NOTES for Job 31:1-40

Proclaiming his righteousness, Job is in essence addressing not people anymore, but God. Again and again he lists his good deeds, emphasizing that all his actions fully correspond to the Torah, which he has not violated in anything (vv. 1-34). At first glance, such a dossier presented to God looks rather naive. Surely Job did not really think that God knew his good deeds less well than he himself did? But the matter, as one can see, is not this. In this case Job proclaims his righteousness as if declaring his right to certain relations with God, his right to God's attention toward him (vv. 35-40). Before us here is nothing other than religiosity in its highest and purest expression.

Indeed, any religiosity is pragmatic to one degree or another. It presupposes mutually beneficial relations with higher powers. And in this sense it is always twofold, because the source of religious feeling is still that sacred awe that from ancient times has compelled a person to bow before the Higher One. Worship and, at the same time, the striving for mutually beneficial relations: these are the two poles of any religion. Historically all religions, including those that grew out of the experience of Revelation, have been torn between these two poles. Pragmatism, when pushed to the limit, led to the complete spiritual degeneration of religion and its transformation into a form of magical practice; worship, when brought to its logical completion, eventually ceased to be religion and became simply life with God in His Kingdom, the life of which the Gospel speaks to us.

And religious righteousness in the fullness that Job displayed was the boundary beyond which religion ended. Job truly did everything possible for a person to fulfill the Torah. But as a person who had not yet gone beyond the boundaries of religion, he continued to think that relations with God had to be mutually beneficial, that the righteous person receives something from God precisely for his righteousness, as though this righteousness gives the righteous person certain rights to a defined amount of certain benefits, which God therefore must unfailingly give him, otherwise justice would be violated. Evidently this purely religious idea of righteousness was Job's main problem. And Job could do nothing about it, because he truly had reached the boundary to which a person can go at all. Only God Himself can lead a person farther. That is why Job's words came to an end: he had nothing more to say to God; now all that remained was to wait for an answer.