NOTES for Job 26:1-14

Job calls his friends' speeches, which explain nothing and comfort no one, words for the sake of words. ‘To whom did you say this?’ he asks. We should note that, for Job and his friends, the greatness of the One Who Is is axiomatic, and any of them can praise his greatness without end. Here lies a radical difference between biblical spiritual culture and our own: to us, even God's very existence is sometimes far from obvious.

Yet Job, who knows God's greatness, still says that all human knowledge is only a microscopic fraction of the truth. ‘How little we have heard of him’: in this part of his speech, Job again insists that God's inaccessibility makes life an unbearable torment. For Job, the gift of eternity of which Ecclesiastes speaks is characterised by humanity's profound need for contact with the Creator. In this alone lie life's meaning and nourishment for the heart, as the same Ecclesiastes puts it.

One further detail catches our attention, though it is unrelated to what the author intended to say. Speaking of the Creator's greatness, he declares that God ‘hung the earth upon nothing’—an expression that poets of the Eastern Church will use in liturgical texts. The author's understanding of the structure of the universe is therefore much closer to modern views than is commonly thought.