Job's answer to Bildad's remark turned out to be predictably caustic (vv. 2-4). For him, seeking an encounter with the living God, commonplaces had now begun to feel like real mockery. As if mimicking his friend, Job himself delivers a short but expressive speech glorifying the greatness of God (vv. 5-14). It is as though he wants to tell Bildad that if it comes to a contest in eloquence, he will not come in last. But Job has no time for rhetorical exercises: his life is drawing to an end, and he still has not learned the main thing. Bildad's remark about the incomprehensibility of God's ways was, of course, only a commonplace, but Job no longer had any use for commonplaces. He needed not commonplaces, but answers to the questions tormenting him. He cannot treat words as lightly as his friends do.

For Bildad, what he said essentially meant nothing; it was only a general remark. For Job, however, it was an answer to the question he had raised, and an utterly inappropriate answer at that. Empty talk was not part of his plans, and he was not wrong to perceive attempts to draw him into idle chatter instead of serious conversation as a kind of mockery. That is how people usually speak to children or to the mentally ill; meanwhile, Zophar had already hinted that Job says what he says because he is not in his right mind.

Answering these accusations, Job delivers a speech in a spirit that was close and understandable to his friends, as if wanting to show them that all their arguments and commonplaces are as well known to him as to them, and that he does not reject the partial rightness, fitting within the framework of religion, that these commonplaces carry. But Job also wants to reach the minds and hearts of his friends. He wants to convince them that their rightness is not the final truth, that there is something greater, the very thing he, Job, is seeking and cannot find. For Job's friends, the greatness of God revealed in the beauty and harmony of the universe turns out to be almost the highest form of revelation. Of the three, the experience of personal communion with God is known, it seems, only to Eliphaz, but even in his life it does not occupy the central place. For Job, however, just such an experience now comes to the foreground; the greatness of God revealed in His creation is an axiom for him. But such natural revelation is not enough for Job, because it does not answer the questions that trouble him. He wants to receive an answer from God Himself, while his friends think that a person in his right mind and sound memory would never demand anything from God, much less an answer to questions without which, as Job's friends thought, one can live quite well.