The Bible’s Books of Wisdom Literature

Transcript

Job, the book of Job, and more specifically even than that, one kind of slant, one aspect of what we could learn from Job's, obviously a lot of different topics and major issues are addressed in Job, but we're going to talk about just one of them. So, let's get going. Much of this class is going to be what I call a funnel. That is, we're going to start with a very big picture and move down into a specific point. So, the first order of business is to define what in the world do we mean by wisdom literature. It's a genre of literature that focuses specifically on how to live a proper life. You're thinking, well, all the Bible is about that. That's true. In wisdom literature, we're talking about things that are specifically addressing that. The Bible has prophecy. It has history. It has poetry. It has many types of writings in it, but the wisdom literature is something that gets right to the point and tells you this is what you ought to be doing. It's not just about proper life. It's generally in two areas, human relationships and living a virtuous life. Wisdom literature in general provides both insight and pragmatics, that is, practical advice as well as more theoretical insights. People who study such matters have identified other non-biblical writings, ancient writings that are classified as wisdom literature. I don't know really much about that except the Stoic writings, century AD and also a couple of Stoics were active for us. In general, maybe three centuries before Christ and a couple of centuries after. The Stoic writings were entirely devoted towards the idea of virtue in proper life. The Stoic philosophers were not very, hardly interested at all in some of the philosophical issues that other philosophers have, like what's the true nature of matter and things of that nature. There's practical life. Marcus Aurelius, who wrote the things like The Best Vengeance is to Not Acclaim, and Seneca, who said you don't die because you're sick, you die because you're alive. Just real pithy, real life stuff that's really useful for us. Marcus Aurelius advised us, he said, the world is filled with ignorant, stupid, selfish people, and you're going to run into some of them today. How are you going to react? That's the way life is. There's a lot of non-biblical writings, too, that we classify as wisdom literature. Within the Bible, we're talking when the phrase wisdom literature within the Bible refers really to three books, the Proverbs, the Book of Proverbs, the Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Job. Sometimes people include some of the Psalms, too, which I think could be included, but Psalms are really in a different area. There's not much direct advice about how to live life or what's important. I think Psalm 19 maybe would be one, but we're just going to look at these three books primarily, and actually just two of them, Ecclesiastes and Job. I also just want to mention that some of the parables would certainly, if they were in a different context other than the Gospels, would classify as the genre of wisdom literature. For instance, the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12, where the guy's rich, he has a huge harvest, doesn't know what to do, he decides to build bigger barns, and then with his future planned out, the next morning he's dead. So that's the type of thing that wisdom literature would address. What's really valuable in life? It gets right down directly to important questions about virtue, right thinking, living a proper life. So we're going to look at, say, the three books of wisdom literature. There's the types of writing, the genres of writing, and specifically at two, Ecclesiastes and Job, and how the genres enrich the general message of the books themselves. So let's start, as I said, we're going to go at the top of the funnel right now, the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. That phrase, of course, would have been totally unknown to the writers of the Old Testament, Hebrew Scriptures themselves. It was the Hebrew Scriptures. And no big surprises here. I think you know this stuff is pretty basic, the Old Testament. I'll use the phrase Hebrew Scriptures more because when we're talking about Job and Ecclesiastes in context, it's really in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures. This was written well before, of course, anything in the New Testament. So we think of Job in context of the whole Bible, but I'd like to focus today on first the Hebrew Scriptures, then the specific part of the Hebrew Scriptures that we call writings, and then specific part of the writings we call wisdom literature, and then specifically within that Job and Ecclesiastes. So we know this, so no big surprise here. There's the first five books mostly called Law, then there's a section called the Prophets, or the Hebrew Nevi'in, and I've highlighted the first letters here, which you'll see why in just a moment, and the writings, the Ketuvim. So if you take those first three initial letters, you come up with an acronym, which would be pronounced or spelled Tanakh, or Tanakh. You see them both, and I put that in there because you might see this if you're reading any sort of analysis of Bible commentary, you might see someone refer to the Old Testament as the Tanakh. It's the same thing. It's the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures. It's just an acronym like the word radar or laser. It's just a word made up of initials of the component letters, in this case, the first three letters of the three component sections. So that's all pretty simple and basic, so no surprise there. But now if we take a closer look at what is inside each one, this will be different than what we read in our complete Bibles that include both the New and Old Testament, because the Hebrew Scriptures is a different arrangement. So let's have a look at that. So in the Torah, which means the first five books of Moses, ignore those numbers. That's just a picture I took just to get the names here. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. No big surprise there. We know that. The next section, the prophets, this might not run across this before, that in the Hebrew Bible there's two sections of prophets, one called the first and then this or the after. These are pictures I took of pages within my Hebrew Bible of table of contents that are at the beginning of each section. And for some reason, the only non-Hebrew words in it are in Latin. I don't know why they printed it that way. But you have the profete prioris and profete posterioris, which means the first and the second. But in the Hebrew Bible, the first prophets, the first group was considered what we would consider history writings of Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings. They're known in the Hebrew Bible as the first prophets, the Nevi'im, Roshanim. And then we have the next group that we would consider. We recognize now these people, or the second group of prophets, the after prophets, profete posterioris. And you look down there and say, okay, yeah, now I get it. Those guys are, those are the prophets. But as you read through there, what do you see? There's one little, maybe not so little, there's one, something odd there, isn't there? Anybody see that? Other than the Latin names, I mean. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, is that the way it's supposed to go? What happened to Daniel? You go down the list, is he later? No, no, no, he's not in there. Daniel is not in the prophets. Is he not? Yes, he's in the Old Testament. So where is he? Well, I don't know the rationale, but the third section of the Hebrew scriptures is the writings. In here, the Latin heading is agiographa, meaning holy writings. And you see Psalms, Proverbs, Job, canticle, the canticorum, I think it's, or Song of Solomon, Shira, Shireem, and Hebrew, Ruth, Thready, the woes, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles, two books of the Chronicles. So as you look through these, you say, well, that's not what, you know, it's an interesting assortment of all kinds of different types that are all called writings. Well, I'm not going to go into why, because I don't know why, so don't ask me why are these grouped. I do want to point out, however, that in this section called the writings, some of them are, to us, make sense, like the Psalms, but others are different. So let's look at all the genres that are contained within this section called the writings. Well, first you have Psalms, which is poetry. It's all poetry. It's 150 poems. The Book of Proverbs, which we'll talk just a bit more later on, is primarily what we call couplets, two-line things of different formats. Job, which is a dramatically entry. It's in the format of a drama. Ecclesiastes is, oh, I think these words are synonymous. I put them both in. I'm not sure. That's soliloquy or a monologue. It's just one person reflecting on life. Song of Songs, I don't know what the right word is. It's not written as poetry. I don't, I'm pretty sure it's not. I think it's written in prose, at least as I read it, but it's certainly dramatically. It has the feeling of poetry to me. So I call it poetical drama. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's clearly a different genre than the poetry of songs or the drama of Job. It's unique. It's its own self, the Song of Songs. It's not a song. I suppose you could sing it. I can imagine easily a balladeer singing this with the harp or the lyre accompaniment. There's five books, which we would just say are historical narratives. Ruth, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Well, six, I guess. Two books of chronicles. I'm pretty sure the Hebrew Bible, they're considered one. In fact, all the minor prophets are squished together sometimes into one book. So there's a total, I think, of only 23 or 24 actual books. But these are just straightforward historical narratives. It's just writing down what happened. Different genre than any of the previous ones. Lamentations, again, don't know what the technical word for this, but it's a lament. And finally, Daniel is partially history and partially prophetic visions. It's the only book within the section of the writings that would contain, say, the direct prophecy like this. So we have many different forms, and it could be, and this is just a wild guess, that one reason that all these were in the Hebrew thought as the canon was assembled were put into one was to have different examples of different kinds of writings to show the many ways that God can communicate to us. So we've gone from the whole Testament to the Hebrew scriptures. We've looked at the three general sections, the Torah, the prophets, and the writings. And within the writings now, we're going to kind of twist our lens on the microscope again and focus in on three books that are identified called the wisdom literature, the ones that most directly address this issue of how to live a proper life, not indirectly by example. Yes, you can learn from history about how to how people behave, but these are directly telling you this is what God's looking for. So we have the Proverbs, we have the book of Job, and the book of Ecclesiastes. So the genres of these three, now we're going to take a little more detailed look at these three genres here. Mentioned briefly in the previous slide, but now we're going to just add a little bit more. So the general reading plan, you know, we are learning Proverbs right now. We're in the introduction, which sets up, and it has that word wisdom and prudence many times. You know what's about wisdom, it tells you directly. How can you live a wise and proper life? So after the introduction, and of course the wisdom is personified as a woman coming up, a woman coming up. So it's clearly a wisdom literature genre. But in this genre, it's just almost entirely couplets. That is two lines, the sayings, and sometimes the first line is a clarification of the second, sometimes they're opposites. So there's different arrangements of how I've identified a number of different types of arrangements of those couplets, but they're all pretty much couplets. Some of them are triplets, and then towards the end, there's some other sayings too. But we'll just say it's advice given as couplets, things like it's better to have a morsel in a quiet house than a feast in a house full of contention, things of that nature. In terms of having any dramatic content, no. There's no actors, there's no action, there's no scenery. It would be an entirely boring stage production to watch it. Oh, we're going to go to a theater tonight and see the Providence. That probably would not draw a lot of crowds. In fact, even just reading of this is kind of difficult. In my view, it's a bit impractical, but in the reading guide, it'd make a whole lot more sense than just put like one or two proverbs every day and spread them out so you can focus on them. Reading 28 proverbs a day, my brain doesn't go very far. So that's the Proverbs. Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is a monologue. It's one person, or say soliloquy might be the right term, too, I'm not sure. But there's a person, there's an actor. There's no real action except if you were having images that illustrate his various thoughts when he says all the rivers run to the sea, you could do something like that. But there's really no real action, and it's not what you call, again, a dynamic stage production. It's really got not a lot to it. It's just one guy sitting on the stage and thinking about what's really important in life. Job is a bona fide drama. There's no question about that. Not only is it clearly a drama, it's many people have turned it into a drama, either in paraphrase or not. In Ethel Archer's Job's Quest, she has a little section at the back where it's, say, a paraphrased drama. It clearly works very good as a drama. It's intended to be, I think, more in terms of opera than plays myself. So who would Job be? No, he's not a row tether. I don't know if he's a baritone. Things like that. How would this be staged? But much too, and especially at the beginning and end of Job, there's a lot of action going on. There's a lot of people involved, and it's a good drama. So we have three, in the wisdom literature, three really different types of genre of just pithy sayings, couplets, one person thinking extensively, although there are some couplets within ecclesiastes, too, and then the extensive drama in the speeches of Job. So let's do now an example of a Bible study practice I use frequently. To me, it's very interesting. It's very interesting to think about the different aspects of life, which is to imagine what would this be like if something were different? So even though ecclesiastes is not very dramatic, you're thinking, well, what would it be like if you did stage this? So you have the cast is one, and I'm thinking that title is probably in plural. I don't know much Latin, but I think that's a plural ending, dramatis persona. It'll be dramatis persona. There's one guy, Cahela, sometimes translates the preacher. I think the name more implies the person who calls an assembly. The place was Jerusalem, and we know the time. It's probably almost certainly written in the latter days of the reign of Solomon, something in the vicinity of 950 BC. Now, contrast that with Job, which is, say, a bona fide drama. Look at the cast here. Job, a wealthy devout man, usually in the frontispiece of a play, at least most of my Shakespeare's plays. It gives a brief, not just the person, but what their station is, what their role is. So we have Job, a wealthy devout man. I'm going to put him as a baritone. There's a kind of a non-person called Satan. He shows up, he talks. I'll talk a bit more about him later and justify why I'm saying he represents the spirit of envy and cynicism. That's what Satan is all about here. You have the three friends. These are real people from different areas. They come. A fifth major figure is Elihu. I say he fronts God. He is the front man. He is the theological voice of God. When God speaks, God says nothing whatsoever about theology. He just directly says who he is by virtue of the fact he's a creator. But Elihu explains many of the things that seem to have eluded the wisdom of Bill Madd's so far in life as and Job himself. Job's wife has a very small part. She's clearly a mezzo. They're used to small parts. The four messengers likewise. Messengers show up a lot in Shakespeare and in operas. They're important messages, but they usually don't get much, many lines. They say their thing and they're done. The voice of God in the last few chapters, there's no person attached, but this is a real basso profundo. Imagine the voice of the commendatory at the end of Don Giovanni if you're familiar with that. This massive voice just speaking. There's no representation whatsoever except the voice and the storm going on while God is speaking. And then depending on how this would be produced, you might have all the extras, they call the supermumeraries, the servants, Job's children, sons of God, other people, villagers, etc. The place, I call this East of Eden. I don't mean that geographically. What I mean by it's a metaphorical, this is not at all in Job. This is just my, uh, it's my, if I'm presenting Job, I'm thinking this Job is about what happens outside the garden, okay? This is where bad stuff happens and Job is in it. So metaphorically, he's in this place, Adam and Eve are driven out to the east and that's where, say figuratively, what's going on with Job. All the bad things that were just vaguely alluded to or specifically alluded to but not detailed in Genesis about the thorns and thistles, this is all happening to Job. So that's why I say the figure I see, the place, is East of Eden. And likewise, the time, hazy past, but again, you know, people spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly where Job lived in real geographical time and place. I don't really have much, a lot of good, people spent a lot of time. To me, it's more important to take Job as more of a universal message that just means it's outside the garden a long time ago because everything that's happening here could, is a commentary, a representation, a dramatization of the world inherited by, say, Cain and Abel and their descendants and even after the flood. That's what's going on here. The fact that Job is considered a drama is, well, it's not just a drama, it's the according to this book, written in 1891, the oldest drama in the world. And I'd certainly agree with that. I don't know this book, I just found this cover here, but I don't know what he's saying about it, but I would certainly agree that this is the oldest drama in the world. So we're going to pursue, say, getting more specific on this funnel. I said we talked about within the Hebrew Bible, there's something called writings. Within the writings, there's wisdom literature. Within wisdom literature, there are these many different, within literature, there's many different genres of writing. And the two we're going to look at are Ecclesiastes and Job. And we're going to learn, at least this is a lesson I get out of this, how these two formats enhance a core or one of the messages which might not otherwise be apparent within the stipulated or the essential content of the teaching itself. And to do this, I'm going to switch roles for a minute. That is, we're going to turn Job into a monologue and Ecclesiastes into a drama. This is the what if. So let's just continue. Supposing, say Job was indeed written as a monologue. So you have one man, so we're kind of taking the content of Job but putting it in the genre of Ecclesiastes. It turns into a monologue. So it's one man and he's pondering his inexplicable change of fortune. He relates how I had everything and it all fell apart and I have no idea why. I don't know why God is doing this. I haven't sinned. I'm totally perplexed what's going on. Is it this? Is it that? I don't know. And you can kind of imagine getting that same dialogue or tetralogue that happens among Job and the three friends just compressed into the internal voice of one person thinking himself. Like what in the world is going on here? And at the end of the story, God reveals where Job should have been thinking and he finds out that all these questions he's been asking are totally the wrong questions and just based on wrong assumptions about how God works. So now taken Ecclesiastes presented as a drama. So instead of this one man Solomon reflecting on life, you have the wealthy powerful ruler and he's unhappy but he's talking about this with his three court advisors. They're ping-pong and pong, right? And they're telling him but you've got this and you've got this and you've got all this wealth. You've got these beautiful gardens and everybody and he's saying yeah but every time they say anything he says yeah but. He says yeah but yeah I have a lot but people hate me because I bought it with their tax dollars and I have power but it's so hard to live with power and besides that power is fleeting and every time they try to say something positive and he just says all the rivers went to the sea. You know this stuff won't last. I've got all this kingdom who knows what's going to happen. One of my fullest sons is going to win the whole thing. So you could imagine easily that could have been to a point. But I like this way of thinking because when you switch things it now helps you think why something that is there is important if you leave something out. Like if you leave out three friends in Job's life, how does that change it? Just one man doing the soliloquy. It changes something and that's getting now really to the point where I want to get to now to the main of this discussion or just thinking about genres and how the genre relates to the type of message that it's related to. So despite that thinking what we do have is that Job is presented as a drama and to me the big point I get here is yes you could take some of the points of Job about his relationship to God and put them in a monologue form but there's more to that and that is that suffering is presented as a social phenomenon and by social I don't mean stuff like well let's get together and suffer. It's not that. Suffering is not just something happens to you. You're within a community and when a person is suffering it becomes part of the community problem to deal with too and I think that is a core reason we're looking at why Job is cast in the genre of drama because you need to have the social context for what Job is doing in addition to the theological issues he's struggling with. Ecclesiastes on the other hand works fine as a monologue. Other players wouldn't be necessary because it is primarily a personal reflection. It is the prophecy kind of medium through what's really important like this is a decision someone has come to themselves. What is really important to the very end of Ecclesiastes? Serve God. That's what's important. Yes we talk with other people. We do have a community of faith but in Ecclesiastes it's perfectly fine to limit that within the context of one person's mind and ruminating here and ruminating is that's really what all of us have to come to regardless of social situation is what is really important. I need to think about this and come to my personal. I can't be part of Ecclesiastes just because my family is. I have to think myself so I think that's a firstly kind of big place we want to focus in this lesson is the difference between the problem of Job. Both of these guys are rich right? They are both very well off. The difference is Job loses all. Ecclesiastes doesn't lose it but he doesn't care if he did because it's on board in any way or the kohela with the man. There's a lot of parallel here to show about these two aspects of human life but one of them is say is the internal and one of is the interpersonal. So the first hint we get within Job, the first clue that this is going to be not just Job wrestling with his theology but with other people is right in the very beginning we introduce to the family of Job and the family of God and I don't know exactly how that I put these together because they're right there in the text. Not exactly sure where to go with this but maybe somebody can figure this out but it seems too parallel to avoid or to just gloss over. So Job's sons and daughters beat the home of their regular parties. They beat the party on their birthdays and they're all in the oldest when the tragedy happens all ten of them. We don't know, well we don't learn anything about them except they're party folk. We don't know if they work, we don't know if they live off the family's wealth. We don't know really about their attitude about being born into privilege. We don't know what they think about their dad. We don't know what they think about God. We kind of get the impression because Job said his attitude towards them is that they probably are not a pious folk like he is and their attitude is hey we got it and we're good. They seem to be in the secular enjoy life kind of thing. It's not at all explicit and it's barely implicit but that if you to make a guess as to what's going on with them that's where I come down. So right after we have that we have this section about the sons of God. They meet before the Lord which implies an altar, a holy place and they meet not to have a party but to worship God. But despite the fact that religious people, remember they're religious but they're all inside of a very legalistic concept of God in what we call this exact retribution idea. If you do good, God blesses you. If you do good, bad, God will punish you. That's a part of their religious thing but that's the religion in which they are living. So therefore this idea of Satan coming with them makes sense that he's not one of them since he's not build that, he's not Eliezer, he's not some person but you see what I call he's the spirit of cynicism and he represents the fact that when these religious people get together, Job's community, Job's family, the three friends, whoever they might be, they have an attitude towards Job which is Job just does this, he's just in it for the money. That's what they mean when they say does Job serve God for naught? Is he doing this just because he's religious? No, he's serving God just because as long as he serves God, God takes care of him. So they question Job's integrity or his purpose and that's the cynicism and the envy not stated but I think it's hard to leave out envy if you have cynicism. Yeah Job's got all that stuff and we don't but he just does it for the wrong reason. So that's why I conceive of this non-person, this entity I think in Ethel's books you call him the shadowy figure whose face you never see. Yeah that's how it makes sense, he's just something in the cloak, he's not intended to be a particular person, he's intended to represent a mindset that goes along with the type of theology that they had. So that's why Satan comes. So we have say right in the very first chapter of Job this idea of it's not just Job trying to figure out God, it's Job inside of his family that seems to be on the one hand secular and ignoring on the other hand his religious family which is pious religious but they're pious religious and Job is included in here too in this very say kind of legalistic and tit for tat world of what's going on here. So knowing now or to come to this point where say Job is written as a drama because what's about to happen to Job cannot be fully expressed if it's just Job and God by himself. Job's calamities, Job's disasters, Job's suffering has to be in a social context so the friends they have the the obvious role of first showing up, second being appalled at what they're seeing and being unable to speak for a week and then when they finally do talk they don't have much positive to say. All they can really focus on is we know why this has happened to you and this is what you got to do to fix it. So they add to say the social component that is Job is not suffering just a man with terrible health problems and totally lost. I mean this is incalculable losses with all your children, all your wealth, all your standing, all your status hanging on to your belief in God by just the thinnest of threads. He never lets go of that. He knows I don't understand anything this horrible but all I can say God is still there someplace. He never lets go of that but it's done with among other people. These other people have two ways kind of simplifying here. I'm going to make it black and white. Okay they're both in red. They can react to Job's suffering and these two words I'm going to use are attribution and description and what I mean by that the idea of attribution is to attribute a cause to something. In other words Job these calamities have come upon you because you have sinned. We're attributing, we're making an explanation. Attribution is like making an explanation. You did this therefore this is happening. Description just means okay we get at yourself and we really don't know what's going on ourselves but this is you're in a very bad place and you need some help. So under attribution it's Job you deserve what happened. You're just getting the normal proper course of action when somebody sins greatly against God. God is going to punish them. Therefore you deserve what's going on. Description would avoid that. It's only about observing. So description is just what we see. We're not going to go searching for causality. We're not going to be judgmental. We're just a Job needs help. He has lost everything in the world and he needs help. So let's look at this. What would this help be? What would, how could they or what would go on if they were supportive rather than condemning? This is the social lesson of Job. That's the lots of things to say about Job but I just really want to focus on the social lesson of support of someone in desperate situation. This attribution, the New Testament calls it being judgmental. It's antithetical. It's the opposite of support. It's like saying well that person doesn't deserve my help. They just get what they deserve whether it's God giving to him or it's because well of course they had a heart attack in the 43. Look how they took care of their health. It's their own fault or any other way you might condemn somebody. You know the person always is spending. They never took care of their finances and okay I'm not helping them. They're, this is, I'm attributing their problem to either something God caused because they deserved it. They earned it or something they brought upon themselves. That's what attribution, description say avoids all that. It just looks at what is right in front of you. Job needs support and compassion. So the two questions I ask is what is the theological position that underlies each one? As I said at the beginning, I think you probably can figure out to be non-supportive, to be judgmental, got to be pretty legalistic. So you're getting what you deserve. You did this, got to that, it's x and y, you're black and white. Description is maybe a little hard to figure out. What is the theological position that underlies if we just look at somebody and not concern ourselves with how they got that way even if it's their own fault. Yes they might need help in other areas of counseling and learning how to do things better but their immediate situation, you need help. You are in a bad way. I think the theological position there would be more in the order of a global understanding of who we are as human beings. No we're just all, we all got problems. We all do stupid things. We're all going to end up in a bad place some some days. A different theological perspective. So what prevented Bill Dadd so hard to life has from extending compassion to Job? It was just that problem is there underlying theology. Not forgetting the fact that this same thing's shared by Job too throughout the book. He just had a different perspective on how he was evoked but they all kind of had this you deserve it not you need help and that's the core social meaning of suffering within a social context. So summing all this up say so what is wisdom of the drama. As things become clear here Job's calamities were didactic. This something I didn't talk about what I mean is Job's they were not God punishing him they were to teach him things. Exactly the opposite of punishment. Four times Bill Elihu says this is God did this to prevent you from going down to the pit. It's not to send you to the pit it's to keep you from going with this to learn something and to specifically per God's appearance at the end when he shows up as a creator is a what you need to learn is you're you're a limited created entity all of you all of you you're on the same boat. God is limitless and that's the beginning of our relationship to God is to understand limitless creator and limited. That limitedness is magnified by Job's problems his piety he had no power to protect himself not by his good deeds not by his piety not by his prayers for his children not by he couldn't protect himself against the disaster that took away all of his family. He was powerless and God was got all the power and that's beginning of that but that's a that kind of is inside the intrapersonal. The interpersonal big lesson is this and if there's a one one line I hope you can remember tonight is a legalistic or judgmental community is not a compassionate community. If we want to have a compassionate community among our among our brotherhood it's you can't do it if you have a legalistic approach to to religion and legalistic view of God. It's the idea we are all limited and in need of help. Compassionate and supportive community recognizes that we are all limited and in need of a lot of help. That was Job himself learned to be compassionate of course through suffering in the end he becomes a compassion to his friends in accepting their offering and praying for them. He'll say yeah his personal experience results in his compassion to his friends. So Job once again just to sum it all up the drama of Job highlights the interpersonal aspect of misfortune. In contrast to Ecclesiastes which is an intrapersonal meditation on what do I have to do to get my brain right and focus right and what's important in my life. When you introduce the aspect of suffering introduce the aspect of somebody deals problems now it becomes not just a problem for him but for the community with the of that person in our case our Ecclesiastes and our community structure as we demonstrate we're concerned about people who have problems. So the wisdom of the drama Job is a drama is about Job it's also about interpersonal the interpersonal aspects of personal misfortune. That is the end of the class.