The Great Equalizer

One person dies full of innocence, completely tranquil and at peace . . . Another dies with a bitter heart, and he has never enjoyed good.  Together in the dust they lie, and the worm will cover them.  Job 21:23, 25-26 Robert Alter

The worm – Alter’s sobering remark puts Job and Qohelet on the same page: “This idea is akin to a notion reiterated by Qohelet—that life portions out prosperity and misery arbitrarily, while in the end all share the fate of rotting in the grave.”[1]

You’ll remember the quintessential Hebrew empiricist, Qohelet.  He wrote:

 It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and the unclean; for the person who offers a sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good person is, so is the sinner; the one who swears an oath is just as the one who is afraid to swear an oath.  This is an evil in everything that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for everyone (Ecclesiastes 9:2-3a NASB).

In the end, the worm vanquishes.

Job and the Teacher agree.  It takes another turn of the wheel before the idea of another life appears in Hebraic ancient literature.  Perhaps it was the influence of the Greeks, or the Egyptians before them, but at some point, men began to think that this world was not the end.  How could it be?  How could the sinner and the ṣaddîq have the same fate?  Was there no justice, no reward for all that obedience, all that suffering?  Without a supernatural solution, Job’s question drops off the cliff, observed by a Teacher who accepted only what his sense could justify.  In the end, both Job and Ecclesiastes are invitations to suicide.  Get it over before it gets any worse!

We might naively believe that the role of the Messiah was to bring forgiveness to Mankind, but such shallow assessment has no place in the corpus of biblical material.  The role of the Messiah is to bring hope to Mankind.  Forgiveness is nice, but it is shortsighted.  Forgiveness without the prospect of a second life is nothing more than feeling better before I die.  The worm still wins.  What I need is not to expiate my guilt.  What I need is to enter into a world where justice reigns, where the good and the wicked are not treated the same, where obedience matters in the long run.  Without that prospect, religion just becomes duty—and ethical code of conduct during my brief sojourn.  Useful?  Yes.  Meaningful?  Well . . . not really.  If the worm wins, what does it matter?

Yeshua isn’t only the savior.  He’s the redeemer.  That is a much bigger job.

Topical Index: worm, Ecclesiastes 9:2-3, forgiveness, redeemer, Job 21:23, Job 21:25-26

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Vol. 2 The Prophets, p. 520, fn. 26.