Where is the Land of Uz? October 30, 2007
Posted by cantueso in Latin, art, books, history, poetry.trackback
It is an example of a question to which there is no fact-based answer. The Land of Uz is not in Google and is not on the map. Maybe all knowledge about it is lost, because the poem is much older than even the oldest maps.
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The people of Uz lived in tents. Those tents, some of them, would have been made of blue, purple and scarlet linen spread out and held down by strong pegs.
They seem to have been fairly rich, had lots of cattle and time to talk; you would imagine nothing but silent sand and cactus for miles around. But Job had three thousand camels and seven thousand sheep.
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Nobody knows how old the text is. The strange thing is to find out that they considered their cities crowded. It says that even so far back the wild donkey “scorned the multitude of the city and the shouts of the drivers”.
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…. This would likely be the region. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
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It is poetry from the desert and there may have been more than one author writing successively, in stages. The book is only some 20 pages, but it is difficult to read.
It begins with God and Satan betting on Job’s integrity, and Job is placed under immense stress. He suffers and with his friends discusses why God would allow pain to exist. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Job says that the birds in the air and the fish in the sea say the same : that God does not act according to our ideas of justice.
“Ask the cattle and they will tell you, or ask the birds in the sky or the fish of the sea.”
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The photo of the desert flower is from a US travel agency. The picture with the two camels is a fragment from a Klee painting.
Link to source text in English…….Greek…….Hebrew……..Latin
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Wasn’t Satan the elder son of God? Lucifer? To whom God let a lot of things pass? Jung read all the book of Job and wrote himself one… Quite interesting… pointing out the first moral failure of God against man…
The book of Job is only some 30 pages long, so, indeed, if Jung was going to write a book about it, he had better read it all. And what do you mean with your “quite interesting”? The book or Jung? Or maybe your idea of Jung?
http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV8N1p1-18.pdf.
That is an account of Jung’s book “An Answer to Job”. I looked into it, and Jung’s own text is quoted extensively. It sounds awful.
I would probably not be able to comb through a mess like that.
A, when I said the book of Jung was quite interesting I mean just that… some of the things he says there are intriguing, so = interesting… I didn’t guaranteed neither that you’ll like it not that it’s the best reading material… I couldn’t read it myself more than 3/4… Did seem a bit impious (th/t’s the term?) to me and not very easy reading, that’s for sure… But awful? grrrr? I don’t have feelings that strong about most of the books…
It is generally assumed that the land of Uz is more or less what now would be western Jordan or southern Syria. However, what could possibly make you think that the people who lived there had \” time to talk\”? Is that to be understood as an oblique reference to modern run rabbit run conditions?
To Joan M. Weil
The reference is not to any rabbit run, but to the way Job and his friends spend their time examining the reasons God may have had to let Job suffer. –
But the meaning! I have read this ten times and still can’t get the meaning! Can’t have a story like that known the world over and/but devoid of meaning.
A story with a single meaning is an allegory or a fable or a parable. It is a story invented to illustrate a point of ethics or psychology, mostly ideological.
The story of Job is NOT of that kind. It is more like a report or a biography. When you read somebody’s life story, at the end do you ask what it means?
Do you actually believe these stories? Unless I am mistaken, and correct me if I am, some of this Job account is God’s own way of talking about Himself. Now what do you think of that? I wonder.
Yours is a junkie’s way of shilling your ware and pull a fast one, bumkin. You know how to peel an onion, don’t you?
Perhaps the land of “Uz” is none other than modern day “Uzbekistan”