NOTES for Job 7:11

Unlike his friends, Job is no longer afraid to ask God uncomfortable questions. A religious person usually confines communion with God within certain ritual frameworks that clearly define what one may ask God about and what one may ask Him for. Job has no time now for religious conventions. He had been religious too long, had trusted too long in a God whom, as it turns out, he never truly knew.

It would have been better, of course, to become better acquainted with Him under other circumstances, but these are the circumstances that exist. In any case, Job knows one thing for certain: from a religious point of view he has nothing with which to reproach himself. He has done everything he could, and even more. What is happening now does not fit into religious frameworks - and so down with those frameworks; let us speak plainly, without conventions and rituals.

Job asks God a direct question: what do You want from me? My death? Well then, if that is so, I am ready; no one lives forever on earth. But why did You give me the life I am living now? What meaning does it have? What am I supposed to see, to understand? You are before me, Job says to God, and I can neither live nor die, because You give me neither one nor the other. The most terrible thing for Job is precisely this meaninglessness: it turns out that he did not know his God at all.

And now, face to face with Him, Job understands nothing at all; the meeting with God has become for him a theater of absurdity. A nightmarish absurdity from which there is no exit. If God is like this, then what can one expect from Him? What can one expect from life at all? Perhaps then all of life is only absurdity and nightmare? Job's friends cannot help him in any way: for them, even putting the question this way sounds blasphemous. No wonder: they have not been in that theater of nightmarish absurdity where Job has been and where he continues to remain.

The issue here is not the illness as such, but precisely the complete illogic and meaninglessness of what is happening, at least from Job's point of view. One can understand and accept punishment for sin, but how can one understand and accept punishment for nothing? And if it is not punishment, then why is everything happening this way at all? Why to him, to Job? There is no answer, and this is the most terrible thing. Job needs an answer, but he will have to seek it himself: his friends, bound by religious fear, have turned out to be poor helpers.