NOTES for Job 11:1-20

With these words one of Job's friends, Zophar, tries to explain the need to suffer in silence. Zophar's thoughts about the Creator are deep, and his words are just. The trouble is that the rightness of his speech is rightness "in general," with no relation to a living, suffering person. He tries to force Job's fate into a bare scheme. And although his call to hope in the Lord is right and reasonable, this schematic thinking, multiplied by proud self-confidence and arrogant indifference to another person's pain, introduces serious distortions into his logic and devalues the true thoughts contained in his reasoning.

Zophar reproaches Job for empty talk, but for some reason he does not want to understand that by his own words he gives Job the right to return that reproach to its original address.

Sometimes people set forth something common knowledge and generally accepted, so obvious that it needs no proof. Who, indeed, would argue that God is all-knowing and that man is limited in his knowledge? And from this premise it is not hard to arrive at that conclusion of everyday, ordinary religiosity: if that is so, it is better to sit quietly and keep your mouth shut. A person is born like a young donkey, no smarter than that, and still he takes it upon himself to reason about the works of God, and even to make claims against God.

Here, of course, we have not conscious aggression, but the simple nervous reaction of a religious common person disturbed in his religious serenity. But it becomes an integral element of the religious picture against which the existential catastrophe experienced by Job in this particular text unfolds. His friends, in general, do not care how the argument ends; what matters to them is that their world not collapse the way Job's world has collapsed. And therefore it matters that Job behave more calmly and with more restraint, that he not generalize and draw far-reaching conclusions. In the world, everything is simple, and there is no need to complicate anything.

Job is advised to live more simply: find what in his life had been wrong until now and what he may not have noticed, reconsider everything anew, shake out his own life, so to speak - and then, perhaps, everything will change, the problems will disappear, and everything will again be as before. As the saying goes, it is easy to sort out someone else's trouble. But it is not only this: here there is also the confidence, characteristic of popular religiosity, in the saving and healing power of established forms of life (including religious life) in themselves.

Do everything as one ought, as the fathers did; simply begin again the way it is customary to begin, and everything will be fine. Somewhere there was a failure - well, let us try to restart the machine. In this way, a modern person sometimes reboots a computer in the hope of getting rid of the problems that have arisen, counting on the problems disappearing by themselves after the reboot. With computers, it should be noted, this sometimes happens, but only if the problems are not too serious. But a human being is not a computer. A reboot will not help here.