Job 38:4-7, which is part of Yahweh's response to Job, reads as follows:
"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy. (NRSV)
One will often find Latter-day Saints appeal to Job 38:4, 7 as evidence that everyone personally pre-existed, while (mainly Evangelical Protestant) critics will argue that the Bible only teaches notional/ideal, not personal pre-existence for people (with the exception of Jesus). While I am a convinced Latter-day Saint, and do hold to the doctrine that everyone, not just Jesus, personally pre-existed (e.g., see my post The Christological Necessity of Universal Pre-Existence), I do not believe that the texts from Job necessarily support the common LDS reading thereof. With that being said, I do also disagree with some who point to Job 38:7 as prima facie evidence that humanity did not personally pre-exist.
Kevin L. Barney, in his "On Preexistence in the Bible" (review of ch. 3, "Persons and Pre-Mortality: The Mormon Doctrine of Preexistence" in J.P. Holding, The Mormon Defenders: How Latter-day Saint Apologists Misinterpret the Bible [2001]) wrote the following in response to a somewhat informed Evangelical critique of LDS theology on Job 38:4 and 7:
Job 38:4
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Holding quotes an LDS writer as stating that this verse verifies an actual preexistence, for “[T]his questioning acknowledges that Job was somewhere.” (p. 55). Holding counters that the passage is better read as implying that Job was nowhere and not yet created. He further states that this verse echoes the sarcastic comments of Eliphaz in Job: 15:7-8:
Art thou the first man that was born?
or wast thou made before the hills?
Hast thou heard the secret of God?
and dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself?
The first question we must ask ourselves is whether we can even posit the notion of a preexistence in the Old Testament at all, given common scholarly assumptions of an early monistic conception of the soul. As we have shown, however, clear evidence exists from the earliest times for a belief in something—even if we do not call it a “soul”—that could and did exist apart from the body. Further, even under conventional scholarly views, the belief in a separable spirit did develop in Old Testament times, and the process and timing of this putative development are not well understood. In this connection, the dating of the passages Holding discusses has some relevance, for, very roughly and all else being equal, the later the date of a passage, the more likely an allusion to a preexistence may be present. Holding discusses passages from Job, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah and Zecheriah. Of these only Jeremiah is clearly pre-Exilic (since 1:5 is generally considered to be among the authentic jeremianic oracles), and that just barely (i.e., it would date to the late seventh century). Although the setting for Job is in pre-Mosaic times, internal evidence suggests a date of sixth or fifth century B.C.45 The most likely date for Ecclesiastes is third century B.C..46 Zecheriah 1-8 is contemporary with Haggai and dates to the Persian period after the Exile, but scholars have wildly varying opinions on whether Zecheriah 9-14 (the portion containing chapter 12) is pre- or post-Exilic, concerning which no consensus has been achieved.47 In any event, since for the soul not to exist after death would contravene Christian doctrine, an Evangelical presumably would object to a line of reasoning that would deny preexistence based on the presumed monistic character of the body and soul. And in fact Holding does not argue against preexistence in the Old Testament on this basis. I too believe that existence apart from the body in some sense was something believed in from at least the second millennium B.C. Therefore, although I acknowledge here a possible issue worthy of further investigation, for purposes of this paper I will simply assume that a belief in preexistence was at least conceptually possible even in pre-Exilic texts.
I would agree with Holding that there is no necessary implication in the passage
that Job was somewhere at the dawn of creation. Neither, however, is there a necessary
implication that he was nowhere. The focus of the passage is not on existence, but on knowledge; Yahweh’s speech out of the whirlwind is designed to show how ignorant Job is of the mysteries of the universe. This theme is announced by Yahweh’s opening words in Job 38:2-3 (RSV):
Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
Holding’s reading that Job did not exist is certainly possible. If Job did not exist, he absolutely could not know anything about the creation. But this is not a necessary reading. The point is not his lack of existence, but his present lack of knowledge and understanding. Job’s preexistent spirit could just as easily have been waiting in the guph, and the result would be the same: his utter ignorance of the creation. It should be perfectly obvious that any understanding of preexistence must posit a veil of forgetfulness when the soul enters this life, since none of us can actually remember such a state. I see no emphasis here of preexistence vel non, but of Job’s utter ignorance of the nature of things in the face of God’s greatly superior wisdom.
Turning to the comments of Eliphaz, Holding is correct to see them as sarcastic, but they do not constitute an argument against preexistence, as Holding would have it. When Eliphaz asks Job whether he was the first man who was born, he was alluding to an old Semitic myth of a Primeval Man who existed before the creation of the world,48 as if he were one of the Titans from Hesiod’s Theogony. In v. 7b, the wording about being “brought forth before the hills,” is an allusion to personified Wisdom, who was “brought forth before the hills” according to Proverbs 8:25b. Job was not Primeval Man, nor was he Wisdom itself. In his grief, Job forgets the limitations of his present humanity, and this again relates to knowledge, not existence, as the remainder of the speech makes clear. The KJV renders v. 8a as “Hast thou heard the secret of God?” This passage would be better rendered, as in the RSV, “Have you listened in the council of God [besod
eloah]?” The point is not that such knowledge is impossible for humans to possess, for surely the Lord’s prophets have participated in his divine council. But Job was not one of them and this is therefore knowledge he did not possess. Job was not in a position to challenge God.
So, here I would agree with Holding that this passage does not constitute a proof
of the preexistence, but I would by the same token disagree with his suggestion that it may actually be a proof of the lack of a preexistence.
Job 38:7
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Holding argues that the above passage is inconsistent with an assumption that Job
38:4 necessarily posits a preexistence. In his own words, “Why would God imply that Job was somewhere, but not around where or when He was laying the foundations of the earth, and then go on to say that the sons of God (supposedly preexistent men, which would include Job) were there and shouting for joy when He laid those foundations?” (p. 55) That is a good question. I have already acknowledged that I do not see Job 38:4 as necessarily a proof of the preexistence, so for me the point is moot. But Holding wishes to make another point about this verse. He quotes an LDS writer as arguing that since Hebrew ben, “son of” (the plural as used in Job is bene elohim, “sons of God”), literally means “offspring,” Job is here referring to the spirits of men in pre-mortality.. In response, Holding suggests that God might have more than one type of offspring, of varying natures, and he further points out that “son of” need not refer to literal, physical offspring, as in the expression “sons of the prophets.” He further states that there is no indication in Job that future men were among these sons of God that came before God.
Now, this raises the related issue of the Mormon rejection of the creator/creature dichotomy. Mormons see God and man as being of the same type, of the same species, whereas most Christians see God as being wholly other than man. Now, to a great extent, this issue is beyond the scope of the present paper, as I have not laid the groundwork to discuss it effectively. Here I will limit myself to a few key points.
First, Holding is correct that the Hebrew word for “son” is not always to be taken
literally. There was a common Semitic idiom in which the “son of X” was understood to be something having the qualities of X. Therefore, the sons of the prophets were those having the qualities of being a prophet; that is, they were prophets. So, to be a “son of man” was a Semitic way of saying one was a human. This simple formula eventually took on messianic characteristics, but a common way to render the expression in the New Testament is not with the literal “Son of Man,” but rather simply as “Man,” since by Semitic reckoning a son of man is another, somewhat genericized way of saying “man.”49 Therefore, Holding is correct in saying that the sons of God are not necessarily premortal men; the expression could mean that they are divine beings, or gods of the divine council. They are subordinate to Yahweh, but they are indeed gods or, as the concept was eventually softened, angels. On the other hand, the expression can also be quite literal, as in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where the number of the sons of God matches the number of the nations to which they are assigned, 70, which is also more than coincidentally the number of the actual sons of El as we know it from the Ras Shamra tablets. Now, in the immediate context of Job 38 I see no indication that the sons of God were necessarily premortal men. But the basic concept of humans as the sons of God in some contexts makes good sense. Psalm 8:5 reports that God made man “a little lower than God/the gods [elohim].” As we have seen, the Canaanite background to the Old Testament rephaim was of post mortem divinized kings and other elites. The Ugariticking list precedes each name with the word ‘l, “god.”50 Although in the Hebrew Bible the concept was broadened to include those beyond the elites, the concept of post mortem divinization was retained, at least in certain texts. We have already mentioned how the witch of Endor consulted Samuel on Saul’s behalf; in doing so, she saw gods (elohim) coming out of the earth, who were the divinized dead, one of whom was Samuel (1 Sam. 28:13). And if humans can become gods in the hereafter, there may be some limited settings where they are appropriately described as sons of God, whether in this life or even in the premortal world. There are, after all, numerous passages where God describes us as his children, or where we describe God as our father. We are, then, by scriptural definition, the “sons of God,” in whatever sense the relationship is intended in those passages. And in at least some of those passages the original sense was probably a literal one. We could go on at length, but the matter has already been addressed by Daniel C. Peterson near the end of his lengthy article on Psalm 82 and John 10, in a section under the caption “Humans as Sons of God,” and I refer the reader to that article for further detail.51
Notes for the Above
45 James L. Crenshaw, “Job, Book of,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:863-64.
46 James L. Crenshaw, Ecclesiastes, Book of, in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2:274-75.
47 David L. Peterson, “Zecheriah, Book of,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6:1061-68
48 Bruce M. Metzger, ed., The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford, 1962), 627; Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), 115. This figure, known as Adam qadman in later traditions, eavesdropped on the Divine Council and appropriated Divine Wisdom, much as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. [my note: my copy of the same printing has this information on p. 109; perhaps Kevin made an error or there are pagination differences between various copies of the 1965 printing of Pope’s commentary]
49 So Pope, Job, ad loc., renders “and all the gods exulted.”
50 M. Dietrich, O. Loretz and J. Sanmartin, eds., Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit einschliesslich der keilalphabetischen Texte ausserhalb Ugarits, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 24 (Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Berckes, 1976), 1:113.
51 Daniel C. Peterson, “’Ye Are Gods’: Psalm 82 and John 10 as Witnesses to the Divine Nature of Humankind,” in The Disciple as Scholar: Essays on Scripture and the Ancient World in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, ed. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry and Andrew Hedges (Provo: FARMS, 2000, 471-594 at 542-553.
