Welcome Mr. Morden! I like the NRSV’s I make weal and create woe. I am interested to note Alter’s making peace and creating evil. which seems a bit of a throwback to the KJV. The view of God here is similar to what one finds later in Sunni Islam. God is beyond categories. Beyond our questioning. Our portion is obedience. I think this is close to actual monotheism as the OT ever gets.
As for the textual variants of shalom/good (שָׁל֖וֹם/טוב), a scribe probably thought (perhaps even unconsciously) ‘good’ to be a better contrast with ‘evil’. This presumes shalom is more likely original as the lectio difficilior.
Yes, that makes sense. It just reminds me that all this about the Jewish copyists being meticulous with their scriptures–insofar as it is true–is from a later period.
Christians definitely created an issue for themselves when they insisted that a transcendent all-good God had excluded evil from Himself. This idea is what makes the so-called ‘Problem of Evil’ possible in the first place. For Deutero-Isaiah, and Sunni Muslims, God is all-in-all. If you can’t handle that, well then too bad. That was the answer to Job.
This is at least partly why I’ve never thought the ‘Problem of Evil’ was a very strong argument against belief in god.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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