Subject: Re: Dinosaurs and Job
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 11:38:48 +1030
From: Robert Wild < 
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

Ken Smith wrote:
> Why are some people so insistent that parables are confined to the New
> Testament?
> Is there anything wrong with the idea that Job and Jonah may both be
> parables, or, at least, ancient writings in the form of what would now
> be described as parables?

Hey! someone got back onto topic!
Ken,

There are definate parables in the OT - eg: 
Ezekiel 17:2, 24:3

And to reverse the question - is there anything 
wrong with the idea that Job and Jonah are 
historical events arranged by God to serve a 
specific purpose?

Leaving Job aside for a moment, whalers used to 
find all sorts of stuff inside the stomaches of 
whales when gutted - including small boats that 
had been in there a while. Jonah was in the fish 
for three days and three nights. There are many 
examples of people today that have survived in 
adverse conditions over a period of time without 
adequate food or drink - There was that fellow 
trapped in the snow a few months back, the fellow 
who was wandering around in the WA deserts for 42 
days, and the lone survivor of Thredbo.

Getting back to Job, it seems that the main objection 
to a historical account possibility is the style of 
writing - being called ‘poetic’, and poetic 
language is not in everyday use. There are two 
objections to this that I can think of 1) In those 
times, written material was not very common, or cheap. 

Anything that was written usually involved a fair cost 
to the ‘author’ - so they spent time making 
sure it was right. 2)Written language is almost in every 
language very different from written communication, 
formal or otherwise. A good example would be the 
Egyptian Hieorglyphs. The ‘glyphs found on the 
monuments were quite different from the handwritten 
‘glyphs as found on the Rosetta Stone - which 
contained the same phrase written in the ‘High’ 
language, another ‘low’ language and Greek.

Another example today is Chinese - there is the formal 
Mandarin “high language” and the everyday 
language sometimes referred to as Cantonese.

In most cases the high language is usually poetic.

Another point that is relevant to this is (of all things) 
Homer’s Ilyiad. That is a poetic epic that was 
always thought to be fictional or a metaphor for 
something else - righ until the day Schliemann plowed 
straight into the foundations of the alledged city of 
Troy -  city that is only mentioned in Homer’s poems.

Factual evidence that give strong indication to the 
Ilyiad’s possible historical account. The same is 
possible for Job - we havn’t found the evidence yet.

cheers
Rob

> Ken Smith
> --
> Dr Ken Smith < >