From what I have read, it was written in Hebrew, or at least written by an Israelite. The Wiki page has a lot of great detail.
I had either forgotten or never knew that Job is lumped in with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs as “wisdom literature”. Job is meant to tackle one of the oldest questions in religion, “Why do bad things happen to righteous people?”.
I would argue that we do not know, at least not the language of the original, oral version of the story. The scholars can speculate when the current version of the story was documented in written form but that does not tell when the story was originally told. I assume that the story may be old, much older than the Hebrew scripture we have in the masoretic Bible.
As far as I know, the story includes features that suggests that the story is old, older than most other books in the Hebrew Bible. Naturally, there are also features that can be interpreted as signs of a younger age. It is a matter of interpretation what features we like to stress when we speculate about the age of the story. The age is relevant because the earliest inscriptions in Hebrew are about 3000 years old (roughly 1000 years BCE).
Yes, The entire Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, except perhaps a few passages that are quoting something someone said in another language such as Aramaic. The Hebrew Masoretic text is the original. At the time of Jesus, Greek was the predominate language but Hebrews (including Jesus) likely spoke in Aramaic having for the most part forgotten their original tongue with all the times they were captives in foreign nations. Jesus, I’m sure was able to speak in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. I believe the Old Testament was probably read from the Greek Septuagint which was a translation of the original at His time, just as we read an English translation today. The New Testament was originally written in Greek, of which there are multiple copies.
For You and also
for Knor…
Thanks…I think my question relates to the belief that Job was very early on. I once heard it was among the “first” books of the Bible written – which may be arguable.The editor of the Word Biblical Commentary also assumed a composition in Hebrew between the seventh and second centuries BCE. But the book itself, he noted— is “set in the patriarchal era depicted in Genesis: like Abraham, for example, Job’s wealth consists of his animals and his servants…” etc etc… Abraham was not in the seventh century BCE. What sort of creature then was it that this patriarchal-era character saw, (early 2nd millenium BCE) and what language did he speak it in when he told the story? The original Hebrew may not be what is really needed. At any rate, I have no background for arguing with Strong’s rendition of the meaning in Hebrew. OK…it was just a question…
Maybe – and definitely not completely: there are substantial portions where the Masoretic text is a disaster, essentially gibberish – which is in a way a testimony to how faithful they copied, since they knew those portions were a mess but copied them as they received them.
I think the commentator is correct about time setting of Job being early on, likely about the time of Jacob and Esau. Job is believed to be and Edomite. Similar to Genesis though, it was written later on, likely around 300-500 BC. This makes some good points:
Seems to suggest the the author knew Aramaic but still wrote it in Hebrew none the less. I don’t know for sure what the behemoth was but probably something found in the Jordan River.
I have not heard this. How did we get and English version that is not gibberish then? The KJV used the Masoretic text almost exclusively.
Where the text becomes incomprehensible they turned to rabbinic commentaries especially those that had clear quotes from source text (apparently) older than the Masoretic, except in places where established doctrine was affected, then they turned to Latin versions first and then the Septuagint. They also on occasion just lifted the wording from older English translations.
There are places where they had no clue what a set of letters might mean and just transliterated into something that could be pronounced in English; if I had my old notes at hand I could dredge some up – one was “parbar”, for which in 1611 they had no idea what it referred to. A century and a half later when a revision was done the majority of such instances were resolved, some a bit tentatively (most people don’t realize that the KJV they use is almost never the original). In a few instances the revision went back to one or another church scholar who’d had the audacity to correct the Masoretic text by changing one consonant into one easily mistaken, in locations where such a change turned the unknown word into a known one that fit the context (scholars still do the same; there are still some hapax legomena that just don’t fit anything known about ancient Hebrew).
Thanks…and that is an interesting article (the one at Yale Univ Press)…Below is from Thomasnelsonbibles.com
It is important to distinguish the date of the events of Job from the date of its writing. Accurate dating of the events is difficult because there are no references to contemporary historical occurrences. However, a number of facts indicate a patriarchal date for Job, perhaps between Genesis 11 and 12 or not long after the time of Abraham.
[The Gen 11 and 12 texts concern the Tower of Babel and the Call of Abram]
Beyond all that lingers, in the context of this discussion (earlier), the thought that the definition of the word used in the text might be something other than what Strong’s said (“It is the original Hebrew that is inspired”). But the account of Job may not originally have been told in Hebrew…that is, whoever originally told it from “way back in the day” …so what word they used would be different. I also once heard – in Sunday School — that there were dinosaurs living during the time of the psalmist. That was interesting to me until I looked into it and could not find anyone beyond my Sunday school teacher really supposing that this could have been the case.
At any rate…the “dinosaur” idea is one thing…they did exist…but unless we are discussing birds here — they evidently can trace their family history waaay back — I think the better analysis of the article that started off this blog is that it describes ancient human artwork in the vicinity of dinosaur tracks — but that does not indicate any evidence that the dinos were alive at the time of the work of human artists. No indication in the article that we should think that. Your thought that this awesome “behemoth” might be something from the Jordan River is as good as any! It was impressive evidently.
It seems that this is where bias can be introduced in a translation. It should be translated correctly without preconceived doctrine.
I think it was the correct approach to copy the text exactly as it was received and explain any typos in a side note.
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