Line upon Line

It is the cheapest object in the ancient world. A potsherd. A broken curve of fired clay, the leftover of a smashed water jar, swept out the back door with the ash and the bone. Nobody bought potsherds. Nobody guarded them. You stepped on them. In the whole inventory of the ancient east, the potsherd is the one item with no market, no owner and no thief.

This is the tool that the greatest of all the men of the east (Job 1:3) now takes up and drags across his own skin.

“And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes” (Job 2:8, KJV). Notice what the verse withholds. No servant. No physician’s blade, no jar of balm. The wealthiest man in the country reaches into the refuse at his feet and finds there the only instrument left to him. He has joined the things nobody bothers to lose.

We flinch, and we should. But underneath the pity most of us are running a quiet calculation, and the calculation says this ought not to happen to a man like Job.

The Ledger We Keep

The arithmetic is simple, and almost everyone carries it. Keep the commandments and the hedge stays up. Pay tithing and the transmission holds. Serve faithfully and the biopsy comes back clean. Nobody teaches this from a pulpit. We would blush to call it doctrine. We live as though it were policy.

The damage shows up in the quiet, unphotographed heartbreaks. An illness that has outlasted a dozen priesthood blessings and shows no sign of caring how many more there are. A man laid off after eleven honest years, sitting in the church parking lot with the engine off because he cannot think how to tell his wife. These get no airing in fast and testimony meeting. They have not resolved yet. They are carried by people who keep showing up anyway, while the old arithmetic whispers that a better man would not be here.

It had already failed Job’s friends, though they never noticed. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar arrive carrying an argument instead of a casserole. They begin by sitting with him seven days without a word, which is the wisest thing any of them does. Then one of them opens his mouth, and the comforting ends. God is just. God prospers the righteous and afflicts the wicked. Job is afflicted past all measure. The conclusion writes itself: Job must have earned this. They spend more than twenty chapters trying to get him to sign it.

Chesterton, in his 1907 introduction, saw where that arithmetic lands. “If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. [They] will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.”¹ So the transactional gospel yields prosperous men whom we agree to call righteous, and sufferers whom we quietly agree to suspect.

The Adversary had proposed that same arithmetic already, as an accusation. “Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him?” (Job 1:9-10). The charge never touches Job’s conduct. Job is not a bad man. He is a well-paid one. Pull down the hedge, says the prosecutor, and no worshipper will be found underneath, only a satisfied customer. The whole book answers that one question, and the answer cannot be spoken. It can only be given by a man on an ash heap with a broken shard in his hand.

Six Feet of Stone

The same silence fell in the winter of 1838-39 on a man in a stone box in Clay County, Missouri. The dungeon at Liberty measured barely six feet from floor to ceiling. The Prophet Joseph Smith stood over six feet tall. The room was built for a shorter faith. As Elder Holland puts it, on as many as four occasions poison was administered to the prisoners in their food.² Out of that hole came the cry every believer eventually makes his own. “O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:1). Lament is faith refusing to pretend before God.

The answer carried Job’s own name in it. “Thy friends do stand by thee . . . Thou art not yet as Job” (D&C 121:9-10). The Lord never suggests that Joseph’s suffering proves his sin. He tells him it places him in particular company. Joseph was not being punished. He was being placed.

The Voice in the Storm

When God at last speaks to Job, He does not settle the argument. He enlarges it. “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2). What follows is question after question and not one answer. No account of the wager. No explanation of the children’s deaths. Instead God asks whether Job has walked in the recesses of the deep, whether he can bind the Pleiades, whether he has considered the hawk, and then He stops to dwell with evident pleasure on the ostrich, a bird He admits He made without sense and cannot help liking anyway. A man expecting a legal brief is handed a menagerie. 

Chesterton saw why it works. “Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation.”³

That silence is usually read as God withholding the explanation. Turn it over. Job could only answer the accusation by not knowing he had been accused. A man who is told he is being tested is a man performing, and a performance proves nothing about whether he loves God for nought. God is keeping the answer clean.

Still, a God who speaks only out of a storm can seem too large to come near. He lays the foundations of the earth. He sends rain on a wilderness where nobody lives. And a man scraping himself with a piece of broken jar can hear every word of it and feel farther off than when the questions started. Awe is not company.

The Kinsman in the Field

Job had named the missing thing long before. “Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both” (Job 9:33). A daysman is an umpire, an arbiter who stands between two parties and hears them both. Job wants one and cannot find one. Nobody in the room can touch both sides at once.

Then, in the middle of his misery, Job says something he has no business knowing. “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (Job 19:25).⁴

The word standing behind redeemer is gō’ēl, and it carries no abstraction whatever. Under Israelite law the gō’ēl was your nearest kinsman, the man legally bound to buy back your forfeited land, to purchase you out of slavery, to answer for your blood. He did not qualify by strength. He qualified by blood. And he did not redeem out of surplus. He redeemed out of his own field.

There is the answer the whirlwind was building toward. The God who stretched the measuring line is also the Kinsman bound to fetch you home, and when He came He did not redeem us from a safe distance. “The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?” (D&C 122:8). Below the ash heap and the dungeon, below the six-foot ceiling and the poisoned bread, below the biopsy and the phone call at two in the morning. The daysman Job wanted could lay one hand on God and one hand on man because He had a real hand for each.

Priesthood on the Ash Heap

The friends said nothing that sounded scandalous. That was the danger. Their theology was respectable, tidy and catastrophically wrong about God. They wanted a God who could be audited. They got one who could be met. “Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). They are to bring seven bullocks and seven rams to Job, “and my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept” (Job 42:8). Fourteen animals is a great deal of livestock to drive across a valley in order to apologize.

Read that slowly. The men who argued God’s case at such length are marched out to the man they accused, and Job must plead for them before God. The refuse pile where he sat scraping himself is now an altar. The instrument of his humiliation has become the furniture of his priesthood. The book opens with a prosecutor. It ends with an intercessor, and the intercessor is the man in the dock. Job never found a daysman to stand between him and God. In the end he was made to stand between God and his accusers.

Affliction does more than refine a man for his own account. It fits him to stand between. That is experience in the old hard sense, the kind no man hands back.

Say the rest of it, though. All of that meaning is visible only backward. Job is never told he is in training. Joseph is not told, at the hour he asks where the pavilion is, that a revelation is being made of him. It arrives afterward, and it arrives as a gift, never as an invoice. If you are in the hole tonight, you are being handed a name to sit with.

So look once more at the potsherd. An object so common that nobody in Uz would have stooped to pick one up. Job stoops. He takes the cheapest thing in the world into a hand that has lost everything else, and before the book closes that same hand is raised over an altar, pleading for the men who accused him. Chesterton ended his introduction by refusing to say the obvious out loud: “I need not say that . . . there is one Old Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is prefigured in the wounds of Job.”⁵

The bargain was never offered. The Kinsman came instead.

Footnotes

1. G. K. Chesterton, “Introduction to the Book of Job,” in The Book of Job (London: S. Wellwood, 1907). Text available at the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, https://www.chesterton.org/introduction-to-job/. The published text reads “Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.” The bracketed correction is mine.

2. Jeffrey R. Holland, “Lessons from Liberty Jail,” Church Educational System fireside address, Brigham Young University, September 7, 2008, published in Ensign, September 2009, 26-33.

3. Chesterton, “Introduction to the Book of Job.”

4. Job 19:25-27 contains some of the most damaged lines in the Hebrew text. The preposition rendered “in my flesh” (19:26, KJV) can as easily be read “from my flesh” or “without my flesh,” and scholars including Marvin Pope, Job (New York: Doubleday, 1965), and Norman Habel, The Book of Job (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), deny that resurrection is in view. I hold the traditional reading. Whatever Job expected to happen to his skin, he expected a living Redeemer to stand on the earth.

5. Chesterton, “Introduction to the Book of Job.”