As I was reading over Job, one specific stanza caught my attention. Job says in 7:13-15, "When I think my bed will comfort me and my couch will ease my complaint, even then you frighten me with dreams and terrify me with your visions, so that I prefer strangling and death rather than this body of mine." This passage helped me see Job's pain on a deeper level. Sleep is supposed to pull us away from our pain, at least for a moment. In the epics we have read lately there has been a great emphasis on sleep as this type of escape from pain. Job does not even have that. This lack of restful sleep allows us to truly understand this torment he has been placed under. Sleep is a blessing from God, so it makes sense that this be taken from him to under these conditions, but it is hard to understand a life without at least a few moments of quiet. This goes to show just how blessed we are, I suppose.
P.S. I commented on Caleb's post
I though this was really interesting! I hadn't thought about the fact that sleep might have been one of the physical blessings that might have been taken away from him.
ReplyDeleteThis does make it a lot more painful. And yeah, sleep has been repeatedly shown as a sort of refuge in other texts - I hadn't even thought about the symbolism of sleep in that regard. Really interesting.
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