In this engaging episode of Enter the Bible, hosts Rev. Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker and Rev. Katie Langston welcome biblical scholar Dr. Cory Driver to tackle listener questions about understanding biblical prophecy. The conversation explores the historical context and theological significance of Amos's bold critique of the wealthy northern kingdom, Micah's geographically diverse preaching locations, and the complex role of Job's friends in biblical wisdom literature. Dr. Driver provides fascinating insights into how these prophetic voices challenged the religious and social status quo of their time, offering contemporary listeners a deeper understanding of biblical prophecy beyond surface readings.

As the discussion unfolds, the hosts and guest explore how Amos confronted religious hypocrisy in Bethel, how Micah cleverly used wordplay with town names in the Judean foothills, and whether Job's friends' speeches contain any theological value despite God's rebuke. This episode demonstrates how understanding biblical prophecy requires engaging with the texts in their historical context while recognizing how they continue to challenge our comfortable theological systems today. Perfect for Bible study groups, seminary students, or anyone wanting to move beyond superficial readings of these profound prophetic texts.

Mentioned in this episode:

Stepping Up to Supervision

welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston.

Kathryn Schifferdecker, and we have a returning guest here today, and we're so happy to have him here. Reverend Dr. Cory Driver has been on our podcast before. He is a graduate of Luther Seminary, Lutheran pastor, and ⁓ a Hebrew Bible scholar, and currently serving as the Director of Research at the Center of Life, which stands for Leading the Integration of Faith and Entrepreneurship at Miami University in Ohio.

not in Florida, Miami University in Ohio, and the author of a recent book called God, Gender, and Family Trauma, which looks at the good, he has it there, which looks at the stories in Genesis of family dysfunction and other things. So I highly recommend it. I've read the book and it's really insightful. So thank you so much for coming back to the Enter the Bible Podcast, Cory.

Thanks for having me. What a joy to be back with you again.

That's great. So today we're doing a lightning round. So for those of you new to the podcast, lightning round is when we get questions from listeners that probably wouldn't take a whole episode to answer, though we're really good at talking, so we could probably stretch any question into a whole episode. Yes. We do love to talk. So we've chosen three of these perhaps smaller questions to talk about with Cory. So thank you for joining us, Cory, on a lightning round.

Let's dive in. So the first question for our lightning round this time around is what was the people's response to Amos's message? So just as a reminder, Amos is one of the so-called minor prophets, not minor because he's unimportant, but because his book is pretty short. know, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those are all large prophetic books. Amos is one of the smaller ones, the so-called part of the book of the 12. So, Cory.

Where can you teach us about amos?

So we have within the text of Amos, a micro picture of the response. The priest Amaziah, appointed by Jeroboam II, says essentially, Amos, thanks a lot for coming up north. Thanks, but no thanks. We are all full up here of prophets. So please go back home and take your message with you.

Okay, give us a little more background, so. North and south, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's sure.

So there's two kingdoms, right? The Northern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Amos has crossed an international border to come up and to speak in one of the two epicenters of Israelite religion. And we say Israelite advisedly of the Northern Kingdom to say, look, you're doing everything wrong as it turns out.

love it when foreigners come into a country and tell them that. That's their favorite thing.

You have to know that, right? And so the book of Amos opens up with garnering sympathy and rapport. Hey, this other country that you hate. Great. Hate it. This other country that you hate. Yeah, they're terrible. This other country.

God doesn't

like their actions. yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, right. They're practicing injustice. You don't like them. God doesn't feel that great about them right now either. Right? And so garnering agreement and then drawing the bullseye tighter and tighter and tighter until Amos finally says, and God's actually not that pleased with your activities, which is a hugely countercultural notion at this time in Israelite history. Jeroboam II expands the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Mm-hmm.

to essentially the Solomonic borders. In fact, one of my favorite architects whose name I'm blanking on, Israel Finkelstein, duh, says that the borders of Jeroboam II are actually influencing the way that Solomon's kingdom is being talked about. And it's not so much that Jeroboam II is a shadow of Solomon, but maybe the version of Solomon we get is a shadow of Jeroboam II. He has expanded the borders. This is the richest the country's ever going to be.

From the Dead Sea up to what is today, northern Syria, the north part of Lebanon is the Kingdom of Israel and everything is going great. And if you are a Israelite nationalist, it's a time of great blessing, right? That of course God is pleased with us. Look at how Jeroboam II has expanded our empire and broadened our borders and brought so much wealth into the kingdom. And no one

wants to be told, actually the opposite. But at this exact moment, Amos, Hosea, another of the 12, Joel, another of the 12, even Jonah, a number of the 12, right, are all prophesying at the same time. And Joel, Hosea, and Amos are bringing one message to say, look, God's not actually that impressed with your wealth. In fact, your wealth is ill-gotten.

And we are dealing with humans and there's every reason to think that Amaziah, the priest's rejection of Amos is shared by just about everybody else. And if you follow along in the history, according to second Kings, it doesn't go great. that people just generally reject Amos's message of

Hey, justice, especially human justice, and especially taking care of, you know, the poor, the widow, the outcast, the foreigner is really important and maybe more important than building a huge kingdom that's incredibly wealthy with income inequality as a major feature. that to say in a nutshell, Amos is pretty unpopular among the humans. Jonah actually does a bit better. Like Jonah prophesies national expansion.

thinking about 2 Kings 14, and he says, yeah, the kingdom's going to get bigger and bigger. And so his sort of prophetic experience is very different. And so he is the one of the 12 who is sent to the foreigners to say, ⁓ well, you're a little too positive about the Israelite kingdom. Let's demonstrate some care for the people of Nineveh. See what you think about them. Amos is unpopular.

True of a lot of prophets, obviously. I love how you describe it, Cory. Well, there are some parallels that could be drawn, Like, well, Jeroboam's making Israel great again, or maybe for the first time.

I don't understand.

You said that not me, I bit my tongue so many times. was like, don't be the one who says it, Cory.

⁓ making Israel great again. But, and I just want to quote Amos here. So this is one of the most famous passages in Amos. This is Amos 5, starting at verse 21. I will not listen to the melody of your heart, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. One of Martin Luther King's favorite verses, that last verse. So yeah, let the listener, those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Let's put out there.

And just for my own thing, and this, always tell the students, Amos is not talking about sacrifices in Jerusalem. At the beginning, this is not a Judahite sacrificial cult. We're talking about the two idolatrous sacrificial cults in Dan and Bethel. And so at the beginning, right, like there's golden calves there. And we know like having read Exodus, not.

a huge fan of God of the golden. God is not a big fan. And so a lot of times this Amos passage is deracinated to say like, this is God's opinion about sacrifice generally. No, no. And we want to be really careful about that. Isaiah is going to have some words about sacrifice in Jerusalem and we should, we should take those very, very seriously, but I really don't want this to be decontextualized as it often is. Amos is talking to the North. He's saying these words in Bethel.

And so that should be taken very seriously.

And Bethel is in the north, right?

in the Northern Kingdom and that's where one of the golden calves was.

from context clues as picking it up.

Yeah. So Jeroboam I, the namesake of Jeroboam II, is very smart. And he says, look, I'm establishing this other kingdom, but you know what's going to undo this kingdom is Thanksgiving. Right? It's people coming together with families, traveling, getting together saying, hey, we miss you. We should do this more often. And so he establishes two cultic centers, one at the very south of his Northern Kingdom and one at the very north of his Northern Kingdom and says,

Don't go to Jerusalem. You don't want to go there. They don't like you. Their accent's funny. It's too far for you anyway. Right. Even though it's not far at all. Right. But just, just go to Bethel. They've got a golden calf there. Jerusalem doesn't have a golden calf. That stinks. We love a golden calf. And so it's set up as a pilgrimage alternative. So keep the holidays. We might change the dates, change it around a little bit, but...

The object of worship well we do change the object of worship

Well,

we're just hanging different pediments, right? So from an Israelite perspective, they would say, look, of course, you're not worshiping a golden calf, you're worshiping the one that rides the golden calf, right? So ⁓ they would not say, we're engaged in idolatry, it's just we decorate our religious spaces differently. Maybe they're too poor to afford a golden bull in Jerusalem, who knows? ⁓ But they very much disentangle

religious worship to say, look, you don't want to have to go to Jerusalem. You don't want to talk with your cousins and uncles and stuff down there. Cause they're southerners. Right. Exactly. Not like us enlightened northerners, expanding our kingdom. Like obviously things are going great. Jeroboam the first, Jeroboam the second, not father and son. There's several kings in between. But very much to say like, Hey, let's have some pride in who we are and let's not.

condescend to visit those backwards southerners. And so there's real intentional separation and cutting off of family holidays to say, don't get together with them.

Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm afraid this is a lightning round, so we gotta move on. that was,

Okay, yes.

That was very, that was, whew, I'm feeling convicted. Okay, next question though. I think this one will be faster, but you you never know with us. Where did Micah preach?

So Micah, very much unlike Amos, gets around. So he is up north in Samaria, he's down south in Jerusalem, and he's everywhere in between.

And when is he? If Amos is during the time when there were still two kingdoms before the Babylonian, well, no, before the- the- Yeah, yeah, yeah, of the north. So when is Micah?

serious

Micah, very similarly, one of the things that I kind of resist is like specific dating unless we have it. Right, right, right. But it's, it's time when the two kingdoms still stood. Rough contemporary of Isaiah, like living Isaiah. so he's traveling back and forth and has some messages for both kingdoms. Very much similar to Isaiah himself saying, Hey, Israel, this, you do that. But Micah's actually going.

little later perhaps than aim as though, right? So, but same century.

Generation or two different probably. But Micah's going every place, but he is a hometown guy. He is from Morsh Haqqat, which is a little bit southwest of Jerusalem. And he really confines a lot of his travel in the Shefele, like in the Judean foothills. So not quite the Judean mountains, not quite the Philistine plain, but like that gently rolling, the beautiful area.

BC.

When the Israeli department of tourism takes photos of different places in Israel to like get you to want to visit the countryside, this place, right? Like just really glorious, some farms, some vineyards. It's, it's delightful. And the reason we know he's from there is because, well, he tells us, but also he invokes town names. So this is a guy who knows all the suburbs of Cincinnati and is making the call outs and the references.

He knows the bars. If you're in North College Hills, you know you're in North College Hills, not South College Hills.

Right. And so never the College Hills shall meet.

Yeah, you know the street that separates them, right? And so in his poetry, and one of the beautiful things and encouragement to, if you have it all an opportunity to take some Hebrew, right? Like do some original language work. There's continuing education, the students, if you're in seminary, like to do the work, especially the optional classes, like do that work because it's glorious and it's fun. And so Micah has a little bit of fun in the first chapter.

And is calling out these place names in the Shefala. Right. And so in Micah 1, I'm looking 8 to 16, says in Bet-li-ah-ah-fra, right? In house of the dust, rule yourself in the dust. Right? Like, Ooh, got them. What else you got? The inhabitants of Zanan going out will not escape exile or forced going out.

Like, burn, that's good. The inhabitants of Marot, the place of bitterness, will hope for something good and tasty, but how can they? Cause they're from bitterness. gotcha. And so there's this deep, deep knowledge of place names. Harness the team of chariots, Larrakech, right, a horse team, inhabitants of Lakish, right? And so it, this rhymed phoneme and assonance of meaning, right? So.

The words sound the same, but the meanings are the exact opposite. And he's calling out like very specific small towns or medium sized towns too. But it's not, he speaks to Samaria, the capital of the North. He speaks to Jerusalem, the capital of the South. But then he also speaks to the small towns, right? He's calling out Peoria. He's calling out Normal. He's calling out Bloomington for my Illinoisans. That's where I grew up. Right? So Mattoon, got to get that shout out there.

This is what he's doing. He's saying, look, I'm from here. Don't think this is a capital city only, right? Don't think this is Washington only. ⁓ This is you. This is hometown. And this is going to affect all of you. So your inability to perform God's righteousness, your shirking of responsibility to be a kingdom that serves the true King.

right, that does the stuff that God requires of you, it's not going to be confined to Jerusalem when the punishment comes, right? In fact, it's going to get to Jerusalem last, and it's going to go through you first. And so, it's a very important note that Micah is contextualizing and using his place, right? Using his area where he grew up to say, look, this is all of us. And again, that could preach if one went into.

Yeah. his message is similar to Amos in that way, right? Like he's calling out the people who are complacent, who aren't practicing righteousness or justice or taking care of the poor, the poor and the needy, right? But I like your, I never really thought about it this way, actually, Cory, I love that point, right? It's not just the Jerusalem and Samaria, it's everybody in the whole kingdom, right? You all need to pay attention to what God truly desires.

Yeah, it's a message for everybody.

Well, huh.

Alright, so good luck.

Lightning!

⁓

That's

good, that's good, that's good.

So the last question, I know this will be exciting for both of you, says, I wonder about Job's friends. If they are speaking about the Lord, should we take anything they say as pleasing to God? Should we quote them or disregard them? I'm assuming this person is talking about sort of the practice of

you know, taking a quote, like a quote here and there and maybe out of context, bless our hearts, and, you know, saying, building a whole theology or worldview around it. So yeah, should we do that? You know, can I take, I don't know, I can't even think about it. I was trying to think of someone who says something terrible in the Bible and then build my theology around that. Can we do that?

I'm just watching Catherine's face. ⁓

I have I have much to say on this but I yeah, yeah, I want to hear from you Cory. I don't I have from you sure. Yeah, go ahead. I've just studied job a lot and I've written one book and I'm working on another book on Job but

My dirt.

You are?

I am.

You

heard it here first,

my gosh, I'm first in line.

All right. Thank you, Cory. Should we do a brief? Sure. Sure. So for those who haven't read Job lately, so Job is the object of a bet between God and the Satan. And that's a whole other topic, but basically lots and lots of bad things happen to Job, right? He loses all of his children. He loses all of his wealth. He's, he's afflicted with boils, you know, he's, he's on an ash heap scratching himself with pot shards.

And these three friends come, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and they sit with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. And this is the origin of sitting shiva, which is the Jewish practice of literally sitting with families that are grieving the loss of a dead... And that's wonderful pastoral care, right? Like they're silent, they're with him, they're sharing his grief. And then Job...

speaks and he laments the day of his birth, curses the day of his birth. And then the friends open their mouths and everything goes to hell, right? Because they start out somewhat sympathetic, at least the first one, Eliphaz does. But then they just end up talking past each other and Job responds to each of them. And it descends into a big argument. And Eliphaz, the one who starts out kind of graciously, like, you know, gently.

ends up accusing Job of terrible, terrible things by the end of the speeches. And then the friends are silenced and God speaks. And that's another part of the story. So the question is, yeah, what do we do with these speeches of the friends? Do we just throw them out completely? When I teach the book of Job, I challenge my students to like, is there anything good about the friend's speeches? Is there anything we can take away from them?

Because it's pretty easy to just throw away, like just say they're terrible people, terrible friends, terrible theologians. And there's a lot of truth to that. But, but there's something more going on, I think. But Cory, before I dominate this conversation, what do you think?

What say you?

Thank you for that. And I do want to acknowledge it is impertinent to speak in front of one's master. The great joy. No, I had the great joy and I want to be really open about this of learning job at your feet, Catherine. And I recommend it for everyone. So I will say some things, but then I will be quiet.

Okay, alright.

I have three methodological approaches to the question and they are all different. The first, like, do we take anything from the Friends? Yeah, absolutely. Because the book does, right? This genre is, among other things, a international idol of wisdom poetry, right? And it's couched as such, right? The, the, the Friends, if we want to call them that, are introduced as representatives of wisdom traditions.

Right? And so Eliphaz is a Temenite. Temen is grandson of Esau or son of Esau. can't remember actually. So look at like Genesis 36 there and the Edomites, the Esau people are renowned for the wisdom. Ovediah, Obadiah verse eight and Jeremiah 49, seven talks about the wisdom of the Edomites, right? Eliphaz isn't Joe Shmo. He is there representing a renowned.

wise culture, right? Bildad, a descendant of Shua, a descendant of Abraham and Keturah, right? Everybody forgets Abraham's third wife, that stinks, it's not fair, but it happens. yeah, everybody does. But Bildad's a member of the family too, right? He is, Catherine talked about Eliphaz. Bildad's the first one to accuse the kids of maybe sinning such that they cause their own death and the misfortune of their father,

for goner.

Not good pastoral care.

Yeah, we don't love that. We don't love that. Zophar is from Nama, which might be a city in present day Southern Syria. The Septuagint doesn't know what to do with that. And it says that he's the king of Mina, which would be a city just outside modern day Mecca. So from, from the neighborhood and representing a kind of Bedouin wisdom as well. So these are heavyweights, right?

And they do come in and they are wise enough to sit and be present. But then when they speak, they're not just spouting off, right? These are wise actors. When Elahou, who is young, also speaks towards the end. He is a descendant of Nahor, right? He's from Boz, so like way back in Genesis 22. And interestingly, his passages contain more Aramaisms, as you would expect somebody who's descendant of Nahor, from Aram, from Padana-Ram. So.

Like we're really representing a lot of cultures that are all connected to the family, right? Like these are all descendants of Abraham. And that's really important because the work of Job is not to construct paper tigers or easy targets, but to say, well, actually I kind of agree with Eliphaz, right? Like why do bad things happen to good people? And maybe they don't.

Maybe like bad things happen to bad people and we just don't know how Job is bad. Right? If this is easy to dismiss, the work's not doing the job. Right. The whole point why it's included in the beautiful poetic structure is because it's supposed to work on you. Right? Like it's supposed to not be easy to dismiss and you're supposed to kind of agree with it a little bit. And that's why Job.

And I would say Dina, and we can talk about that later if we want to, right? Of all the terrible things that happened, Job's marriage does not dissolve and they are making babies before and at the end of the book. let's hope you understand. So he is not abandoned there and perhaps the wisest character in the book may be Job's wife, which Jewish tradition holds up is Dina. Right. Right. And so she has her own.

Jacob's daughter.

Quick plug, she has her own traumatic incidents and healing and insights that come from that. And perhaps she speaks most truly of what is going on in heaven. And so if we're going to trust the theology of anyone from the book of Job, it might be that we look at Job's wife. So it is a wisdom contest though, right? Like these are supposed to be heavy wise figures and Job wins, right? The crux of the book is that

They don't speak truly of God. Right? So Job 42, that's the trump card, if anybody's going to play it, what is it? Verses seven through nine is that they have not spoken truthfully of me as my servant Job has. Right? So Job wins. Hooray. A terrible cost, but Job has spoken rightly of God. And this is really a vindication of

what I'm going to call a biblical late-Judaite religion, right? To say, look, these other folk are part of the family. They at least know about our God and maybe they have different versions and maybe it's completely different gods or maybe like it's just a fun house mirror version of our God, but they don't understand the way we do and we win the international wisdom off, right? And so that, that is one way of interpreting jokes.

Right? To say like, this is a contest of wisdom, right? And certainly other books are going to talk about the wisdom of different traditions. And there is the wisdom hymn in the middle of Job, right? Chapter 28 is like a song for wisdom. so viewing this as a wisdom contest that Job wins, would seem to indicate, yeah, I mean, you can take some things from the friends. They are here because they represent wisdom traditions.

They're just not as good. In fact, they say some things that aren't true of God. So you would want to use them very advisedly to say, look, this isn't garbage, but it's not the best. Right. And you have the gold standard here. response one is, yeah, go ahead and use it, but use it advisedly and always let Job have the last word because Job speaks truly. Option two, skip straight to chapter 42 verses seven through nine. No, don't use any of it. Right. They have not spoken of God, truthfully.

as my servant Job has. So why would you, yeah, just toss it, right? Why would you do anything with that? And that is a certain impulse at one of the congregations that I attended growing up. That was the thing, right? Like we don't actually need to read the book of Job because we've read the book of Job once and you know, we know who's right and we know who's wrong. Done. Yeah, I think we're all good here. And then the third response is, yeah.

Absolutely, we need to read the Friends because we are dealing with and hearing their theologies all the time. Everyone wants to construct because we are humans and God makes humans in God's image and we return the favor. We want to construct God in our image. And so it is the idolatry of every moment to create a systematic theology that works for us based on our experience and to say,

course God works this way because that's how I think God should work. Right? Yeah, of course. And so a very wise professor at Luther, who is not Catherine, famously keeps repeating systematic theology as an oxymoron. And to a certain extent, yeah. Right? Like God is not a system and we need to have this lens when we read the gospels, right? Because there's

any number of people who've read the Bible and understand exactly how God works and have the system down, and then Jesus. And the constant problem, the problem is not that people don't see Jesus doing miracles, like opening the eyes of the blind and bringing the dead back to life and multiplying food and everything. The problem is that's not how God's supposed to work. Right? We understand the system of God and this ain't it. And then the response is always, but

How could anyone do the things that he's doing if God was not with him? Right? And that's why we read the book of Job. To have ourselves unsettled. To say, Ooh, but I don't like that God and the Satan are making bets. Ooh, good. Don't like it. Like be unsettled. That's, that's the work. And so of course we read the friends because they're us. They're us at our...

most vulnerable moments seeking to make meaning and to say, God must be like this because if not, that makes me extremely uncomfortable. the thing about the Holy is it's uncomfortable. Right? And so we don't take the friends as arbiters of truth. We take the friends as expressions of ourself and our discomfort with God who is after all a different species from human. Right? Like.

That whole Jesus thing is really a mystery because it's hard to figure out how God and human. Right? And so the friends are most valuable when we allow ourselves to see ourselves in them. And then to say, you know, what happens at the end is not just that they're wrong and Job's right, but Job prays for them such that they are forgiven and restored in relationship with God. Right? That

yeah, they get past it, right? And so a lot of times our systematic theologies or our understanding of like, here's exactly how God works. I've got that figured out and drew it on a little napkin or whatever, or a little chart in the back of my Bible. We need to be broken of that. And that's the work the friends do and Job does. And like the whirlwind discussion is God is other. And if you want a real relationship, you're going to have to deal with some discomfort and some lack of understanding.

And the friends help with that.

That's really beautiful.

That really is. That's great, Cory. I would agree 100 % with what you said. I'm just going to add a little tiny bit. I'm going to try to be brief. on number three, I think that's really a good way to put it, right? We see ourselves in the friends and we're trying to make God in our image. And especially, I would say, when we blame the victim, right?

That's what they end up doing. I mean, as nice as Eliphaz is at the beginning, by the end he's saying things like, you know, is it any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous or is it gain to him if you make your ways blameless? It's not your wickedness, great. There's no end to your iniquities. You have given no water to the weary to drink. You've withheld bread from the hungry. You've sent widows away empty handed. I mean, all of these accusations against So far.

Because well, yeah and build that in Zofra

Your

punishment is too good for you. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, And I mean, poor Job, right? Like he's on the ass sheep, he's covered with sores, he's lost everything except his wife. Thank you for bringing up Mrs. Job. And then his friends are like, it's all your fault, right? Like this is your fault. And because he disturbs their worldview, he disturbs their theology, where if you're righteous, you get rewarded, and if you're wicked, you get punished.

And so because Job is obviously being punished, he must have done something terrible. Even though they... Yeah, what was he wearing? Yeah, he shouldn't have been there, you know, walking alone at night, right? Like, there's just this impulse, this kind of self-protective impulse to say, Job is really suffering. I don't want to suffer. So I have to distance myself or find some reason why Job is suffering, right?

so that I can be safe. And the problem with that, I mean, there's lots of problems with it, but the problem is they're not being true. They're not speaking truth. They know Job, they know that he hasn't done anything to deserve this. And yet they allow their theology or their discomfort, as you said, Cory, to overwhelm their compassion for their friend. And that's what makes them terrible friends, right? Anyway, but I'll say this too, that...

A lot of what, at least some of what the friends say, and this goes back to your first point, sounds a lot like some other passages in Scripture, right? Especially Eliphaz. So in Job chapter 5, Eliphaz's first speech, he says, do not despise the discipline of the Almighty, right? Which could come straight out of Proverbs. In fact, Proverbs 3 says pretty much exactly the same thing.

God disciplines those whom he loves. So don't despise the discipline of the Almighty, right? Or in 5.8, Eliphaz says, as for me, I would seek God and to God I would commit my cause. He does great things and unsearchable marvelous things without number. He gives rain on the earth and sends water on the fields. He sets on high those who are lowly and those who mourn are lifted to safety. Well, that's...

sounds pretty good, right? Like it sounds like, in fact, the whirlwind speeches at the end of the book. And it sounds kind of close to Hannah's song in First Samuel, right? Where God lifts up the lowly, God brings down the mighty and lifts up the lowly. So it's not that they, as you said, Cory, they know their stuff, right? They're not dumb, dumb-dumbs, right? I won't swear here, right?

They know their stuff and some of what they say sounds a lot like other parts of scripture. The problem is they don't take the context into their theology, right? They're speaking truth in a context where that it doesn't work, right? Because Job is innocent, what they're saying about his punishment is wrong and they're not willing to leave anything to mystery. So that's one thing I'll say. And the other thing is that

apply here.

the verses that you quote in 42, seven through nine, right? God speaks to the friends and he says, you have not spoken about me rightly as has my servant Job. know, so Job's gonna pray for you. That can also be translated, you have not spoken to me rightly as has my servant Job. And Job, for, you know, for all of his anger and lament, the important thing is he speaks directly to God, right? He speaks.

He speaks to his friends, but he turns more and more to speak directly to God. He shakes his fist at God while still holding on to God, right? That's my definition of lament, right? That he's honest with God. He never lets go of God. And the friends, for all of their theologizing, they never once intercede for Job. They never once speak directly to God on behalf of their friend Job, their suffering friend. And I think it's...

in part for that, that they're chastised by God at the end, right? They haven't spoken rightly about God, but they also haven't spoken to God to intercede for their friend and prayed for him. Right. And so I think that's a big reason why they're chastised at the end. So yes, pay attention to the friends. Some of what they say sounds a lot like other parts of scripture, but take it with a big grain of salt and take a lesson from it not to make God in your image, as you said, Cory, and not to

ignore the suffering or blame the victim, but to speak with compassion as well as wisdom. That's what I would say.

And the only thing, I mean, I have nothing to add about the content. You were both amazing and brilliant. The other thing I would just put here as maybe a final thought is, you know, also too, the practice of taking quotes out of context from scripture and then trying to entire theologies around them or like get the moral or a quotable quote. That's fine.

It has very deep limits and the way that you enter the Bible is to read comprehensively and not just try to cherry-pick quotes from here and there to support one proposition or another, but it's actually about diving deeply into it to see what's actually going on. The question was, should we quote them or disregard them? Yeah, you can quote them. Sure, you could disregard them too, but...

Those aren't the only two options, right? Those aren't the only two options. Like you might not embroider their speeches on a doily, but you know what I mean? Like engage. That's true. have, I could make some fairly offensive doilies. So why not?

What's on here the doilies for?

You heard it here first. Enter the Bible merch.

Offensive doilies and our merch store

Yeah, I Problematic Bible verses doilies. We gotta monetize this stuff. I'm in a business.

I

know come on come on

What are we doing That's great. That's great. That's great. Yeah, no, that's an important point, Katie. Yeah, to not take things out of context, to read comprehensively, to let scripture interpret scripture. Yeah, that's all good. I'm afraid our lightning round has been a little long, but it's been so wonderful. Cory, you've taken what I imagined as fairly straightforward, simple questions, and you've really enriched them. So I really, really, really appreciate you being with us again. Yeah.

For

real. It's just a joy to be with you both. Thanks for having me back. I love this.

Well, we will definitely do it again. And thank you to our listeners for sticking with us for this lightning round. Just a reminder that if you have questions that you want us to address, we can't get to every question, but we try our best. Just go to enterthebible.org to submit a question. We hope this has been insightful. We urge you to go to enterthebible.org for more.

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