NOTES for Job 20:1-29
Zophar's speech, replying to Job's reproach that his friends lack compassion, is constructed in such a way that it is almost impossible to find fault with it. Yet the meaning of his words skims the surface of life; Zophar's wisdom is very simplistic. The joy of the lawless is short-lived, and all their good things will vanish like smoke. The evil a lawless person does will eventually turn against them. That, in essence, is all Zophar says, once the poetry is removed. His speech is built out of edifying sayings, but piling them up does not make them a proof. Is there any deeper meaning in Zophar's speech than ‘the rich cry too’?
In essence, Zophar, like Job's other two friends, speaks not of what life is actually like but of what it ought to be like from his point of view. In reality, destruction, death and ruin await all human works on earth, as Ecclesiastes will write a little later. Perhaps the heart of the position the author expresses through Job's friends, who speak of the destruction of the wicked, lies elsewhere: the wicked, they say, ought to suffer for their wickedness, and evil ought to turn bitter in their mouths. But for Job's friends the converse follows too: the righteous ought to prosper. Zophar wants the world to be ordered as he describes it. In such a world, one can be content with oneself and have no fear of one's fleeting days, provided one meets a limited set of not particularly difficult requirements.
The world order Zophar and his companions describe is, by its nature, similar to any more or less developed system of criminal law. In it, the bad are punished and the good rewarded. The shadow of Charles Darwin looms behind Job's friends: they describe a world in which people are supposed to become good through natural selection. Perhaps that is not such a bad idea... But can the theory of natural selection be applied in the moral realm? The prophet Jeremiah spoke bitterly of this: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots? Can you, then, do good when you are accustomed to doing evil?’ (Jer. 13:23) Here we encounter the Old Testament's central spiritual problem and central revelation. Human beings cannot, by themselves, overcome slavery to sin, and no natural selection will help them do so. The answer to this human powerlessness was the revelation, in the prophets' preaching, of the Saviour, the New Covenant and the outpouring of God's Spirit.
In the Darwinian world order so persistently promoted by Job's friends, there is no place for the Living God. They often repeat that it is he who punishes the wicked and the lawless; in reality, this is done by the world order they describe, by a universal law. Of course, it was in Second Temple Israel that this position spread and grew. Yet it is deeply rooted in the religious psychology common to humanity, and people often reproduce it in other religious and historical contexts. The question is: does this position accord with the Almighty's design?