NOTES for Job 21:1-34

Job, it seems, has no difficulty refuting all his friends' arguments about recompense for the righteous and punishment for sinners. At least as far as this world is concerned. This is hardly surprising: the world lies in evil, and it would be strange if righteousness governed its existence. In a fallen world, only sin can rule, and Job understands this perfectly well.

So, indeed, do his friends, who nevertheless try to refute the obvious by appealing to the traditional writings of the sages. Yet Job's friends overlook one crucial point: all the texts they quote, directly or indirectly, presuppose what theologians today sometimes call the eschatological horizon. Put simply, their authors see every situation, including those involving rewards and recompense, from the perspective of God's eternity. They perceive each such situation in the fullness of time, when everything has already been determined and every last detail settled.

But if one looks at the world from within time, as a process not yet completed and not yet brought to the fullness of time, one will see neither the triumph of righteousness nor recompense for the righteous. Nor, indeed, the due punishment of sinners. It is precisely this quite obvious fact that Job points out to his friends. Why? Perhaps because Job sees no prospect other than Sheol, which levels everyone, so that there can no longer be any question of recompense there?

That, of course, is also possible. But there is another possibility: finding himself at an existential dead end, Job begins to realize that the very religious concept of inevitable recompense, whether after death or postponed until the end of time, is inadequate. That it fails to accord with certain fundamental laws of spiritual life. For the only reality accessible to a person in life is the reality of the present moment, the reality that exists here and now.

To live for future recompense is to live not in reality but in illusion. And here it no longer matters whether recompense comes immediately after the end of one's earthly journey or at the end of time: in either case, it is something that does not exist here and now. Thus a religious person whose life is sustained by the expectation of recompense lives by something unreal. The point is not whether they will receive what they expect, but that here and now they are compelled to live by something that, at any rate, is not yet part of their life. To live by what does not exist.

And since it is impossible to live by what does not exist, such a person is left with nothing but their own ideas of what awaits them at the end of the road. And of what they themselves must be like to live up to their ideal. To live by ideas, fantasies, sometimes even illusions. But Job has no fantasies, no illusions, no hopes left. As long as there is a future, one can imagine anything at all about it and live by that imagining. When there is no future, all that remains is to live in the present. And here religion can offer no help. Something else is needed. But Job does not yet understand what that might be.

Job's friends had so often repeated to him the familiar truths about the fate of the wicked that Job finally decided to answer their instruction seriously. He demolishes the common ideas about the reward of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked in this world. He says to his friends: look around; are there not many wicked people who prosper? They live comfortably and die peacefully, thinking neither about God nor about the commandments (vv. 7-15). Job himself, of course, understands that the wicked are mistaken when they think they achieve everything by themselves. He has no intention of becoming like them by denying God's involvement in human life (v. 16). But the fact remains: in a fallen world, the fate of the wicked is often more prosperous than the fate of the righteous (vv. 17-18).

One could suppose, in keeping with ideas widely held in those days, that children would be punished for the sins of their fathers. But besides the fact that punishing some people in place of others can hardly be considered just, it is not really punishment at all: after his death the wicked man will no longer know anything about what is happening in the world of the living, including what happens to his own children (vv. 19-21).

Of course, God knows better when, whom, and how to judge (v. 22), but in that case the question of justice remains unanswered, because in a world where the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, there is no room to speak of it (vv. 23-25). And if we remember that postexilic Judaism knows nothing of recompense after death, and death merely makes everyone equal (vv. 25-26), then it turns out that there is no justice not only in the world of the living, but also in the world of shadows. If that is so, then all the lofty words of Job's friends about the punishment awaiting the wicked are worthless (vv. 27-34). Of course, Job does not object to his friends simply for the sake of argument. For him, the prosperity of the wicked and the disasters of the righteous become another proof that God, as it appears, has no concern for people. He sees this situation as part of the absurdity that the world and his own life have become for him after the God of religion was no longer enough for him. And commonplace maxims about good and evil could no longer help him.