NOTES for Job 19:25-27

These are the words of a man who did not live to see Christ's Resurrection, but who experienced in his heart a meeting with the Crucified and Risen One. This is Job, the same Job whose name has become a synonym for troubles and misfortunes. The same Job whose book's prologue was used by Goethe. Job, who dared to demand judgment and justice from God. Job, to whom God answered with a fearsome, ironic, and very loving voice: "Who is this who darkens Providence with words without meaning? Where were you when I measured the foundations of the earth?" Job, who turned out to need nothing: neither judgment nor even justice, and still less prosperity. God answered his cry. "Before, I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see You; therefore I withdraw and repent in dust and ashes." Job, who seeks the meaning of suffering and finds the Almighty Himself, and God Himself becomes his consolation. And of Job too we can say that this is an example of faithfulness to God, directness, and depth of personality.

This is why the long-suffering Job is closer to God than his devout friends. They try to see in the misfortune of Job God's logic, His just reward for sin and thereby to justify in a certain way the punishment of the innocent. Job cannot agree with that, he understands that evil is illogical, irrational, that suffering should not either be ignored, or justified, but that it is necessary to go through it, even crying and being disgusted. And go through to God, to His presence in life, to His salvation. And in this attachment to God, opens to Job what was hidden from his interlocutors: the Redeemer is alive, that is the One who " will settle the accounts " of Job and will take him out of sufferings, the One who will stop decay and death, the One who will eliminate the barrier between him and God. And he begins to see clearly here that it is not only about the immortality of the soul, but also of a genuine spiritual-physical life with God. And the very important word " though” is not about the reincarnation says Job, but of the genuine resurrection in his body, restored from the dust.

This is why the long-suffering Job is closer to God than his devout friends. They try to see in the misfortune of Job God's logic, His just reward for sin and thereby to justify in a certain way the punishment of the innocent. Job cannot agree with that, he understands that evil is illogical, irrational, that suffering should not either be ignored, or justified, but that it is necessary to go through it, even crying and being disgusted. And go through to God, to His presence in life, to His salvation. And in this attachment to God, opens to Job what was hidden from his interlocutors: the Redeemer is alive, that is the One who " will settle the accounts " of Job and will take him out of sufferings, the One who will stop decay and death, the One who will eliminate the barrier between him and God. And he begins to see clearly here that it is not only about the immortality of the soul, but also of a genuine spiritual-physical life with God. And the very important word " though” is not about the reincarnation says Job, but of the genuine resurrection in his body, restored from the dust.

Job's cry is a rebuke to us. We so often do not know what to do when confronted with another person's grief. And because we do not understand... we launch into a frenzy of pointless activity. We rush to console, explain, rebuke, wipe away tears, analyze the situation... and thereby only deepen the person's suffering. If you do not possess peace yourself, you cannot share it with your neighbor. You cannot give what you do not have. This is what happens with Job's friends: all their words only make the situation worse. It could not be otherwise. Job's problem lies in his personal relationship with God. Only two take part in that relationship: Job himself and God Himself. No one else can “join in.” Does this mean that we should quickly step aside from a suffering person and leave him alone? No, it does not. We must remain close when our presence is needed, without interfering in the situation or deciding for the other person.

Job understands his friends' claims that suffering belongs only to the wicked and the lawless as their attempt to exalt themselves at his expense. ‘You want to establish your own righteousness at my expense,’ Job says. But he suffers not because he is worse than other people, but because God has risen against him. In his misfortune, Job sees the touch of the Almighty's hand, for he is certain that nothing in the world happens without God's will. Job experiences what is happening as a sign that God has barred his path through life. And this opposition from God—which, within the book's story, is only apparent—leaves Job in terrible loneliness. No one can, or even wishes to, ease his suffering. Those closest to him have abandoned him, and he has become an object of ridicule to those around him.

It was from God that Job demanded a just hearing; from his friends he asks for compassion. He begs them to pity him, but his pleas are in vain. In his previous speech, unable to find witnesses in his favour among his friends, Job asks God himself to defend him. Now, finding no sympathy among his friends either, he appeals to God himself for compassion. From a human point of view, this is impossible: no human being can both persecute another and have compassion on them. But God is not like human beings, and Job continues to believe this firmly. This faith gives him the astonishing hope that, despite everything, he has not been cast away from God's hand or abandoned by him to his fate. Even if, for a reason Job himself cannot understand, God's anger has blazed against him, God has still not forgotten him—and that is what matters most.

Job utters paradoxical words about God as his Defender, words that do not follow from what came before. The term goel can carry different shades of meaning; in the biblical context, it means God freeing his people from oppression. This is said, in particular, of God bringing the people out of Egypt and returning them from the Babylonian exile. That is why the Vulgate, the Slavonic and the Synodal translations speak here of the Redeemer; the Septuagint calls him the Liberator. Job believes in a coming encounter with him. Death appears to him in a different light: for Job, the last day will be the day of his encounter with the Redeemer.

Verses 25–26 can be interpreted and translated in different ways. They may be regarded as Job's profession of faith in the coming resurrection of the dead; this understanding underlies the Septuagint, the Slavonic and the Synodal translations. They may also be understood sceptically, as a statement that God will stand over Job's dust and receive his last breath; this is the understanding on which the Vulgate and some other translations are based. The following verses confirm that, for Job, death will become an encounter with God in his own, Job's, flesh. It is not someone else but Job himself who will see God with his eyes. Like anyone of biblical culture, Job knows that God is invisible, incomprehensible and beyond human perception. Yet, against this knowledge, he believes in the indissolubility of his bond with God: from God's side, at least, it cannot be broken; God will always remain Job's Creator and Lord. Job says something, not entirely clear even to the book's author, about an encounter in the flesh, an encounter connected with death. But what matters most is Job's belief that God will not refuse to free him from his torment. Perhaps the most essential thing in these words is precisely Job's certainty that God will not abandon him. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even if she forgets, I will not forget you’ (Isa. 49:15), God said through Isaiah of Babylon about a century before the Book of Job was written, and the book's author knows that this is true.

It is not surprising that Job takes the attitude toward him and toward his words expressed by Bildad as an insult (vv. 2-3). After all, what he said was not said in the heat of the moment or out of foolishness. For him everything is absolutely serious, and once again they want to accuse him of sin, even if involuntary, and make a laughingstock of him (v. 3)! Job, for his part, continues to insist on what he has already said more than once. He accuses God of his calamities, being not without reason convinced that without God's will none of what he had to endure would have happened to him (vv. 6-24). Yet Job is still sure that if he can ever meet God face to face, the situation will change radically. The sufferer now connects his hopes with the Messiah, whom, following the tradition that had developed in post-exilic Judaism, he calls the Redeemer (v. 25).

It is interesting to note that now Job speaks of resurrection, though he understands it somewhat naturalistically (vv. 25-26). As we can see, Job connects resurrection and the coming of the Messiah above all with the possibility of seeing God face to face and personally resolving all his problems with Him. As for Job's friends, according to the sufferer, they behave not as righteous people but as wicked ones. Instead of supporting a suffering righteous man, they use the opportunity to assert themselves at his expense (vv. 5-6). He asks his friends for mercy (vv. 21-22), though he understands that he will receive no mercy from them. These accusations may seem too harsh, and his friends, though mistaken in substance, still do not wish Job harm.

But the problem here is deeper than it may appear. Job's friends not only cannot understand Job; they do not want to, and are afraid to enter into what torments the sufferer. And this fear has a religious character: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are simply afraid of losing the confidence that comes to a person from the awareness of his own religious rightness. And this fear has a religious character: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are simply afraid of losing the confidence that comes to a person from the awareness of his own religious rightness. Job, by contrast, does not demonstrate such rightness at all. On the contrary, he is no longer sure of anything, and his friends are trying to support him. But they do this as if condescending to the sufferer from the height of their own rightness. They are completely sure that everything happening to Job is a misunderstanding that they are obliged to help him resolve, that they are right about everything, and that Job is either mistaken in his judgments or beside himself because of the troubles and misfortunes that have fallen on him. The thought that Job may be right seems so terrible to them that they are more ready to allow for madness, a temporary derangement of their friend, than for their own error. Such a position, of course, could only seem insulting to Job himself: his condition was already serious enough, and from his friends he saw nothing but contemptuously pitying "help" that did him no good.

Job reproaches his friends for their hard-heartedness in continually accusing him. His defense rests not only on the natural desire to uphold his own dignity, but also on broader considerations: even if one accepts that God has punished him, then do his friends, if they can still be called that, have the right to accuse him as well, much less to speak as if they knew God's will? By confidently presenting their own versions in God's name, do they not put themselves in His place? When they reproach Job for violating His will, do they themselves follow it?

The point is not that his accusers, like every person, cannot be sinless, nor even that they judge confidently and without grounds while lacking a complete picture of what is happening, a picture they are fundamentally incapable of seeing. They are driven by mercilessness and a readiness to trample anyone who stumbles. Thousands of years before Nietzsche, they follow the principle he proclaimed: “Give the falling man a shove.”

Job, meanwhile, even as he laments and is brokenhearted, continues to hope in the One Who on the last day will raise him from the dust. His troubled heart is more open to God than the minds of these “friends.”