NOTES for Job 8:3-4

As we can see, Job's words increasingly irritate his friends. And if Eliphaz still tries to be objective and friendly, another of the friends taking part in the conversation, Bildad, falls directly upon Job with reproaches (vv. 1-2). He says to his friend: how long will you go on accusing God? After all, He cannot possibly be wrong; He punishes only those who deserve punishment (vv. 3-4). In essence, Bildad says nothing new to Job; he only repeats what Eliphaz has said. He says: if you really are righteous, then God will confirm that you are right (vv. 5-7). The only new argument in Bildad's mouth is an appeal to tradition, to the opinion of the fathers (vv. 8-9).

But this opinion, in essence, only supports settled and generally accepted religious ideas: the wicked person is never successful; he will disappear from the face of the earth and dry up like grass without water (vv. 10-19). To Job, in the event of submissiveness, Bildad, like Eliphaz before him, promises a quick end to the trials sent by God and the return of his former prosperity (vv. 20-22). Such a reaction by Bildad to Job's words hardly has a rational explanation. It looks as if Bildad is simply afraid of what he has heard and reacts completely irrationally, as often happens to people under the influence of fear. And his reaction is all the sharper because this is religious fear. Such fear is characteristic, to one degree or another, of all religious people, and it appears when the inner world of a religious person is threatened with deformation or even destruction.

Indeed, what Job has said must have seemed almost blasphemy to any religious person, for at first glance he dared to call into question the rightness of God Himself, His right to judge each person and to issue His own decisions without accounting to anyone for anything. The thought that a person could doubt God's rightness seems monstrous to religious consciousness, because religion is only the work of human hands, and a human being, especially a religious human being, understands perfectly well that he cannot speak with God as an equal. The experience of revelation is another matter: in such experience, sacred awe born from the experience of God's real nearness often stands alongside boldness, born where God intentionally diminishes His greatness so that His communion with a human being may become communion between equals. But the experience of such communion is the experience of revelation; religion as such does not know it, and therefore religious consciousness perceives it at best as audacity, and at worst as blasphemy.