Homo Ex Nihilo

“But where can wisdom be found?  And where is the place of understanding?”  Job 28:12  NASB

Where – What is the source of wisdom?  Where do you go to get understanding?  “Just tell me where to look so that I can find the answers,” seems to be the consistent cry of those who have embarked on a journey into God.  But the desperate desire to find the truth, to know once and for all what is real, might just betray a Western world’s wish rather than the Ancient Near Eastern view of cosmic design.

“Job’s question, ‘Where—me-ayin—can it be found?’ translates literally, ‘From nothing, nowhere—ayin—it is to be found.”[1]  And remember, the punctuation is the artistic work  of the translator.  Do you suppose that Job is really providing a deep insight into wisdom’s elusive origin?  Do you think that Job’s me-ayin reveals the same paradox as our inherited Greek ideal of utopia, a word that literally means “no where”?  What would you do if you discovered that the true source of creatio homo is homo ex nihilo?  How would you feel if you acknowledged that we make ourselves out of the nothing that haunts us?

I recall the opening lines of the movie Troy.  “Man is haunted by the vastness of eternity,” proclaims the narrator, in basso profundo.  We expected “man is haunted by the vastness of space,” because we think in terms of a spatial universe.  Even our Western idea of time is linear, a fallacy that has affected virtually all our misunderstanding of history.  But this is not the ancient world’s trauma.  Like the East, what truly frightens Man is eternity, the endless cycles, the destruction of all that matters over millennia, the loss of anything meaningful, evaporating in the slithering sands of “everlasting.”

“Where can wisdom be found?”  “From nothing is wisdom found.”  And so we must venture into the nothing, into the empty space where divine and human cooperate in creation.  It may be that God created everything from nothing, but that doesn’t mean that everything is now filled.  It means that we too are creators from nothing.  We, the image of God incarnate, penetrate the emptiness of being—and bring forth who we are, what we are, how we are.

But only if we are willing to begin where nothing is found.  In the deep.

Topical Index: nothing, me-ayin, creation, Job 28:12

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 271.