My Redeemer Liveth

"I know that my Redeemer liveth." It is one of the sentences appointed to be read at a burial in the Book of Common Prayer, and most people have heard it over a grave long before they ever opened Job.

The objection deserves stating properly. The verse is produced as Job's confession of bodily resurrection, and the weight for that sits on the line after it. The King James prints: yet in my flesh shall I see God. The American Standard prints without my flesh. The French Bible this app ships has him seeing God when he has no flesh left. Those are opposite claims, and the difference is in the Hebrew. Nothing about the resurrection of your body should rest on a sentence that reverses between the versions on your own shelf.

Now take what survives all of them, because it is the load-bearing word. Redeemer is go'el, and a go'el is no vague benefactor. He is the relative with a legal duty: to buy back the land a poor man has sold, to answer for spilled blood, to take the case. Leviticus assigns the office. Boaz performs it at the town gate before ten elders. Proverbs warns a man moving a boundary stone on an orphan's field that their redeemer is mighty; he shall plead their cause with thee. Every use of it belongs in a courtroom.

Which is what Job has been asking for since chapter nine, where he said flatly that there was no arbitrator who could lay a hand on both parties at once. By chapter sixteen he is plainer: O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour. He wants somebody with standing who will still be alive when he is not, and who will stand up. That claim is in verse 25, and it is in every translation ever made.

So which have you actually been leaning on this week: a promise about the condition of your body, or the knowledge that somebody is going to stand up and take your case?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 174 is Set in Families (Psalm 68:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two