NOTES for Job 20:1-29
In answering Job, Zophar returns once again to the punishment of the sinner. In fact, he says nothing new. He merely repeats the commonplaces that were well known through the writings of the sages at the time when the Book of Job was written. Zophar only stresses that, sooner or later, a sinner cannot escape God's punishment. It is merely a matter of time. In this too, Zophar says nothing new. He simply repeats the traditional answer to a question that nonreligious people have always put to religious people: if God exists, and if He is just, why are there so many prosperous sinners in the world? The traditional answer of religious people has been: everything in its own time.
It is a vague answer, and in its vagueness quite universally applicable. Yet there was also something more definite: an appeal either to recompense after death or to the day of the Last Judgment. This established the inevitability of retribution that the religious mind requires. For a religious person cannot conceive of the world except as a place where everyone is tested for conformity to certain religious standards of conduct, receiving either the corresponding reward or the corresponding punishment according to the outcome.
The religious mind does not usually envisage either the world or the human being in any other way. And if, for example, the righteous person receives no corresponding reward, and the sinner no corresponding punishment, in this world during earthly life, this means only that both are postponed, either until the end of that person's earthly journey or until the end of time.
But in any case, the righteous should not grumble, nor should the sinner rejoice: sooner or later, everyone will receive what they deserve. And beyond earthly life, reward or punishment becomes still more significant and, so to speak, more tangible, for in that case both remain with a person forever. So Zophar too advises Job not to demand judgment and justice from God right here and now, but to wait. All the more so because what is at stake is God's eternity, before which temporary suffering, like everything temporal, including the sinner's temporary prosperity, is nothing.