Day 148. Job 18-21

In his first speech Bildad held out hope to Job if he would repent. Now, angry that Job will not listen to his wisdom and that of his companions, he harshly condemns Job as a sinner beyond hope of redemption. The wicked, he says, wander utterly lost and befuddled. "By disease their skin is consumed, the firstborn of Death consumes their limbs" (18:13)—and this is of course what Job is even now experiencing. The wicked are bereft of their possessions—"In their tents nothing remains" (18:15), Bildad says—and they lose their children and together with them any hope of survival in the memory of the living. "They have no offspring or descendent among their people, and no survivor where they used to live" (18:19) he says—and Job's children have indeed been killed. To Bildad Job's misfortunes are proof that he is harboring some secret iniquity. These disasters could only happen to who does "not know God" (18:21). This is, of course,
hardly descriptive of Job, who is, if anything, oppressed by the closeness of God and tormented by his presence. Job's problem is not that he does not know God, but that he hates—and also loves--the God he knows.
God is the one who is to blame for all his sorrows—"Know that God has put me in the wrong and cast his net around me" (19:6), Job says. He is besieged by God—"His troops come on together; they have thrown up siege-works against me, and encamp around my tent" (19:12). He is cut off and isolated by his suffering from all humanity--his guests, his servants—even his wife and family—"my breath is repulsive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own family" (19:17), he cries. And the accusations of his so-called comforters only serve to further alienate him, and he ends up pleading with them to have pity on him—"Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with by flesh?" Job asks them.
And then when his hope seems utterly exhausted, he bursts into the most famous and one of the most beautiful passages in the whole of the Book of Job. "I know that my redeemer lives," he says, "and that at the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God" (19:26). Handel in his oratorio Messiah used these words as chorus of praise to the resurrected Christ. But we are really uncertain who this redeemer is for the writer of Job, a human being or a divine one. A "redeemer" in biblical language is one who "buys back" one who has been forced to sell himself or his ancestral land to pay a debt (see Leviticus 25). Who is buying Job back? God? Some other redeemer? What exactly is the salvation of which he catches a glimpse here? All that we can safely say is in the midst of his despair Job sees some hope beyond his despair, an assurance that somehow in his flesh and with his
own eyes he will "see God," as he desires to much to do.
But the comforters are not through with him yet. Zophar picks up his argument where he left it earlier. God is just because the wicked suffer eventually for their sins, "the joy of the godless is but for a moment" (20:5); in the end they "fly away like a dream, and [are] not to be found" (20:8). "Their prosperity will not endure," he says. What goes around comes around, we might say.
But Job remains unconvinced. He argues again not from authority but from experience. "Why [then] do the wicked live on," he asks, "reach old age, and grow mighty in power" (21:8). If they are supposed to receive the just desserts of their wicked deeds, why are their "houses safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them?" (21:9) If God metes out justice, why do those who deserve punishment "spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol" (21:13), the abode of the dead. "Is not their prosperity their own achievement?" Job asks, as they themselves obviously believe. "How often is the lamp of the wicked put out?"(21:17) he wants to know. And in the end, what difference does it make? The ultimate fate of the virtuous and the wicked is the same. "One dies in full prosperity, being wholly at ease and secure. . . . Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of good. They down alike in the dust, and the
worms cover them" (21:23-26). Job wants to be convinced otherwise, but he can see no justice built into creation. Therefore he suspects that the Creator is not just, and this suspicion is what torments him more than his sores.