NOTES for Job 11:1-20

The sharper the questions Job asks God, the more frightened his friends become. The third of Job's friends taking part in the conversation, Zophar, in fact directly accuses Job of wickedness and almost of blasphemy. For him all of Job's questions and all his turmoil are only empty talk (vv. 1-3). Such a reaction may seem like ordinary contempt, but if so, this contempt is apparently conditioned by the same religious fear that determines the behavior of Job's other two friends. In fact, the questions Job asks can prove destructive for religious consciousness if only a religious person tries to give them an honest answer, because precisely one distinguishing feature of religious consciousness is a very cautious attitude toward any experience of direct revelation.

This, of course, is more characteristic of pagan religiosity, but even a religion that has grown on the foundation of revelation still remains religion in a certain respect and therefore presupposes the presence of a certain distance between a person and God, a kind of "safe distance" that may be reduced only in an extreme case. But Job wants precisely to meet God face to face. It is no wonder that this frightens Zophar, as it frightens Job's other two friends. Realizing that he cannot answer Job's question on the merits, Zophar tries to deprive it of meaning. He says to Job: are you so sure of your purity? Perhaps you deserve a far heavier punishment than the one that has now fallen on you. Has God, out of mercy, perhaps hidden something more from you (vv. 4-6)?

Of course, this is not at all an answer to the question Job has asked. Zophar does not intend to answer; he wants to force Job to be silent, to give up the questions he is asking, and to do so voluntarily. He says to Job: look at who God is and who you are. Can you make yourself equal to Him? Can you know Him? And does He not know better than you whom, when, and how to judge (vv. 7-11)? And, as if failing to notice that Job himself is asking God precisely for a just trial, he says to him: would it not be better for you, without clever evasions, simply to turn to God, having cleansed yourself of all sins? Then everything will be well again (vv. 12-15), and a religious idyll will begin. Prosperity, which the righteous person deserves, will return to him, while the wicked, as is proper for him, will be put to shame (vv. 16-20).

With these words one of Job's friends, Zophar, tries to explain the need to suffer in silence. Zophar's thoughts about the Creator are deep, and his words are just. The trouble is that the rightness of his speech is rightness "in general," with no relation to a living, suffering person. He tries to force Job's fate into a bare scheme. And although his call to hope in the Lord is right and reasonable, this schematic thinking, multiplied by proud self-confidence and arrogant indifference to another person's pain, introduces serious distortions into his logic and devalues the true thoughts contained in his reasoning.

Zophar reproaches Job for empty talk, but for some reason he does not want to understand that by his own words he gives Job the right to return that reproach to its original address.

Sometimes people set forth something common knowledge and generally accepted, so obvious that it needs no proof. Who, indeed, would argue that God is all-knowing and that man is limited in his knowledge? And from this premise it is not hard to arrive at that conclusion of everyday, ordinary religiosity: if that is so, it is better to sit quietly and keep your mouth shut. A person is born like a young donkey, no smarter than that, and still he takes it upon himself to reason about the works of God, and even to make claims against God.

Here, of course, we have not conscious aggression, but the simple nervous reaction of a religious common person disturbed in his religious serenity. But it becomes an integral element of the religious picture against which the existential catastrophe experienced by Job in this particular text unfolds. His friends, in general, do not care how the argument ends; what matters to them is that their world not collapse the way Job's world has collapsed. And therefore it matters that Job behave more calmly and with more restraint, that he not generalize and draw far-reaching conclusions. In the world, everything is simple, and there is no need to complicate anything.

Job is advised to live more simply: find what in his life had been wrong until now and what he may not have noticed, reconsider everything anew, shake out his own life, so to speak - and then, perhaps, everything will change, the problems will disappear, and everything will again be as before. As the saying goes, it is easy to sort out someone else's trouble. But it is not only this: here there is also the confidence, characteristic of popular religiosity, in the saving and healing power of established forms of life (including religious life) in themselves.

Do everything as one ought, as the fathers did; simply begin again the way it is customary to begin, and everything will be fine. Somewhere there was a failure - well, let us try to restart the machine. In this way, a modern person sometimes reboots a computer in the hope of getting rid of the problems that have arisen, counting on the problems disappearing by themselves after the reboot. With computers, it should be noted, this sometimes happens, but only if the problems are not too serious. But a human being is not a computer. A reboot will not help here.