NOTES for Job 16:1-17:16

In response to his friends' speeches, Job turns to God. He understands that he will hear nothing new from his friends. Just as he understands that there can be no question of support from them. He reproaches his friends: if you were in my place and I comforted you in just this way, how would you feel? Yet, on the other hand, Job understands that his case is not a human matter. It cannot be contained within the bounds of ordinary human religiosity. Only God Himself can resolve it. And Job longs to reach God. He has only one desire: to speak with God face to face, just as one person can speak with another. To do the very thing his friends consider utterly impossible, even blasphemous.

But for Job this is his only chance: if God shows him not only His power but also His face, then some meaning may enter his life. Job can no longer find meaning along religious paths. He already knows all the traditional answers, but they can do nothing to help him. The situation is extraordinary. His friends, however, simply cannot understand this. Or rather, they do not want to. They would dearly like everything to be as it was before, so that they would not have to reconsider anything in their own lives or their own religiosity. Hence the unrelenting desire of all three friends to turn night into day, as Job puts it.

To Job it is obvious that his former life has collapsed, that it has passed away for good. That he cannot be cured. That what he needs is not a cure but resurrection, a complete renewal of his whole life. Job is beginning to sense this. He already understands that there is now only one road open to him: down to Sheol. If God can show him another, it can only be through a miracle, a miracle his friends do not even contemplate. Night can turn into day for Job if God so wills. His friends, however, want to persuade him that there is no night at all, that he has merely found himself in life's shadows. He has entered a dark patch, so to speak, but never mind: things will soon brighten up. The shadow will vanish. Night will turn into day.

The main thing is patience and trust in God. It is these words about patience and trust that infuriate Job most of all. Because they are spoken by people who have never experienced anything like what Job is experiencing now. When someone has Sheol ahead of him, those staying behind would do better simply to keep silent, rather than encourage the one descending there with cheerful platitudes and religious moralizing. But Job's friends cannot understand this, and Job cannot understand why such obvious things simply fail to get through to them.

Answering Eliphaz, Job tells his friends directly that they do not understand him at all and do not want to understand him (Job 16:2-3). He says to them: if I were in your place and you in mine, it would cost me nothing to "comfort" you in the same way with meaningless general phrases and common religious truths (Job 16:4-5). Meanwhile, Job is waiting for an answer not from his friends at all, but from God (Job 16:20). He accuses God precisely of his misfortunes, asserting that none other than God Himself has abandoned him to the mercy of fate, as the wicked are abandoned, destroyed his family, and sent him an illness that Job did not deserve at all (Job 16:6-17). And yet Job speaks of his heavenly Advocate (Job 16:18-19). At first glance this transition from despair to hope may seem inconsistent. But the seeming inconsistency is resolved at once (Job 16:21-22).

As we can see, Job connects his hopes precisely with the fact that a face-to-face meeting with God, like a person's meeting with another person, is still possible. Then there is hope that God will value Job's righteousness by relating His holiness to a human measure. For now, however, Job has to defend his righteousness not only before God, but also before his friends, who do not want to understand him or support him in his search for meaning. Job perceives his friends' words as nothing but mockery (Job 17:1-2). He asks God to stand up for him before his friends, whose heart, in his own words, is "closed to understanding" (Job 17:4-7).

Job has no doubt that his friends are being hypocritical in their communication with him (Job 17:8-9). Religious fear makes them fail to notice the obvious: Job's situation is such that it cannot fit into any traditional religious framework; from that point of view Job has no hope and can have none (Job 17:13-16). But Job's friends behave toward him as though his situation were completely ordinary, as though nothing special had happened, and as though it were enough simply to wait a little and everything would normalize by itself and become as it was before. In Job's own words, they "try to turn night into day" (Job 17:10-12). It is no wonder that Job finds no true wisdom in his friends' words, and that all their consolations only irritate him.

Job calls his friends miserable comforters and rejects their speeches. Indeed, they have moved far too easily from consolation to reproach. Yet Job also understands that if he himself were in the accusers' place, he might behave in the same way they do; he now understands many things more deeply than his friends. When Job says that God has delivered him to the lawless and cast him into the hands of the wicked, one may conclude that he counts among them the self-confident accusers who try to lecture him under the claim of friendship.

But after his speech might be taken as a complaint against God, Job calls out to Him. Although Job wants to contend with God, even as he challenges Him he is not deprived of faith and hope in Him. He asks the Lord to protect him not only from disasters but also from those people whose heart is closed to understanding... who consign their friends as spoil, that is, who abandon them in distress. Through his despair and utter bewilderment we can see that, in spite of everything, Job's attachment to God does not leave him.