NOTES for Job 19:1-29

Job reproaches his friends for their hard-heartedness because of their unceasing accusations against him. His defense rests not only on the natural desire to uphold his own dignity, but also on more general considerations: even if we accept that Job has been punished by God, do his friends, if they can still be called that, have the right to accuse him as well, and especially to speak as though they know God’s will? By confidently voicing their own theories in God’s name, do they not put themselves in His place? While reproaching Job for violating His will, do they themselves follow it?

The issue is not that the accusers, like every human being, cannot themselves be sinless, nor even that they judge confidently and without grounds while lacking a complete picture of what is happening and being incapable in principle of seeing the whole. They are driven by mercilessness and a readiness to trample anyone who stumbles; thousands of years before Nietzsche, they follow the principle he proclaimed: “Push whoever is falling.”

Job, however, even as he laments and grieves, continues to hope in the One who on the last day will raise him from the dust. Job’s troubled heart is more open to God than the minds of his “friends.”