Job 38:1-7, (34-41) In today’s Old Testament reading, God responds to Job’s questions about suffering. The whirlwind (and other storms and natural phenomena) appear in scripture to signify theophany. The lectionary has only treated us to Job’s problem (Propers 22 and 23) and God’s response. We have been spared his friends’ lengthy attempts to justify…

Job 23:1-9, 16-17 As the story of Job unfolds, Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, have come to sit with Job in his suffering, and to convince him that his fate is deserved. They represent the voices of traditional theology and piety. They insist that the old explanations must hold true, evil deeds are…

Job 1:1; 2:1-10 It has been said that the Book of Job is where the Bible runs off a cliff! The text probes the mystery of suffering, but ultimately yields no satisfactory answer. The great contribution of Job lies in its realistic assessment of the explanations that traditional theology often provides for suffering. Those traditions…

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29 Today’s reading from the book of Numbers interweaves three themes – the peoples’ frustration with their situation of wandering in the desert with little to eat, Moses’ frustration with the heavy responsibilities he has been given, and the independence of the prophetic office from priestly control. The vacillation of both the…

Proverbs 31:10-31 This, to me, is a challenging passage. It is difficult to look beyond the immediate visceral reaction to the patriarchal assumptions about a woman’s life and worth being connected to her husband – thus the description of the “capable wife.” These assumptions would have been expected and accepted when Proverbs was written. And…