NOTES for Job 8:1-2

Job's friends cannot help him at all in his search for the answer to the main question: why? And Bildad's speech is the best proof of that. Bildad, however, appeals not so much to personal experience as to tradition. He offers many quotations from the books of the sages, which, beyond any doubt, prove his, Bildad's, main thesis: nothing bad can happen to a righteous person, and if something like that still happens to someone, then that person is not righteous. It is a religious scheme as old as the world, one that easily allows Job's problem to be presented, in essence, as a false problem. There is no problem of a suffering righteous man; there is the old, long-solved problem of a suffering sinner. Here again is the same desire not to solve Job's problem, but to smooth it over. And the best way to smooth it over would be to fit it into the framework of religion, where there would be traditional mechanisms for resolving it and ready-made answers to the questions Job is asking.

Eliphaz did this more subtly. He relied, among other things, on his own spiritual experience, especially since that experience had helped form and strengthen Eliphaz's own religiosity. Eliphaz sees that Job's religiosity is wavering, and he offers him something that could strengthen it. Bildad is doing essentially the same thing, but unlike Eliphaz, he has no experience of his own, so he offers Job the experience of the ancestors, Tradition, in its place. It is a sure move: Tradition is unquestionably important. But only when it is received properly.

Genuine Tradition always carries within itself the experience of the spiritual life of earlier generations. But it also carries the religious forms characteristic of those generations, in which the bearers of Tradition expressed their experience. If one wants, even in genuine Tradition one can find religiosity and stop there. One can turn certain ancient books, for example, into a book of quotations, where statements on any given topic can always be found, much as Bildad does. Then Tradition disappears, and only tradition remains, the work of human hands.

That is essentially what Bildad offers Job to reinforce Job's religiosity. But Job needs something else. He does not need the restoration of his own religiosity. He needs an answer to the main question, without which there is no life for him. Not only no spiritual life, but no life at all. Everything is that serious for Job. And his friends still hope to "talk away" his problem, to find religiously correct words for it, words that, once heard, will make the problem disappear on its own.