Job 38:8-15

Continuing the previous post. Notice the regularity of the next three verses all with the same contour to begin, all with the tuba on the rest note but three differing moves to the tonic. The speaker is teaching with announcement and on the rest note even though we read it as forceful. Are we reading it well?

You'll notice also the awkward beginning of this question continuing the earlier one from verse 6 before the shout and exultation of verse 7. The shouts are an interruption. 

Job 38:8-10

Verse 8-9 -- birth imagery. The sea is clothed and swaddled: restraint without violence. Gentle language for all the rhetorical force of the speech. Care for the sea. We are right to support the Orca and the Coral.
Dominion is not domination. Rule (rdh) and control (cbw), the glosses I used in Genesis 1 concerning the human, do not require hostility. God does not bind the sea but wraps it. The sea is so powerful, a decree is shattered (wbr). Channels and runaway lanes give the sea a way to manage its turbulence. Wisdom or shrewdness (I use both glosses for kcm) is knowing where force may move, not necessarily eliminating force.

This speech so far is an interrogation encompassing the domains of earth, stars, and sea, each governed by unseen measures. The sea is held. Do we recognize a wisdom that precedes moral accounting?

Job 38:11

The sea is contained by speech. It's cresting force is acknowledged, allowing its wave to disintegrate where it breaks. We can stand in the waves knowing (with care) that they will break. And we can study such waveforms right to the infinitesimals of the wavelengths of light and the sounds of music.

Across all these 8 verses, from 4 to 11, the overall musical contour of each verse is the same whether the subject is foundation, joy, birth, clothing, channeling, or limits. Joy and limit belong to the same sequence. Boundary is not the opposite of freedom. It is its condition.

The play explores the demand of suffering: explanation will not suffice, proportionality is unthinkable, moral calculus does not work. The problem of suffering is contained within this higher order wherein we have been placed before an inescapable encounter?

הְֽ֭מִיָּמֶיךָ has two accents on the first syllable. In what order should they be applied? Haïk-Vantoura assumes that the result is g-e, effectively an ornamentation of the first note. I have interpreted the g as prevailing since the silluq is ambiguous because it is used in the text under two distinct names and for two distinct functions. This long story is more thoroughly explained in my introductory paragraphs in the book.

Dawn, a cosmic servant, executing an assigned task, actively grasps the hem of the earth. Note how verses 12 to 14 are joined by the opening note, each verse to the one previous. The garment formed by the separation of light from darkness is metaphorically shaken so that the wicked are tossed as if in a blanket, or to mix metaphors, as the clay is imaged by the seal. So it appears that the moral order is subordinate to the cosmic scale we have just come down. Dawn illuminates the topography and light exposes or is withheld and the exalted arm broken. Visibility already judges.

Where are we at the foundation of earth, at the joy, or the shouting of the children of God, and at the containment that followed? Who am I that I should know? Perhaps we are getting there but with great difficulty. We too with Job, will sigh over dust and ashes. But wisdom delights. Time is definitely strange. There is no passage of time in an electromagnetic field. Waves without mass have no pocket watch. Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 8. Perhaps even we are 'in Wisdom' as we explore the universe.

From Proverbs 8

I think you can see how much work there is to consider the music in the text. Check out the About page for available volumes.