Turning a Blind Eye

May the stars of its twilight be darkened; may it wait for light but have none, and may it not see the ^[e]breaking dawn; because it did not shut the opening of my mother’s womb, or hide trouble from my eyes.  Job 3:9-10  NASB

Hide trouble – “History is a nightmare.”  So said Abraham Heschel, and although we probably agree with this statement, we rarely seem to acknowledge its veracity.  We pretend things will get better in the morning.  We ignore the steady march of humanity into despotism, cruelty, and destruction.  We put on Pollyanna glasses because we don’t want to face the reality of our utter vulnerability and quaking condition.  Humanity’s persistent disease is the blind-eye syndrome. How much better to be blissfully ignorant than hear the discordant music of the universe.

Job refuses to be duped.  But he doesn’t give us an optimistic solution.  How could he?  Look what’s happened to him through no fault of his own.  What’s his answer to the terror of living?  Don’t!  Don’t come into a world that is saturated by sorrow, pregnant with persecution, rinsed in rejection.  As soon as you’re born, your eyes are opened to the truth.  Trouble is never hidden from the one who looks.  Heschel said it best.  “Scratch the skin of any person and you come upon sorrow, frustration, unhappiness.”[1]

Once more we’re thrown back into Genesis.  “Cursed is the ground because of you; with hard labor you shall eat from it all the days of your life.”[2]  No exceptions to the rule.  Although the Hebrew in Genesis is a different word, the theme is the same.  ʿiṣṣābôn, in Genesis, is related to physical pain as well as to emotional sorrow, clearly a condition applicable to Job.  Why, then, choose ʿāmāl?  Because ʿāmāl is the drudgery of life.

The verb ʿāmal is one of several Hebrew verbs for “labor, work, toil.” Other major terms include ʿābad “to work, serve,” and ʿāśâ “to make, do, work” (both of which see). ʿāmal is used less often than those two verbs, and is employed often with the nuance of the drudgery of toil rather than the nobility of labor. Hebrew ʿāmal is cognate to Arabic ʿamila “to labor,” and to the Akkadian noun nīmēlu, that produced by work, “gain, possessions.”

The root ʿāmal relates to the dark side of labor, the grievous and unfulfilling aspect of work.^[3]

Job looks upon the birthed world and sees what every person fears to see: pain, sorrow, and unhappiness, but rather than turn away helpless, he wishes what other ancient poets have wished—not be to born at all.  As Qohelet wrote: “But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 4:3 NIV).  Job forces us to confront the ultimate question of the broken world: Why?  Why am I here?  Answering that question is the challenge of being born.

Topical Index:  birth, ʿāmāl, trouble, life, Ecclesiastes 4:3, Job 3:9-10

[1] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 146.

[2] Genesis 3:17  NASB

^[3] Allen, R. B. (1999). 1639 עָמָל. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 675). Moody Press.