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Record W4413341685 · doi:10.1093/jts/flaf046

Hedged in, Hunted, Haunted, Hiding: Divine Presence and Absence in the Dialogues in Job

2025· article· en· W4413341685 on OpenAlex
Brittany N. Melton, Katharine J. Dell

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Theological Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicBiblical Studies and Interpretation
Canadian institutionsRegent College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article examines the complex conceptualization of divine presence and absence in the dialogue sections in the book of Job through seven categories, which exemplify a disjointed portrayal of God and the dissonance between Job’s perspective and that of the friends. The metaphors Job uses for divine presence are more dynamic: hedging, hunting, haunting, wounding, creating, and destroying. The friends reuse these same metaphors but repurpose them in the service of theological explanations, rarely speaking out of personal experience. Job alone voices the inexplicability that God is ignoring him and hiding his face, or simply inactive, whilst for the friends, Job’s experience of God’s absence is justifiable. Job’s disjointed portrayal of divine oppressive presence alongside absence can be explained by its rhetorical function, which is to demonstrate the depth of his suffering in order to persuade either God or the friends to alleviate it. Therefore, in addition to illuminating the multi-layered nature of comprehending conceptualizations of divine presence and absence in Job, broader implications are drawn for interpreting portrayals of God in the Hebrew Bible, in the recognition that the rhetorical force and circumstances of the speaker impact the reader’s evaluation and expression of God’s presence and absence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.388
Threshold uncertainty score0.307

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.083
GPT teacher head0.310
Teacher spread0.227 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it