Today is the 65th anniversary of the start of WW2. Not that many people are talking about it - I guess we all like to celebrate the end of wars rather than the beginning of them.
We looked at Job and Ecclesiastes in Old Testament today. I know some people don't like talking in this way, but I consider them to be two of the most interesting books in the Bible. Wisdom literature is where it's at.
Regarding Ecclesiastes, we talked about how it possessed a courageous honesty about life, and even a healthy sort of cynicism. It seems the Hebrew word 'hbl' (traditionally translated as 'vanity') might better be rendered 'engimatic'. Our lecturer, perhaps unfairly, postulated that the GNB's translation of 'useless' said more about the translation than the word...
Job is perhaps even more fascintaing. We hear Job's so-called " friends" say all sorts of really orthodox stuff, while Job seems to belong to the lunatic fringe. But in the end, we see that Job was right all along, and his friends were wrong. It's possible to sound right and be wrong, and to sound wrong and be right. The conclusion to the book turns everything on its head.
I'll have to go over both these books a few more times before I understand them, however...
And in Hebrew class we've gotten up to the more, shall we say, risque? bits in Ruth...
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