In the midst of his plenty, distress will overtake him; the full force of misery will come upon him. – Job 20:22

Today's Scripture Reading (August 31, 2024): Job 20

Humor can be a strange thing. Or the things that we call humor can be weird. It isn't just the off-color jokes; tragedy is so often used as a source of our humor. For instance, In the days after the Stock Market Crash in 1929, humorist Will Rogers was quoted as saying. "When Wall Street took that tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and speculators were selling spaces for bodies in the East River" (Will Rogers). At the same time, Vaudeville Comedian Eddie Cantor, who lost most of his wealth in the 1929 Crash, joked that "when he requested a 19th-floor room at a New York City hotel, the clerk asked him: "What for? Sleeping or jumping?" Do you find the words funny? Maybe the truth that there were no mass suicides by jumping out of downtown New York skyscrapers helps. Yes, suicides increased between 1929 and 1932, but it was not the epidemic that we seem to think it was. The idea that people were jumping out of windows just isn't true. And it certainly did not happen at the time of the crash but in the aftermath of economic turmoil over the next few years.

That is not to say that suicides didn't happen because of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. On October 24, 1929 (Black Thursday), Chicago real estate investor C. Fred Stewart asphyxiated himself with gas in his kitchen. On October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday), John Schwitzgebel shot himself to death inside a Kansas City club. Down to his last four cents, Wellington Lytle left the following suicide note in his Milwaukee hotel room: "My body should go to science, my soul to [Secretary of Treasury] Andrew W. Mellon and sympathy to my creditors" (Time Magazine, December 23, 1929).

There might not have been mass suicides on the day of the crash, but the financial disaster of 1929 that continued through the first few years of the 1930s did prompt some to take their own lives. They understood the pain of which Zophar speaks. Zophar's description here describes the terror of the financial collapse of October 1929 well. On that day, self-sufficient people lost everything, often including the hope they needed to live.

Zophar's mistake is in assuming Job fell into that category. Yes, Job had been wealthy, but his hope had always been placed in his God. The financial loss was not central to Job's misery; it was not just his financial situation that had changed. He had also lost family and health, which were much more important to Job than his wealth. In light of this, Job struggled to cling to the hope he needed to live. 

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Job 21