NOTES for Job 36:1-33

Addressing Job, Elihu composes a hymn to the greatness and wisdom of God (vv. 22-33). Without doubt, Job himself and his friends would have agreed with such words. But Elihu does not limit himself to praising the wisdom of the Creator as it is manifested in creation. He says directly that the purpose of his speech is what modern theologians call theodicy, the justification of God (vv. 2-4). The main task of such a justification was to explain where evil in the world comes from and why it so often happens that those who are ready to follow God's will live worse in this world than those who do not take God into account at all. Elihu's theory is simple: God always supports the righteous person, and if misfortune nevertheless happens to the righteous, it is nothing other than God's attempt to correct him when, for some reason, the righteous person suddenly falls into sin (vv. 5-12).

For Elihu, as we can see, this explanation is the only possible one, which is no surprise: only such a position excludes any protest from the start, while not requiring of a person merely formal obedience or acceptance of the rule of a dull force indifferent to human beings. If a person rejects God's correction, then in Elihu's eyes he becomes a hypocrite, almost worse than an open evildoer (vv. 13-15). Therefore Elihu calls Job not to take the position of a hypocrite, not to prefer wickedness to suffering (vv. 16-21). In putting forward these arguments, Elihu is, in a certain sense, inconsistent: if God has no concern for a person's righteousness or sinfulness, as Elihu himself recently claimed, why would He instruct or correct anyone? But Elihu's heart was apparently wiser than his reason. He understood that a God who creates something senseless and inhuman is not God but a monster, and his heart, it seems, rebelled against such a God no less than the heart of Job, whom Elihu wanted to convince of God's rightness. And so Elihu tries to find meaning in God's actions, although everything he had previously said about God gave no hope of this.

For Elihu, humility, as he understood it, was the key to the search for meaning. It is no accident that in his speech Elihu calls the righteous person "poor" (v. 15): already in pre-exilic hymnography, reflected in the Book of Psalms, the poor of the Lord had become a living example of humility. But that was true humility, a complete entrusting of oneself to the will of God, without which a normal and full spiritual life is impossible. Elihu, without noticing it, substituted false humility for true humility. He is not speaking of humility before God, who leads a person after Himself and opens the path of righteousness to him, but of a God who has no concern at all for an individual person, for whom all people look the same, so that both their righteousness and their sins are indifferent to Him. In that case, to humble oneself no longer meant entrusting oneself to the will of God, but bowing before a crude force utterly indifferent to human beings, behind which God is hidden as behind a veil. Such a position is, of course, very far from true humility. But it allowed Elihu to make at least some sense of what seemed to him to be God's providence. And this understanding of his, as we can see, he offers to Job on God's behalf in answer to the questions Job has been asking God.

Elihu has a high opinion of himself; he even calls himself a man perfect in knowledge. Yet what he says is something we have already heard from others, including those who preceded him in rebuking Job. Surely one cannot claim that the righteous are invariably exalted and always sit with kings upon the throne, while if they are bound in chains, they themselves are to blame and deserve it... Neither the Bible nor the reality surrounding us over the centuries supports such an unequivocal conclusion.

What is true, however, is that judgment and condemnation are close; here, in passing, Elihu expresses an important and profound thought. Indeed, when discussing a person or a problem, it is often very easy and almost imperceptible to move from analysis and calm assessment to hasty judgment, and then to accusatory conclusions that are very often unfounded. Elihu himself, however, demonstrates this very thing.