Day 150. Job 27-30

If a note of hypocrisy and priggishness sometimes creeps into the voices of his "comforters," the character of Job confronts the problem of suffering and the experience of his own suffering with absolute honesty. When Job speaks the very structure of his sentences has the disjointed character of a mind under extreme stress. Images pile up, one upon another, as his mind reels and wanders struggling to come to grips with his loss, trying to make sense of what is happening to him.
So in today's reading, Job's outburst against God is a genuine rant; he refuses to hold anything back. As long as he has "the spirit of God in [his] nostrils," his "lips will not speak falsehood" (27:3-4). He will tell the truth whatever the consequences. He clings to his righteousness with such violence because he has nothing left but his sense of his own righteousness; until he dies, Job says, he "will not put away [his] integrity" (27:5-6). He realizes that if he were to lose his integrity, the sense of the rightness of his case and his anger with God over the injustice he has experienced, he will have lost everything. He will not now exchange everything he has lost for that integrity.
In losing everything he has gained an insight into what God is like—not a superficial one, like that of his comforters, but a profound one, based upon his own experience. He knows that darkness and mystery that surrounds God—he has gained that knowledge through bitter experience--and he refuses surrender that knowledge "concerning the hand of God" (27:11). That knowledge is what the Bible calls "wisdom," the practical understanding of how to run one's life in relationship to God that only experience imparts. Job's comforters are teachers of traditional wisdom, but they are inauthentic teachers who lack the experience that imparts wisdom. So all they can do is give abstracts drawn from the experience of others.
In chapter 28, in his speech about true wisdom, he compares those who search for it to miners, working far underground, delving for precious metals. They delve deep—"the sources of the rivers they probe," he says, and "hidden things they bring to light" (28:11). The work is dangerous, and they must work alone—"They open shafts in a valley away from human habitations; they are forgotten by travelers, they sway suspended, remote from people" (28:3-4). It is a solitary task.
But wisdom is not found in the earth, nor can it be bought by the wealth that comes from the earth. Death and the powers of evil—Abaddon (28:22) is the ruler of the demons—do not possess it. It can only be found in relationship with the living God. "The fear of the LORD," that is wisdom (28:28). This "fear" is not "terror"—Job certainly at times confesses feeling terror of God—but this fear means respect and wonder, mixed with the dread appropriate to an encounter with something as mysterious and powerful as God is. Wisdom is one of God's creations (28:27). God created it, but it is the proper work of human beings to pursue it.
Job now describes his former life, the time before he lost everything, with longing—"O that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me" (29:1). He remembers the friendship of God he enjoyed and the respect of other people. He recalls his generosity to the poor and the disabled and the satisfaction it gave him—"I put on righteousness and it clothed me, my justice was like a robe and turban" (29:14).
All that went to make up "the good life" is contrasted with his present condition. Now he is disrespected by the rabble, by those "whose fathers [he] would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock" (30:1). Now he is mocked by all. The bow in the hand of an archer is a symbol of strength for ancient people. Now God has "loosed" his "bowstring" (30:11), Job says. His "soul is poured out" within him (30:16), spilled like water. Pain, physical and psychological, gives him "no rest" (30:18). It is like a ruffian, who "with violence" seizes his garments and casts him into the mire (30:19). He is helpless against the forces within and without. The God who was his friend now will not answer when he cries out, and merely looks at him (30:20). He lifts him up "on the wind" and makes him "ride on it" (30:22), like dust or dry leaves "in the roar of the storm."
Job asks only for the compassion and decent treatment that he himself gave to the poor. He is filled with inward turmoil and never knows peace (30:27). He is cast out of the world of human fellowship. With the jackals and ostriches, the animals of the desert, he is isolated in the wilderness of his pain and depression. Like them he is considered a danger to society, an example of human failure. And why? What has he done?