Job 1:7 · World English Bible
Job 1:7 Meaning Yahweh Said to Satan
Yahweh said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, “From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
What does Job 1:7 mean?
The two speakers here are really two sides of one being. The adversary is not an outsider who slipped past the gate.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Job 1:7 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
The two speakers here are really two sides of one being. The adversary is not an outsider who slipped past the gate. He is the darker half of the same God, the part that doubts, suspects, and is never satisfied. That is why he keeps moving over the earth. Restlessness like his cannot settle anywhere.
When the ruling voice has to ask where this figure has been, the reason is plain. The bright, commanding side of God does not keep watch over its own dark side, so that side roams the world on its own. God asks the question because a part of him has been acting in a place where he was not looking.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Job 1:7 today
- Think of a trait you cannot stand in other people. Ask honestly where that same thing lives in you, even in a small or well hidden form.
- When someone irritates you today, for the length of one breath hold the possibility that the irritation is telling you more about yourself than about them. You do not have to say anything, just hold it.
- When you feel the restless urge to pick up the phone, change the tab, open the fridge, pause instead of acting on it. Ask what you are moving away from, since restlessness is usually running from something rather than toward it.
What in you have you stopped keeping an eye on because you would rather not know it is there?
The same truth in other traditions
Taoism · the Tao Te Ching on opposites
Being and nonbeing bring each other forth. Call one thing good and you have created its opposite in the same breath.
Hinduism · Shiva
The same god destroys and creates. The tradition does not split him into a good half and a bad half, because the ruin and the making come from one hand.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
Look inward. Whatever restlessness you keep finding out in the world is a thing you carry with you, and no change of place has ever cured it.
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