NOTES for Job 8:1-22
Job's speech and prayer, in which he addresses God as a living Being capable of understanding him, outrage his friends. They think Job shows insufficient reverence for the Most High. Bildad's reply therefore sounds noticeably harsher than Eliphaz's first speech. ‘How long will you speak like this? The words of your mouth are a raging wind!’ Eldad exclaims. The closest modern slang equivalent would be ‘talking a load of rubbish’. The essence of Bildad's reproach is that Job's words seem to him groundless and destructive. Does Job really think God can be wrong, when he is always right ‘by definition’? Whereas Eliphaz spoke of a law according to which sin is punished by suffering, Bildad reasons in the opposite direction: if Job's sons suffered, they must have sinned against God. If Job himself is innocent, let him pray, and God will immediately give him peace. Bildad's argument follows almost word for word what God said through the prophet Ezekiel about personal responsibility: children do not answer for their parents' sins, nor parents for their children's (Ezek. 18:1–24). This can be seen as an argument for the Book of Job having been written after the period of the exile, when Ezekiel was active. Moreover, and much more importantly, the substance of Bildad's words is repeated by the Jews mocking the crucified Christ: ‘He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he delights in him’ (Matt. 27:43). Thus Bildad's apparently infallible position has no bearing on life, in which everything is far more complicated.
Finding no new theological arguments beyond Eliphaz's, Bildad turns to a statistical argument: ‘It has always been this way.’ ‘Ask the generations of old,’ he urges Job, and offers a poetic description of the destruction of the wicked. Bildad seems not to have heard what Job said in the previous two chapters, so he tries as best he can to keep some glimmer of optimism alive in him. ‘Everything will be all right,’ Bildad says. What powerless, empty words—and how often, in such a situation, we simply have nothing else to say!