NOTES for Job 8:1-22

As we can see, Job's words increasingly irritate his friends. And if Eliphaz still tries to be objective and friendly, another of the friends taking part in the conversation, Bildad, falls directly upon Job with reproaches (vv. 1-2). He says to his friend: how long will you go on accusing God? After all, He cannot possibly be wrong; He punishes only those who deserve punishment (vv. 3-4). In essence, Bildad says nothing new to Job; he only repeats what Eliphaz has said. He says: if you really are righteous, then God will confirm that you are right (vv. 5-7). The only new argument in Bildad's mouth is an appeal to tradition, to the opinion of the fathers (vv. 8-9).

But this opinion, in essence, only supports settled and generally accepted religious ideas: the wicked person is never successful; he will disappear from the face of the earth and dry up like grass without water (vv. 10-19). To Job, in the event of submissiveness, Bildad, like Eliphaz before him, promises a quick end to the trials sent by God and the return of his former prosperity (vv. 20-22). Such a reaction by Bildad to Job's words hardly has a rational explanation. It looks as if Bildad is simply afraid of what he has heard and reacts completely irrationally, as often happens to people under the influence of fear. And his reaction is all the sharper because this is religious fear. Such fear is characteristic, to one degree or another, of all religious people, and it appears when the inner world of a religious person is threatened with deformation or even destruction.

Indeed, what Job has said must have seemed almost blasphemy to any religious person, for at first glance he dared to call into question the rightness of God Himself, His right to judge each person and to issue His own decisions without accounting to anyone for anything. The thought that a person could doubt God's rightness seems monstrous to religious consciousness, because religion is only the work of human hands, and a human being, especially a religious human being, understands perfectly well that he cannot speak with God as an equal. The experience of revelation is another matter: in such experience, sacred awe born from the experience of God's real nearness often stands alongside boldness, born where God intentionally diminishes His greatness so that His communion with a human being may become communion between equals. But the experience of such communion is the experience of revelation; religion as such does not know it, and therefore religious consciousness perceives it at best as audacity, and at worst as blasphemy.

Job's friends cannot help him at all in his search for the answer to the main question: why? And Bildad's speech is the best proof of that. Bildad, however, appeals not so much to personal experience as to tradition. He offers many quotations from the books of the sages, which, beyond any doubt, prove his, Bildad's, main thesis: nothing bad can happen to a righteous person, and if something like that still happens to someone, then that person is not righteous. It is a religious scheme as old as the world, one that easily allows Job's problem to be presented, in essence, as a false problem. There is no problem of a suffering righteous man; there is the old, long-solved problem of a suffering sinner. Here again is the same desire not to solve Job's problem, but to smooth it over. And the best way to smooth it over would be to fit it into the framework of religion, where there would be traditional mechanisms for resolving it and ready-made answers to the questions Job is asking.

Eliphaz did this more subtly. He relied, among other things, on his own spiritual experience, especially since that experience had helped form and strengthen Eliphaz's own religiosity. Eliphaz sees that Job's religiosity is wavering, and he offers him something that could strengthen it. Bildad is doing essentially the same thing, but unlike Eliphaz, he has no experience of his own, so he offers Job the experience of the ancestors, Tradition, in its place. It is a sure move: Tradition is unquestionably important. But only when it is received properly.

Genuine Tradition always carries within itself the experience of the spiritual life of earlier generations. But it also carries the religious forms characteristic of those generations, in which the bearers of Tradition expressed their experience. If one wants, even in genuine Tradition one can find religiosity and stop there. One can turn certain ancient books, for example, into a book of quotations, where statements on any given topic can always be found, much as Bildad does. Then Tradition disappears, and only tradition remains, the work of human hands.

That is essentially what Bildad offers Job to reinforce Job's religiosity. But Job needs something else. He does not need the restoration of his own religiosity. He needs an answer to the main question, without which there is no life for him. Not only no spiritual life, but no life at all. Everything is that serious for Job. And his friends still hope to "talk away" his problem, to find religiously correct words for it, words that, once heard, will make the problem disappear on its own.

In his self-confidence, Bildad surpasses everyone who answers Job, and categorically, without having the facts but guided by general considerations, he declares that Job's sons rightly suffered for their sins. Bildad is right when he says that God is just, but it is strange that he does not take into account that after the fall the world lies in evil, and therefore much of what happens in the world does not correspond to the Creator's intent. For some reason, both Bildad and moralists like him forget that there is much evil in the world regardless of whether disasters rightly fall on people, and we have no right to call every calamity a punishment for sins.

Bildad's hope in God is completely right, but it is joined to a judgment he has taken upon himself willfully. In essence, Bildad puts himself in God's place and tries to decide on His behalf, without having the slightest grounds for doing so.