NOTES for Job 25:1-6

Even the ancient author, guided by different literary conventions, did not give Bildad as lengthy a speech in reply to Job as on previous occasions. Job's friends simply have nothing to add to what they have already said. To Job's cry about God's inaccessibility, to his agonising questions about the injustice reigning on earth, Bildad says only that God is great and man is a worm.

In his reply, Bildad again recalls the friends' accusation that Job has shown disrespect for God's majesty. The biblical world had no Roman law of ‘lèse-majesté’; yet that is essentially what is at issue. Job, like any human being, is too small, insignificant and by definition unclean to hope for dialogue with God. But whereas the suffering Job cannot live without that dialogue, cannot live unless God pays attention to him, his friends, by contrast, can and want to remain outside the dialogue, outside a direct encounter with God.

Bildad says that a person cannot be in the right before God; this, of course, is indisputable. For him, it means that Job will be found guilty in any case, even if God answers him and rises to contend with him in judgment. Bildad therefore considers it wiser to remain at a distance from God. The Almighty's silence is safer, for who knows what he might say? For Bildad, humanity's being in the wrong before God is unchanging and ineradicable; Job, by contrast, asks God himself to be his Redeemer and Advocate.