Last night, I was very happy to have dinner with a few friends: Jim West and his daughter, Frank Jacks, David Garber, and Doug Watson. We had a good time swapping stories about such notables as Philip Davies and Wenzel van Huyssteen.

This morning, I moderated a session of very fine papers by four graduate students. First, Richard Medina of Columbia Theological Seminary read a paper titled “Job’s Entrée into a Ritual of Mourning As Seen in the Opening Prose of the Book of Job.” He argued that we should interpret Job’s grieving actions in 1:20-21 in light of ancient Near Eastern mourning rituals. By taking off his clothes, shaving his head, and falling to the ground, Job symbolizes his own liminal descent into the underworld in his identification with his dead children. These actions accomplish his temporary separation from society. Richard ended with a nice point, saying that Job’s ritual mourning show his active engagement with the disaster that has befallen him. Thus, we could read Job’s mourning as a bodily protest against God’s injustice.

Second, Sarah Stokes Musser of Duke University read a passionate paper titled “Comfort in the Whirlwind? Job, Creation, and Environmental Degradation.” The heart of her paper was an interpretation of Job’s vision in 39-40, in which Job gets a glimpse of the real creation, wild and untamed, and beyond the control of humans. Job, Musser argued, is a call for humans to reclaim a sense of humility in the face of the awe and wonder of creation. She pointed out how many of the animals in Job’s vision are now extinct or threatened, and suggested the writer would be surprised at how many of God’s rhetorical questions we could now answer in the affirmative. We do god-like things such as move mountains, but we have no wisdom. We cannot predict what negative outcomes will result from our arrogant domination of nature. With the tumult of climate change, perhaps God speaks through the storm.

Third, Davis Hankins of Emory University read a paper titled “A Critique of Pure Fear: The Wisdom of Job’s Prose Tale.” He made a very interesting argument about the “testing” of Job in light of Kant’s distinction between legality and morality. Hankins argued that Satan cannot imagine that Job would love God “for nought,” meaning totally unconditioned. If Job curses God in light of the testing, Satan wins. But, Satan also wins if Job blesses God, because it would be a case of misfortune driving a person closer to God, something that is common in human grief. What happens, however, is that Job’s response is unconditioned and unconditional, “pure fear” without reward or succor of any kind. This was a very interesting way of looking at the moral dilemmas in Job, and I look forward to seeing Davis’ work in the future.

Finally, we heard Bennie Reynolds of UNC Chapel Hill read his paper, “Adjusting the Apocalypse: How the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C Updates the Book of Daniel.” The Apocryphon is an apocalyptic text from the Qumran scrolls that, Bennie argued, was written to update the end-time predictions found in Daniel 9, 11, and 12. He spent some time discussing which “three priests” are intended by the Apocryphon writer, something that I don’t know much about. However, I really enjoyed his discussion of how the Hasmonean-age writer borrows language from Daniel to revise his predictions. He suggests that the reviser wanted to say that Daniel was right, even though he might not have been correct in every detail. Of course, the writer of the Apocryphon turned out to be incorrect as well.

I spent the afternoon with my family at Greensboro’s Natural Science Center, and I will hopefully post a couple of photos later. So far, it’s been a top-notch regional meeting.