NOTES for Job 26:1-14

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.

Job calls his friends' speeches, which explain nothing and comfort no one, words for the sake of words. ‘To whom did you say this?’ he asks. We should note that, for Job and his friends, the greatness of the One Who Is is axiomatic, and any of them can praise his greatness without end. Here lies a radical difference between biblical spiritual culture and our own: to us, even God's very existence is sometimes far from obvious.

Yet Job, who knows God's greatness, still says that all human knowledge is only a microscopic fraction of the truth. ‘How little we have heard of him’: in this part of his speech, Job again insists that God's inaccessibility makes life an unbearable torment. For Job, the gift of eternity of which Ecclesiastes speaks is characterised by humanity's profound need for contact with the Creator. In this alone lie life's meaning and nourishment for the heart, as the same Ecclesiastes puts it.

One further detail catches our attention, though it is unrelated to what the author intended to say. Speaking of the Creator's greatness, he declares that God ‘hung the earth upon nothing’—an expression that poets of the Eastern Church will use in liturgical texts. The author's understanding of the structure of the universe is therefore much closer to modern views than is commonly thought.

Job is ironic toward Bildad, but there is no irony in his words when he speaks of the Creator’s greatness. For him it is subject neither to doubt nor diminution. One might even say that at last Job and one of his accusers are of one mind, were it not for certain substantial differences in their conceptions of God.

Both Bildad and Job experience fear and trembling before God, but these are not the same in each of them. In Bildad’s fear one senses too strongly the human terror of power and might; it is therefore difficult to say whether he loves God or merely fears Him. The human soul is so constituted that one’s attitude toward God is often projected onto one’s attitude toward people, and vice versa (“he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” 1 Jn 4:20). Bildad’s hardness toward Job should therefore not surprise us.

Job, however, is open to God. His fear is not panic-stricken terror but reverence before God’s boundless greatness. Yet Job is also aware of the greatness of man, who despite all his smallness and weakness is appointed by God to be the crown of creation. There is humility in Job’s heart, but no sense of being crushed, because despite all his doubts and bouts of despair, he is capable of loving the Creator.