These are definitions of Job's name that have been puzzled over and discussed by orthodox scholars for close to three millennia. Entry # 347 in the "Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary" of James Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Old and New Testament is, says Strong, who is a recognized orthodox authority,  from the root defined in Entry # 340 ayab, meaning to hate (as one of a hostile tribe or party); to be hostile, to be an enemy. Entry 347 says Ijob means hated, i.e. persecuted. Then under the same umbrella definition, completely disregarding the negative significances of Job's name, Strong, in an attempt to rescue the image of Job, states that Ijob means hated and persecuted. Strong is merely doing what orthodox scholars have always done, reinterpreting data to favor a religion of animal sacrifices.

    Strong repeats the platitude of the orthodox and says that Ijob refers to Job, the patriarch known for his patience.  Is  Job really patient? Hardly. Not even close. In well over ninety per cent of the narrative, Job is just the opposite.
 

   All through my life I have heard of the "Patience of Job."  It is enough to make me humorously conclude that perhaps all these scholars who say Job epitomizes patience have never actually carefully read "Job" except for the last chapter, which is patently phoney and obviously revised.  The coda of the last chapter is like a very small caboose telling a very long line of boxcars and a very powerful locomotive that they have been going in the wrong direction.  The coda is as obviously false a resolution as can be seen in the history of well-known literature.  At least ninety percent of the narrative discusses the bad karma of Job. And that bad karma is described often using the imagery of butchery: Job feels that his limbs and organs are being separated from him, much as the limbs and organs are severed from the bodies of animals that are sacrificed and eaten. The final chapter of the Book of Job would be an ideal and easily discussed classic example of obviously revised literature in a literary criticism class.

   Any close reading of the Book of Job discovers that throughout the main body of the dialogues Job is not at all patient, that he curses God's will, is cynical, and despairing, and rejects the counsel of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and the young Elihu, all of whom without exception tell Job that all suffering, including his own, is just.
 

    Why does Job's name mean to hate, to be hostile, to be an enemy, hated, and persecuted?  The answer, we shall clearly see, does not lie in the answers given by the Jewish Rabbinical orthodoxy, nor does it lie in the unsubstantiated platitudes uttered by orthodox scholars in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Job is given the perfect name, a name that is redolent with the crimes of the orthodoxy, a name which allegorically shows the immorality of orthodox Judaism's brutal treatment of animal creatures. Job is an archetype of that immorality: as a sacrificer of God's creatures, he is a hostile enemy to them, as well as an enemy to those who defend the lives of God's creatures, the Sabeans.

    Job is a Jew of the Pentateuch par excellence. He offers burnt offerings to God according to "Leviticus" ostensibly to expiate the sins of his children. "His sons used to hold a feast in the house of each on his day: and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offering according to the number of them all; "It my be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." Thus Job did continually." Job: 1: 4-5.
 

   Chapter 1 of the Book of Job immediately introduces Job as getting up early in the morning and sacrificing animals, one for each of his ten children. The family of Job would make a circuit of their festivity. His seven sons and three daughters were to take turns eating at the house of each son.  It turns out that not only is the family of Job meeting together, so are the sons of God meeting before Jehovah.  The naive narrator presents God as asking Satan if he has found anyone as virtuous as Job during his roaming of the earth. Satan challenges God and says Job is prosperous only because God protects him so closely. So God allows Satan to have his family members killed and their home destroyed, and allows the Sabeans to kill his servants and release the animals Job had "owned."

   The fire from heaven which kills his animals and servants (1: 16) reminds the reader of the pillar of fire of the Old Testament out of which the Deity, Sabaoth, protecting and  guiding Moses speaks, a pillar of fire which is seen in the  the Lingam Purana, a work in which Shiva in a pillar of fire speaks to Brahma and Krishna.  Moreover the name Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts, is given to the Deity in the pillar of fire that defeats the Egyptians pursuing the Israelites.  The name Sabaoth itself is derived from Saba, a name of Shiva, who is also known as Pasupati, Lord of Creatures, and Protector of Cattle.
 

   However, though Job is dispossessed of a number of his sons and daughters, their home, and his cattle, that is, his wealth, he still affirms his trust in God and God's justice in the universe in a statement that has become one of the most succinct and hallmark statements of trust in God's will: "Naked came I from the womb, and naked shall I return; God has given and God has taken away. Blessed be the name of God." (1: 21)

     Therefore, in the contest between God and Satan for the soul of Job, God and Job have won round one. Points for Job. No points for Satan. But this, we see, is shortly to change radically in the dialogues that follow in which, beginning with Chapter Three, Job curses God and God's will with passion and eloquence and with a relentlessness that is anything but patient.

  The dialogues between God and Satan occur in Chapters One and Two in order to effectively introduce the battle between God and Satan, the battle between Good and Evil, that manifests itself also as a battle between Vegetarianism and Carnivorism, and between Living Harmoniously With Creation and Sacrificing Animals that takes place throughout the Book of Job. The fact that Adversary means Enemy, which is one of the definitions of Job's name, is certainly not accidental.  Job is an Enemy, an Adversary, to the creatures he sacrifices, that is, kills.
 

   It will be more than plain that the God of the main body of Book of Job is Shiva, God of the Sabeans.  This God punishes Job for his brutal treatment of his creatures, that is, his sacrificing of them. Vegetarianism as a compassionate alternative to eating the animal sacrifices is brought up quite clearly early in the Book.  The main body of Job is concerned with orthodox Job's cynicism, despair and complaints against this God who makes him suffer, or allows him to suffer, even though he has kept the word of the Torah, and the attempts of Bildad, Zophar, Eliphaz and Elihu to show Job that he has accepted a false and brutal paradigm of God and God's plan, namely that of orthodox Judaism, and that the rewards of living according to a more compassionate Way are received even in this life.

     We shall see that the counsellors of Job, the Shuite Bildad, the Naamathite Zophar, the Temanite Eliphaz, and Elihu from the family of Rama, all come from Shaivite or Sabean cultures; that Shuites and Shaivites are of the same ilk; that Naamathites, in spite of the shortcomings of orthodox ancient Hebrew dictionaries, are people of the Naama, the divine name as it is described by the Sabeans, that the Temanites are associates of the Sabeans; and that Ram is a deity worshipped by the Sabeans, a deity in the Hindu pantheon, and the hero of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana.

   In the Book bearing his name, Job is "hated" and persecuted by God himself for his bloody slaughtering of creatures. Until the last and obviously revised last chapter of the Book of Job, this God is plainly not the orthodox God of Judaism, but instead, the God of the Sabeans, or Shiva, who was considered to be the Essence of All Living Beings, who was known as Lord of the Creatures, Shiva Pasupati, and who is also known as the Protector of Cattle. The name of the God of the Sabeans, Saba, is discussed by James Hastings in his Dictionary of the Bible as Seba, Sheba, which are simply transliterations of Shiva, and Sheva with an E, in the Old Testament.  Though the orthodox scholars of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are not likely to make you aware of this fact, there is really no disputing the fact that Saba and Shiva are the same entity.  Moreover, Saba is seen immediately in the first chapter of "Genesis," though not named in our current versions of the Torah, as Lord of the Sabbath, the seventh day of rest.

    William Drummond in his Origenes points out that the origin of Judaism was in Tsabaism, or Sabaism, which in our times is known as Shaivism.  More and more people are becoming familiar with this suppressed and extremely important fact of our collective history (see viewzone or matlock.com on the Internet).  James Hastings in his Dictionary of the Bible tells us that the Sabean Culture of the Ethiopians flourished for 14 centuries, from about the 8th century B.C. to the 7th century A.D. I regard Hastings estimate to be conservative, because I believe it is based on the time line in which Ethiopia became an imperial power, when in fact Ethiopia's history as a Sabean culture goes much further back in antiquity, some Hindu scholars surmising that the aboriginal Shaivites of India may have come from Ethiopia. The Deity of the Ethiopic Books of Enoch and Noah, though simply called God in English, is clearly Shiva of the Shaivite and Vaishnava Hindu tradition. Seven mountains, seven rivers, seven heavens, an emphasis on trees, and tongues of fire, all these exist in these books and are recognizably connected with, or are attributes of Shiva, whose name means Seven.
 

     Shiva (like Krishna in his incarnation as Govinda the cowherd) is the prototype for the Good Shepherd, an image that has been "humanized," that is, treated in a human-centered fashion, by the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition which uses the image of the good shepherd not literally, but figuratively, as referring to a rabbi or priest who is benevolent to his human flock.  The late Jewish prophets, however, most of whom were vegetarian, and Jesus, who constantly quoted them, used the image literally, meaning one who in actuality does care for other creatures and protect their lives.  Jesus' cleansing of the temple, which involved not only overturning the money-changers' tables, but also chasing the animals to be sacrificed out of the temple, as well as the rationale for cleansing the temple, given in 10: 4-5 of "Epistle to the Hebrews," show a Jesus taking the Good Shepherd image so literally that it led to his death. Perhaps one of the best summaries of what comprises the Good Shepherd as opposed to what comprises the Evil Shepherd is given by Zechariah who spoke words so truthful that they have been  scrupulously ignored by all carnivorous orthodoxies for almost two millennia.

"Thus said the Lord my God: `Become shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter.  Those who buy them slay them and go unpunished; and those who sell them say,  "Blessed be the Lord, I have become rich"'; and their own shepherds have no pity on them."  Zechariah 11: 4-5.

   In contrast to the Sabean and Vaishnava vegetarian traditions which teach compassion towards all the creatures of Shiva or Krishna, both of whom have the designation of Lord of Creatures, Job is the archetype of the Evil Shepherd, not the Good Shepherd, and his sufferings and his misery occupy a very large part of the Book of Job and are not at all explained by the last chapter, which is as superficial a revision of a work of literature as can be imagined, which does not at all follow logically from the preceding narratives.

    The dialogues of the narrative show, again and again, with a redundancy that is profound, that Job suffers because he causes suffering. His body and spirit feel butchered because he has butchered God's creatures. He feels as if he is being slain by God because he is in fact the slayer of God's creatures.  In other words, in our Judaeo-Christian-Islamic history, Job is interpreted over and over again as a universal symbol of patience, because scholars from these carnivorous and animal-sacrificing traditions prefer to base their conclusions from a final chapter which occupies less than 5 % of the narrative, but which supports animal slaughter, instead of from the body of the work occupying over 95 % of the narrative, which relentlessly and profoundly affirms that God is totally just, that all creatures are to be cared for, and that if we do not care for them, there will be karmic repercussions, as there are in the life of Job, who suffers profoundly, who claims to believe in God's word (as presented by Jewish orthodoxy), who is cynical, who curses his fate, who claims God is unjust, and who is not at all resigned to the will of God as it manifests itself in his suffering body and spirit.
 

"Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?  As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.  By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed." 4: 7-9

"For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble sprout from the ground..."  5: 6.

"He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that their hands achieve no success.  He takes the wise in their own craftiness; and the schemes of the wily are brought to a quick end....But he saves the fatherless...the needy from the hand of the mighty... " 5: 12-16.

"Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?  As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.  By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed." 4: 7-9

   And Eliphaz gets right to the point through the imagery of his language. Using lions as his easily perceived representative or symbol of the human carnivore, Eliphaz lets Job know that the way of the carnivore is a way of iniquity and trouble.

"The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, the teeth of the young lions, are broken.  The strong lion perishes for lack of prey, and the whelps of the lioness are scattered."  4: 10-11.

"At destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the beasts of the earth. For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you. You shall know your tent is safe, and you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing." 5; 22-24

"Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?"  8: 3

"If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the power of their transgression." 8: 4

 "If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and reward you with a rightful habitation. And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great." 8: 5-7

"If you set your heart aright....you will forget your misery...you will have confidence, because there is hope; you will be protected and take your rest in safety. You will lie down and none will make you afraid."  11: 13, 16,  18-19.

"Does not calamity befall the unrighteous, and disaster the workers of iniquity?" 31: 3

    In order to live peacefully with the beasts of the earth, which is a Shaivite law governing the Sabeans, one by definition cannot kill them.  The laws commanding sacrifices in the Torah is a total perversion of the Hindu Shaivite and Vaishnava traditions commanding vegetarianism.  We even have a variation on the Righteous Bough or Righteous Branch imagery in that the righteous are seen to die as plants die, when they are ready to be harvested.

You shall know also that your descendants shall be many, and your offspring as the grass of the earth.  You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing floor in its season." 5: 22-27.

"Does the wild ass bray when he has grass, or the ox low over his fodder? Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt, or is there any taste in the slime of the purslane?  My appetite refuses to touch them; they are as food that is loathsome to me." 6: 5-7.

     Here in Chapter 6 Job begins what will be an ongoing motif in the fabric of  the Book of Job: he uses cruelty and brutality towards animals to describe the state of his own body/ spirit, without ostensibly seeing the correlation between his personal suffering and the suffering his has inflicted on other creatures when he sacrificed them.  The terror that the false covenant of carnivorism of Gen. 9: 2-3 justifies, is in fact felt by Job himself.

"For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me." 6: 4

 "You would even cast lots over the fatherless, and bargain over your friend."  (6: 27)

"When I lie down I say, "When shall I arise?" But the night is long, and I am full of tossing till the dawn.  My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt: my skin hardens, then breaks out afresh. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and come to their end without hope." 7: 4-6.

  Bildad reasserts that all of Divinity's actions are for a reason and can be learned from by the attentive sufferer.

"Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?"  8: 3

   Bildad, though critical of Job's attempts to defend his feelings of despair and cynicism, still affirms to Job that there is hope for his future, if he will genuinely seek God and purify himself, that is, eliminate his cattleman's ways, and the eating of flesh.  This interpretation is only too obvious a conclusion from the description of Job as the ineffectual carnivore-lion.

"If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and reward you with a rightful habitation. And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great." 8: 5-7

"If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and reward you with a rightful habitation. And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great." 8: 5-7

"For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause. 9: 17.

"I am blameless...It is all one: therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.  The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges--if it is not he, who then is it? 9: 21-24

   Job ironically describes himself as a carnivorous eagle without apparently sensing his own limited vision.  If he is a predator, does he not need to learn not to prey on other creatures, and instead live harmoniously with them?

"My days are swifter than a runner...like an eagle swooping on the prey." 9" 25-26

   One of the great joys of explicating the Book of Job has been experiencing the empathy of the author of the book, whoever that might be, and discovering the author's insistence on indirection, on letting the reader (or the listener) experience the moral of the Book through the mouth of Job himself.  Job ironically vies with his questioners as far as being his own best analyst. If Job were to listen to himself, and apply is his own criticisms of God's unjust treatment of him to his unjust treatment of the animals he has oppressed, enslaved and sacrificed--all of these acts are corollaries to being a cattleman--then Job would have the means to reform himself, a rationale for reformation coming out of his own mouth.  And here in the Book of Job, recognized as being one of the oldest books of the Old Testament, we experience a technique that we consider to be modern, and expect in modern writers who are apt to shy away from direct moralizing: a combination of irony and indirection. I would suggest to the reader that Moses used the same technique in Psalm 90.
 
 

   But make no mistake about it.  The irony and indirection are used precisely to show how Job the cattleman's indifference to the feelings and lives of other creatures is parallel to Job's assertion that God is indifferent to the feelings of Job. This is constantly seen in Job, with plenty of illustrations in Chapter 10. Job says to God:

"Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands and favor the designs of the wicked: Has thou eyes of flesh?....Thy hands fashioned and made me: and now thou dost turn about and destroy me."  10: 3-4, 8.

    As witnessed by our hospital beds full of sufferers of cholesterol-related diseases, there are no real winners in the game of carnivorism. The oppressed, enslaved and slaughtered animal loses its dignity and life, the carnivore loses her/his health. Only base appetites are satisfied: the egotistical desire to dominate another creature to the degree of killing it; and the satisfying of the  addiction to eat corpses.
 

  Job is hunted by God in the likeness of a lion, because Job the carnivore has regarded other animals as they are regarded by predatory lions, as prey, and as food, not as sacred creatures to be respected.

"And if I lift myself up, thou dost hunt me like a lion, and again work wonders against me; thou dost renew thy witnesses against me, and increase thy vexation toward me; thou dost bring fresh hosts against me."  10:16-17

  Job, who touts his own intelligence over and over, who reminds his questioners that they see nothing that Job himself does not see, nevertheless seemingly fails over and over again to see the irony and karma not only of his situation, but of his verbal description of his situation.  Job has treated cattle as a predator, so God preys on Job.

    And 10: 19 is as incisive a commentary on carnivorism as is Jesus' description of the carnivorous Pharisees as unseen graves.  Though this interpretation is considered unorthodox by the orthodox, I must remind the reader that a growing number of people are now understanding the vegetarian implications of the cleansing of the temple and the mission of Jesus to abolish the animal sacrifices that is voiced in "Epistle to the Hebrews."  Charles Vaclavic's The Vegetarianism and Pacifism of Jesus, and Keith Aker's The Lost Mission of Jesus both have much information on the vegetarianism of Jesus that is ignored by Christian orthodoxy. And even a mainstream T.V. Series, "From Jesus to Christ" omitted the word "men's" from Jesus' description of the Pharisees as whitened sepulchers full of dead bones," which is precisely the way in which Conybeare translates the phrase in his The Origins of Christianity. In other words, instead of describing the hypocrites as whitened sepulchers full of dead men's bones, making the symbol meaningful from a human perspective only, Conybeare and the editor of part one of "From Jesus to Christ" omit the word men's and make the image consonant with Jesus calling the Pharisees "hidden graves."  Talking of his own birth, Job in a state of despair says

And how can the aware reader not understand that the belly of Job is in fact a burial place for sacrificed animals, that his body too is an unseen grave?

   If nothing else, longevity statistics from time immemorial in the Rg Vedas to the present from our most advanced medical research labs verify this correlation: like it or not, vegetarians live longer and healthier lives. This is indisputable. When Job asks "Why didst thou bring me forth from they womb? (10: 18)," he asks the same question any of the creatures he has exploited and sacrificed could ask. In other words, the author, obviously sympathetic to the Sabean view, the Shaivite concepts of regarding other creatures with compassion and protecting them, is saying that our suffering is not mysterious; it is caused by the fact that we cause suffering to other creatures.

    We also see in the Book of Job an affirmation of Grace as well as Karma, in scriptures affirming that though Deity is Just, Deity is also Love, and that Love has its own indefinable transforming power, as Zophar the Na'amathite reminds us in Chapter 11.
 

   Early in Chapter 11 Zophar counters Job's view of life as meaningless, and is relentless in affirming that God is not unjust: "If he passes through, and imprisons, and calls to judgment, who can hinder him?  For he knows worthless men; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it." 11: 10-11.

    Zophar says to Job "you say `My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God's eyes," but Zophar asserts to Job that his suffering, great as Job makes it out to be, is not at great as it could be: "Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves." 11: 6  Zophar tells Job that if he decides to have a change of heart--and that's what the entire story of Job is about, the value of turning away from oppressing other beings and living instead harmoniously with them--if he leaves behind his iniquity, his oppression and slaughter of cattle, and that if there is no wickedness in Job's tent--which we can infer as a reference to one of Job's storage tents in which he kept the dismembered flesh of the slaughtered cattle that he will sell--that Job can still have a good and happy life without dread of other beings.

    And let me say that the Eastern Hindus, Jains and Buddhists have been infinitely wiser regarding how to eliminate depression and despair than the European and U.S. institutions of psychiatry (and psychology) which base themselves on investigating childhood traumas as the source of human angst, and which totally ignore the radically traumatic act of brutalizing other creatures and ingesting their adrenaline, cholesterol. and chemical infested corpses. One may conclude that the institution of psychiatry is defensively pervaded by a disproportionate number of Jews because the Jewish patriarchy, the rich Jewish ranchers of the present, like rich orthodox Christian and Muslim ranchers understand that it is useful to the cause of  orthodoxies based on the exploitation of other creatures, on subduing them and having dominion over them, and these orthodoxies will do anything they can to turn human consciousness away from the evil and depressing effects of a carnivorous diet, and insist instead on the absurdity, the stupidity really, of saying all human traumas are human-based, and have nothing to do with our relationships with other creatures.

   On the positive side, medical research on the effects of cholesterol is not so ironically helping to crumble the wobbly pillars of a human-centered science of psychiatry.

   In Chapter 11 Zophar attempts both to console Job and to provide for Job a means of consolation. We are reminded of the passage in Chapter 5 stating that Job will be at peace with the animals. And the reader familiar with the traditional texts of Hinduism and Buddhism will understand that the Vaishnava Hindu worshipping Krishna and the Shaivite Hindu worshipping Shiva are both taught that a morbid fear of death is eliminated by compassionate vegetarian living and by chanting mantras reminding the chanter of the holy and compassionate actions of their deities.
 

"If you set your heart aright....you will forget your misery...you will have confidence, because there is hope; you will be protected and take your rest in safety. You will lie down and none will make you afraid."  11: 13, 16,  18-19.

    "And none will make you afraid" is a chorus sung by the late Jewish vegetarian prophets, as well as being a Hindu, Jain and Buddhist truism on karma: the less fear caused, the less fear felt.
 
 

     Zephaniah, 3: 13, is practically identical: "You shall and lie down and none shall make you afraid."  And Zephaniah's statements come immediately after his condemnation of Israel's officials as lions, i.e. carnivores. Zephaniah specifically mentions pure offerings as coming even from beyond Ethiopia. Students of history know that Saba, or Seba, i.e. Siva, was worshiped in Ethiopia and that untainted scriptures such as the indisputably vegetarian Ethiopic Book of Noah and the Book of Enoch were being preserved by Ethiopians while they were at the same time being destroyed by the patriarchs of orthodox Judaism.  In the Ethiopic works Noah very specifically and unequivocally condemns the killing, and the eating of other animals.  No wonder the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic orthodoxies have hidden these scriptures from you, presented you with abridged versions of them, and marginalized their importance. To present their congregations with these bodies of scripture would be to saw off the very thin limb on which the carnivorous orthodoxies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sit.
 

    Isaiah, speaking of Damascus, where animals were sacrificed, says "Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins.  Her cities will be deserted forever; they will be for flocks, which will lie down, and none will make them afraid." 17: 1-2.  And Isaiah in 18: 1 also refers to Ethiopia, the culture of the Sabeans and Shiva and the preserver of purity. The Sabeans of course are the animal rights militants, the Shaivites, who released Job's cattle and, like Cain killilng Abel, killed his servants, whom we may infer did Job's dirty work of slaughtering the cattle. "Just doing my job following orders" said the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII.
 

   Here too is an echo of the well known passage in Micah, who not only affirms that there should be no war against beasts, but that when the purity of Israel is restored, there shall be peace among humans as well: "...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid..."  4: 3-4.

   We can easily go one better than Micah and see a time when there is in fact no agricultural invasion of the creature-inhabited earth and its ecosystems. In some translations of the Gospel of Barnabas, which shows Jesus predicting the coming of Ahmed or Muhammad, Jesus also says that when the Deliverer comes he will plead for the lives of creeping things, such as insects as well.  Where is there an earth uninhabited by creatures? The Brahmans and Jains, the devotees of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, Rechabites, Arab Nabateans, and earliest Chrstians and Muslims, and the Mayans leaving Tollan all understood the ultimate sanctity of all creation as it is. Humans not only cannot, they are not to attempt to improve, creation.
 

    Ezekiel uses the same refrain in describing the restoration andof Israel to its vegetarian purity, a time when neither beast nor feed on one another: "They shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them; they shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid."  34: 28.  Chapter 34 of Ezekiel is of course a classic description of the good shepherd and of vegetarian Judaism, much like Zechariah 11: 4-6.
 

    Looking ahead to the study of Islam and the Quran we will see a repeated refrain in the Quran, which is a direct reference to the phrase "and none shall make them afraid."  Over and over again, Muhammad, whose preferred diet, even according to Sunni Muslims, was vegetarian, channeled the following phrase in the Quran over and over again: "There shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve."
 

   But if the wicked persist in their carnivorous ways, oppressing and killing animals (and still wish to feel joy), says Zophar in the last line of Chapter 11, lots of luck; death will be the escape from their despair: "the eyes of the wicked will fail; all way of escape will be lost to them, and their hope is to breathe their last."  Those who chronically experience intense suffering or despair finally wish to die rather than live in a suffering state. Our personal experiences with loved ones are more than adequate proof that this is so.

   The Sabeans play a pervasively important part in the Book of Job.  They are partly responsible for the downfall of Job's family dynasty.  The Sabeans kill Job's sons and servants, all of whom follow the ways of patriarchal orthodox Judaism, the culture which not only sacrifices animals, but which claims that such sacrifices are necessary in order for humans to atone for their sins, as stated in "Leviticus." To the superficial reader, the Sabeans then disappear.  But they don't disappear at all.  In fact their Way permeates the Book of Job: the values of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, Job's more elderly friends and questioners, and the values of Elihu, who believes his elders have been unsuccessful in confronting Job with the validity of his suffering as a manifestation of God's justice, and finally, the values of God, as presented previous to the final chapter, are all Sabean values.