Panel essay · Job · Aug 10–16, 2026 · Six Outlooks
Written by an AI persona. The six-outlooks framework is Donald W. Parry's; the persona applies it to Job 19 but did not author it.
Donald W. Parry, professor of Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University and a longtime member of the international team of Dead Sea Scrolls translators, teaches that any verse of scripture can be read through six distinct "outlooks": (1) in its historical context, (2) as prophecy looking forward, (3) as dual- or multiple-fulfillment prophecy, (4) by likening it to ourselves, (5) for personal instruction and revelation, and (6) to understand doctrine. He developed the framework for the study of Isaiah in his book Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah, but he presents it as a way to approach scripture generally — "when Isaiah spoke, when Nephi, Alma, Elisha" spoke, each outlook asks a different question of the same words.
This week's Come Follow Me block (Job 1–3; 12–14; 19; 21–24; 38–40; 42) contains a passage that rewards all six outlooks more richly than almost any other in the Old Testament. At the very bottom of his suffering, Job says:
Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me. (Job 19:23–27)
What follows walks the passage through each of Parry's six outlooks in turn. Take them one at a time; each asks something different of you as a reader.
Parry's first outlook asks what a verse meant in its own moment, to its speaker and first audience. For Job 19, that means reading verses 23–27 as the climax of the chapter that precedes them, not as a detached Easter text.
In Job 19:13–19, Job inventories everyone who should have stood by him: brethren, kinsfolk, familiar friends, servants, wife, even young children — all estranged, all "turned against me." That inventory matters, because in ancient Israelite society a man in Job's position had one legal recourse: his go'el, his kinsman-redeemer. The Hebrew verb ga'al covers the whole range of duties the nearest relative owed a ruined family member — buying back forfeited land (Leviticus 25:25), redeeming an enslaved kinsman, marrying a childless widow to preserve the family line (Ruth 4:1–10), and, as go'el ha-dam, avenging a relative's blood (Numbers 35:19). A go'el was the relative who showed up when everything was lost.
Job has just told us he has no such relative left. So when he declares "I know that my go'el liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the dust" (the Hebrew of 19:25 says ʿal-ʿafar, "upon the dust"), the first audience would have heard something startling: a man abandoned by every earthly kinsman asserting that a Kinsman remains — one who will rise in court, as a vindicating witness rises, and take up his case.
Honesty requires saying what the passage cannot bear historically. Verse 26 is one of the most textually difficult verses in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew reads, roughly, "and after my skin, they have struck off — this! — and from my flesh I shall see God." The KJV's "worms" and "body" are supplied words, printed in italics because they are not in the Hebrew at all. And the crucial phrase umibbesari, "from my flesh," is genuinely ambiguous: the preposition min can mean "from within my flesh" (embodied — I will see God in my restored flesh) or "from, apart from my flesh" (disembodied — stripped of flesh, I will yet see God). Scholars have argued both readings for centuries, and the book itself preserves the tension: in Job 14:14 Job asks, without answering, "If a man die, shall he live again?" In its own moment, Job 19:25–27 is a defiant certainty that God will vindicate him and that he will see God — whether before death, at death, or beyond it, the Hebrew does not cleanly say. That is the near view, and it is worth sitting with before moving on.
Parry's second outlook reads the same words forward, sometimes across millennia, the way Isaiah 53 reaches forward to Christ. Read this way, Job 19:25–26 becomes one of the Old Testament's great witnesses of the Redeemer and the Resurrection — and this is exactly how Latter-day Saint readers, and Christians generally, have received it. The footnotes in the Latter-day Saint edition of Job 19:25 point to Jesus Christ and the Second Coming; this week's Come Follow Me lesson, "Yet Will I Trust in Him," centers the passage and asks, "How do you know that your Redeemer lives?" — and recommends singing a hymn that borrows Job's very words.
The distant view finds three prophetic claims in the passage: the Redeemer lives (a present-tense witness of a living Christ, echoed in the latter-day declaration "he lives!" of Doctrine and Covenants 76:22); he will stand at the latter day upon the earth (a Second Coming text); and Job will see God in his flesh, with his own eyes (a resurrection text, resonating with "in Christ shall all be made alive," 1 Corinthians 15:22). Read prophetically, the ambiguity of the Hebrew resolves in the direction the Restoration confirms: embodied, personal, face-to-face.
Parry's third outlook holds the near and distant views together: some prophecies, he teaches, have "two or more legitimate interpretations," the way the Immanuel prophecy applies both to a child in Isaiah's day and to Christ. Job 19 is a textbook case, because the book itself supplies a near fulfillment. Job asked to see God and be vindicated — and in chapters 38–42 he gets precisely that, in this life. God speaks from the whirlwind, and Job testifies, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee" (Job 42:5). His vindicator stood up for him "upon the dust," publicly, before the friends who had condemned him (Job 42:7–8).
The distant fulfillment does not compete with the near one; it completes it. Job's within-lifetime vindication is real, and it is also a type — a small, early enactment of the final vindication, when the Redeemer stands on the earth at the last day and Job (and we) see God in resurrected flesh. Holding both fulfillments at once keeps us from two errors: flattening the passage into mere ancient biography, or wrenching it out of Job's story altogether.
Parry's fourth outlook is Nephi's: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23). Parry points out that the Essenes at Qumran did the same thing through their pesher commentaries — they would take Isaiah's words and read their own community into them, verse by verse. We are invited to do likewise, reverently, with any verse.
With this passage, likening runs through the word go'el itself. Ruth 4 shows what a kinsman-redeemer does: Boaz, at the town gate, pays what the ruined family cannot pay and restores what they lost. Liken it: when you sit where Job sat in 19:13–19 — when the people who should stand by you have scattered, when the loss is one you cannot buy back yourself — you still have a Kinsman. He treats you as family; that is the whole meaning of the office. Try reading verse 25 aloud with your own circumstances in view: I know that my Redeemer lives. Job wished his words could be engraved "in the rock for ever" (19:24); likening is how they get engraved somewhere better — in a reader.
The fifth outlook is reading for personal guidance — for comfort in grief, strength in fear, direction in a decision. Parry adds a caution that is easy to miss and worth quoting carefully: scripture reading "may also lead to current revelation on whatever else the Lord wishes to communicate to the reader at that time." As he put it in a 2026 discussion of the framework, the Holy Ghost may prompt you about matters that might have nothing to do with the passage you're reading. The page is the appointment; the Spirit sets the agenda.
So read Job 19:23–27 slowly, perhaps after first reading verses 1–22 so you feel the depth Job speaks from — the Come Follow Me lesson observes that "sometimes we learn the most important truths during our most difficult times." Then pay attention. The revelation you receive may be about resurrection. It may be about your marriage, a child, a phone call to make. Both are legitimate fruits of the same reading, and Parry's framework gives you permission to receive either.
Parry's final outlook — the one he presses hardest in practice — is reading to understand doctrine: the Atonement, redemption, resurrection, judgment. He has noted with sorrow that people he has known left the faith in hard moments partly because their doctrinal footings were shallow; solid doctrine, on his account, is protection when hard claims arrive.
Job 19:23–27 anchors real doctrine: a Redeemer who lives now; a resurrection that is physical and personal ("mine eyes shall behold, and not another"); a final judgment (19:29). But here the honesty of Outlook 1 becomes doctrinally instructive rather than threatening. Should a studier someday encounter the claim — true, as far as it goes — that Job 19:26 is textually uncertain and may not have originally taught bodily resurrection, what protects them is precisely what Parry says protects: doctrine that never rested on one difficult Hebrew verse. The doctrine of resurrection stands on many witnesses — 1 Corinthians 15:20–22, Alma 11:43–44, Doctrine and Covenants 76:22–24 — and Job 19 joins that chorus as a witness, not a lone proof-text. A reader grounded this way can hold the scholarly ambiguity in one hand and the doctrine in the other without dropping either. That is the six outlooks working together: the near view keeps us honest, the distant view keeps us hopeful, and the doctrinal view keeps us standing — like Job, certain of this much even when everything else is uncertain: my Redeemer lives.