Just to keep things going - here's a poem from TS Eliot for this day of Epiphany The Journey Of The Magi A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a runn...
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I wondered about ultimately obedient. What about Jonah? his 'in depth' obedience is moot at the end. (Yet I cannot condemn him - too much of a good example and too much a good story).
re arguing - Ticciati's "Job and the Disruption of Identity" (at the UVIC library) is a very fine reading. The noun derived from argue/reason in Hebrew is the word referee - a word she develops in the dialogue with Job - altogether a good read. I posted a bit on her work here on one of my old blogs. http://stenagmois.blogspot.ca/search/label/Ticciati
Here is a snippet: But it is in the theme of reasoning (the word groups around a word meaning - to prove, decide, judge, rebuke, reprove, correct, be right and so on) that runs through the poem - that there arises the special role or character of referee. The friends fail, Elihu is indeterminate, God invites Job to be his own referee and he accepts with his hand over his mouth, and Ticciati puts God in this role also.