’s powerful control over the Sea, in continuity with the preceding poetic unit whose theme is God’s singular power and Job’s incommensurability. However, vv 8-11 also subtly reframe God’s conventional antagonism towards the Sea, preliminary to the following stanzas and the second divine speech that realize this reimagination more vividly. The stanza affirms God’s antagonistic power over the Sea by fronting a verb of constraint in its first line, looping thematically and grammatically into the previous stanza, and ending with God physically establishing and verbally commanding its limitation. The stanza reframes God’s relation to the Sea by recasting the Sea as a helpless newborn, contrasting its rushing out with its containment, depicting God swaddling it, addressing it personally, and anticipating the ambiguous language of the second divine speech.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 7 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
Open access, open source, open to all
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