#21 - The Honest Struggle — Job 7 & 14

Objectives

We will analyze the author’s use of metaphor, imagery, and contrast in Job 7 and 14 to explain how the speaker develops the idea that human life is brief yet still reaches toward hope, supporting the claim with text evidence and original commentary.

I will identify tenor, vehicle, and purpose in images from Job 7 and 14; compare how Job and Dickinson treat time; and write an ATC short constructed response that uses two pieces of text evidence and commentary on imagery or contrast.

Notes

Tenor: The underlying idea, topic, or person you want to talk about or understand.
Vehicle: The physical object, concept, or image whose traits are borrowed to explain the tenor.
Purpose: To use the tension and similarities between the vehicle and the tenor to express abstract or unfamiliar concepts in a concrete, memorable way.
Example: Time is a thief.
- Tenor: time
- Vehicle: thief
- Purpose: To show that time steals moments away from us stealthily and irreversibly

Assignment

Step 1: Metaphor / Simile Hunt

Work with a partner to document: tenor & vehicle & purpose / so what?

Job 7: (1)hired laborers, (2)slave longing for the evening shadows, (3)toss and turn until dawn, (4)weaver’s shuttle, (5)life is but a breath.
Job 14: (6)flowers that wither away, (7)shadows, (8)if it is cut down, it will sprout again, (9)riverbed becomes parched and dry.

Step 2: Brevity of Life Triad

Work individually to complete step 2.

Place Dickinson’s last stanza, Job 7:6–10, and Job 14:1–2 side by side.
What does each text do with time?
Does time comfort, accuse, or vanish?

Step 3: SCR practice:

Prompt: How does the speaker in Job 14 develop the idea that human life is brief yet still reaches toward hope? ATC: answer, two pieces of text evidence, commentary on imagery or contrast (tree vs. man).

Step 4: Academic conversation:

Is complaining a failure of the human spirit or evidence of it? Ground every comment in a line from today’s chapters.

Dickinson's Last Stanza

Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity -

Job 7:6-10

6 “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope. 7 Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath; my eyes will never see happiness again. 8 The eye that now sees me will see me no longer; you will look for me, but I will be no more. 9 As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so one who goes down to the grave does not return. 10 He will never come to his house again; his place will know him no more.

Job 14:1-2

1 “Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. 2 They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.