The Argument Continues
Job’s friends are stunned by his peevish response to Eliphaz’s words of comfort. Not only has Job rebuffed their efforts at consolation, he has called into question one of their most cherished articles of faith, their belief in a good God who loves His children, rewarding virtue and obedience. Bildad, second of the friends, picks up the argument.
How long will you speak such things?
Your utterances are a mighty wind. Will God pervert the right?
Will the Almighty pervert justice?
If your sons sinned against Him,
He dispatched them for their transgression.
But if you seek God and supplicate the Almighty,
If you are blameless and upright, He will protect you. (8:1–6)
Bildad avoids suggesting that Job must have done something to deserve what happened to him. But we can understand him to be saying, Job, try to understand that this is not all about you. Your cattle were not stolen because you are a bad person. They were stolen because the Sabeans and Chaldeans are bad people. Stealing other people’s cattle is what they do. Your children were not innocent victims who died to punish you. If your sons sinned, God struck them down for their misdeeds. Is that so hard for you to accept? You knew they were capable of it. Isn’t that why you offered sacrifices on their behalf every time they threw a party, because you understood they might have done something improper?
Bildad then invokes the sages and scholars of previous generations:
Ask the generations past, Study what their fathers have searched out,
For we are of yesterday and know nothing.
Our days are as a shadow.
Surely they will teach you and tell you. (8:8–10)
He is challenging Job: Do you think you’re smarter than all the wise men of history put together? They believed in a righteous God; why can’t you?
Job is offended by Bildad’s accusation that he is daring to judge the way God runs His world. He would never do that, not because he has complete faith in God’s fairness but because he realizes it would be futile.
Indeed I know that it is so,
Man cannot win a suit against God.
If he insisted on a trial with Him,
He [God] would not answer one charge in a thousand …
He snatches away—who can stop Him?
Who can say to Him, What are you doing? (9:2–3, 12)
Remember the three propositions that all participants are trying to reconcile:
God is all-powerful.
God is completely good and fair.
Job is a good man.
The friends’ solution is to affirm God’s power and God’s goodness, at which point they have no alternative except to question Job’s innocence. He must have done something wrong; everybody does. “Man gives birth to mischief as sparks fly upward.” Had they been versed in Freudian psychology, they might have said to their friend, Job: We recognize repression when we see it. Because you think of yourself as basically a good person, it is hard for you to acknowledge that part of you that has done wrong, so you repress it. The longer and more ardently you proclaim your innocence, the more certain we are that you must be hiding something from your conscious self. Give up your pretense of perfection, admit your flaws, throw yourself on the mercy of God, and He will forgive you.
Job, in contrast, affirms his own essential goodness, concedes God’s power: “He moves mountains without their knowing it … commands the sun not to shine” (9:5, 7). But he challenges God’s goodness. God is so powerful, Job complains, that no one can compel Him to play fair. At one point, Job says, “Would that there were an umpire between us, to lay his hand on us both” (9:33). (Unfortunately the JPS translation strikes out on this one, while the traditional commentaries get it right. The context demands that we read the first word as lu, “would that …,” rather than the Masoretic pointing of lo, “there is not.” The author is too good a Hebrew poet to use a clumsy phrase like lo yesh.)
Job says, I wish there were some force beyond God (an umpire) to which I could appeal, someone who could make God play fair and follow the rules. But if there were, would God still be all-powerful? Would His omnipotence be compromised if some force could say to Him, You can’t do that, and God had to heed it? The only theologically acceptable limitations on God’s behavior are those He imposes on Himself. Otherwise, who can say to Him, “What are You doing?” (9:12).
Think of it this way: If we, by our righteous behavior, could compel God to treat us well, to bless us with health and prosperity and guard our children from harm, would He still be the all-powerful Master of the Universe? Or would He be reduced to some supercomputer capable of doing awesome things beyond the capacity of any human being, but only if we tell it to? Would we have turned God into a cosmic vending machine: insert the proper number of good deeds—prayer, charity, forgiveness of those who hurt us—pull the plunger for the blessing you want, and if you don’t get it, feel entitled to curse the machine and take your business elsewhere?
The question might occur to us at this point whether an all-powerful God can be good and whether an utterly good God could still be all-powerful. For God to be all-powerful would mean that there are no constraints on His behavior—not considerations of fairness, not considerations of compassion, not considerations of other people’s opinions. He could take those factors into account before acting, but He would not have to heed them. Yet isn’t it the definition of morality to say to oneself, There are things I am inclined to do but I cannot bring myself to do them without becoming someone other than the person I like to think of myself as being? If there are no such limits imposed on God’s actions, can He still be “good”? Isn’t arbitrariness a necessary dimension of omnipotence? What Job yearns for, what we all yearn for, is a God powerful enough to protect and redeem the innocent, but not so utterly powerful as to be beyond the constraints of fairness and compassion.
Job is offended by Bildad’s accusation that he is looking to put God on trial. On the contrary, says Job, I want God to put me on trial. I want Him to produce evidence, convince me that I deserve all this misery.
I say to God, Do not condemn me.
Let me know with what You charge me. (10:2)
If this could happen to me without just cause, he pleads, that is not just a problem for me. It is a problem for everyone. It means that we live in a chaotic world where there is a disconnect between act and result. At this point, Job is on the brink of giving in to nihilism, the despairing conclusion that life is pointless.
I am sick of life. It is all one.
Therefore I say, He destroys the blameless and the guilty …
He mocks as the innocent fall.
The earth is handed over to the wicked one …
If it is not He, then who? (9:21–24)
Job’s lament is this: If it makes no difference to God whether a person is good or bad, moral or selfish, if it is all one, if our behavior does not determine our fate at God’s hand, why should it matter to us how we behave?
There is perhaps no more frightening line in all of Scripture than the words “the earth is handed over to the wicked one.” I have read accounts of what it was like to live in Germany as the Nazis were coming to power. I have read narratives of people caught in the Sudanese civil war. One gets the feeling of helplessness, of inevitability, of being in the path of an unstoppable force. It is not only the fear that there is pure evil in the world. It is the even more frightening concern that there is no force capable of stopping it.
The sages of the Talmud, in one of their infrequent discussions of the book of Job, strenuously deny any possibility that “the wicked one” refers to God (BT Baba Batra 16a). They argue the point so emphatically that one is tempted to suspect that they think the poet is talking about God there, and they would rather not have that thought found in Holy Scripture. Whenever I reread Job, I am astonished that this book, and Ecclesiastes as well, were admitted to the canon. Did the sages recognize it as a work of genius and not want to deprive posterity of its insights? (The cover story for Ecclesiastes is that it was allegedly written by King Solomon in his old age.) Or, as some commentators believe, was it included because the authorities thought the arguments of the friends were cogent enough to quell the doubts of any latter-day Job who might suffer as he did and ask Job’s questions?
When Job laments, in 9:24, “the earth is handed over to the wicked one.… If it is not He, then who?” is he considering the possibility that his problems are Satan’s doing and not God’s? That, after all, is the Fable’s explanation. Job, of course, is not privy to God’s wager with Satan in chapters 1 and 2. But if he and his friends share the theology of those opening chapters, why does no one respond to the question “If not He, then who?” by blaming Satan?
Do Jews believe in Satan? The only truthful answer to any question about what Jews believe is to say that some Jews believe it and others believe differently, while still others haven’t given the question a lot of thought.
Does Judaism believe in Satan? If by Satan we mean a malevolent being, independent of God and working in opposition to God’s purposes, more independent and more evil than the Satan of chapters 1 and 2 of the book of Job, then the answer is that Judaism has sometimes affirmed his existence and sometime denied it. Biblical Judaism for the most part does not know that Satan. The reference in Chronicles in connection with David’s census, and perhaps Zechariah’s vision, would be the exceptions, and they are both found in the latest books of the Bible. It would have been a gross anachronism, even if we assign a late date to the Poem of Job, for Job to have claimed, Even if I did some terrible things, that wasn’t me. The devil made me do it.
But rabbinic and medieval Judaism did see Satan as real. For those later sages, Satan was behind every serious incident of misbehavior in Scripture. He tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. He teaches Noah to plant a vineyard and gets him drunk. He tries to talk Abraham into rejecting God’s demand that he sacrifice his son (after first persuading God to demand it). He inspires the people to build a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. Whenever people do wrong, the sages attribute it to the machinations of Satan.
Many scholars attribute this change in how Jews understood the tendency of good people to sin to Israel’s being sent into exile after the Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE. The majority of Jews ended up in one province or another of the Babylonian Empire, and after Babylonia was conquered by the Persians, they found themselves citizens of the Persian Empire. The book of Esther, for example, is set in the Persian court. It was at this time that Jews were exposed to the religion of the Persians, an early form of Zoroastrianism that was just emerging. Whereas Israel believed in one all-powerful God and their neighbors believed in a multiplicity of gods and worshipped either the god of the territory they lived in or the god whose worshippers seemed to flourish best, Zoroastrians followed a dualistic theology. They believed in two divine forces, a god of light and a god of darkness, a source of goodness and a source of malice, the two locked in eternal conflict with each other. The role of human beings, in this theology, was not simply to worship the god of light but to actively strengthen him by adding to the amount of goodness and light in the world. It is a little like the story that Native American elders would tell their children: There are two dogs inside each of us, a good dog and a mean dog, and they are always fighting. Which one will win? Whichever one we feed most.
There is something seductively appealing about this dualistic theology. It explains the existence of evil but exonerates God from responsibility for it. Bad things happen when the god of darkness is in charge. And it gives us a role in the effort to help good triumph over evil, more than merely cheerleading. But it has its limitations. For one thing, it posits a second divine being as powerful as God, a major departure from classic Hebrew monotheism. And it undermines our confidence in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. That may be why the prophet we know as Second Isaiah, in the same chapter in which he lauds the Persian emperor Cyrus as God’s anointed who will lead to the restoration of the Jewish homeland, goes on to insist in the Name of God, “I am the Lord and there is none else. I form light and create darkness, I make peace and I create woe” (Isa. 45:7).
It seems plausible that Jews in the Persian Empire were attracted by some aspects of nascent Zoroastrianism but reluctant to compromise their faith in God’s uniqueness. They resolved the conflict by “promoting” Satan from his biblical role as one of God’s ministering angels to the role he would occupy in rabbinic and medieval Judaism, in Christianity, and in folklore ever since: that of God’s adversary, preying on human weakness to defeat God’s purposes. The only two biblical passages in which Satan acts contrary to God’s will, the references in Zechariah and Chronicles, come in books dated to the Return to Zion under Persian auspices.
When people, ancient or contemporary, speak of Satan (or the devil), I hear them saying two things. First, evil exists. It is real, not something we would be able to accept as good if we knew all the facts. There is cruelty in the world; there is deceit. Second, and this is the key, the source of this evil is not within us but outside us. Satan is not a part of each of us; he is apart from us. There is nothing in us that would cause us to do bad things if this external source of corruption had not misled us.
Why did Eve eat the forbidden fruit? Satan tempted her. Why did Cain kill his brother Abel? Satan infected him with jealousy. Why did the Israelites build a golden calf in chapter 32 of Exodus? Satan led them astray. Satan’s involvement on those occasions is not mentioned in the Bible, but the sages invoke him to explain them. People never seem to do wrong things of their own volition. They only do so when Satan misleads them.
This represents a stark departure from normative Jewish theology, both before and after the exile. The classic view of Judaism is that people are responsible for their choices. We are taught that God planted in each of us two complementary impulses, known in Hebrew as the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra, and typically translated as the impulse to do good and the impulse to do evil. I am bothered by that traditional translation, because it makes the evil we do something God put in us. I prefer to believe that God did not and does not create evil (despite Isaiah 45:7), though He created the possibility of evil by giving human beings free will. I would translate the two Hebrew terms as the capacity for altruism and the capacity for selfishness or the egotistical principle.
Selfishness can be evil (the adulterer, the fraudulent businessperson), but it need not be evil. My understanding of how the sages saw the yetzer ha-ra is based on a story in the Talmud. One day, in a certain village, they captured the yetzer ha-ra and imprisoned it. They said, From now on, our world will be Paradise. No one will ever do anything wrong. The next day, we are told, no one opened his store for business, no one bought or sold anything, no marriages were arranged, and no babies were conceived. All those activities, it turns out, contain an element of selfishness, without which the world could not function. So, reluctantly, they released the yetzer ha-ra from its captivity and went back to living in a world where it was a constant factor.
The world needs people like Mother Teresa to devote themselves unselfishly to caring for the afflicted and the neglected. But the world also needs men and women who will marry and raise families, who will plant crops and grow and sell food so that Mother Teresa can sustain those she cares for. The world needs people who will be so successful at what they do that they will be able to support Mother Teresa’s work financially. The world needs doctors who will work to unravel the secrets of illness, with one eye on helping humanity and one eye on their place in medical history. When Dr. Henry Jekyll, in the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, finds a way to purge himself of his evil inclination, he creates a monster on the one hand and an ineffective weakling on the other. A complete human being needs both impulses, and needs the guidance of religion and the support of a moral community to nurture his altruistic impulse and rein in his ego.
When we blame Satan for the world’s ills, we are saying, It wasn’t me. It wasn’t us. The devil made me do it. In their embarrassment, instead of taking responsibility for the misuse of their ego, people are externalizing it, projecting responsibility onto some mythical creature outside themselves. Haven’t many of us had the experience, when we have given in to temptation, of saying to ourselves, I don’t know why I did that. That’s not me. That’s not the person I am.
But if blaming Satan for our wrongdoing is an externalizing of our own capacity for doing wrong, a capacity that embarrasses us, how are we to understand the passages in the midrash where Satan seduces God into punishing an innocent person? Is there a latent capacity for evil in God Himself, and were the rabbis seeking to externalize it, to cleanse God of the embarrassment of being attracted to wrongdoing in a misuse of the divine ego, by claiming that when innocent people suffer, it is because Satan has led God astray? The sages come to the rescue of God’s reputation by holding Satan responsible for manipulating God’s sense of justice in a way that results in good people being hurt.
A passage in the midrash expands on Satan’s role in persuading God to test Abraham as He tested Job, by demanding the death of his son. The story would have it that, after Isaac was born, Abraham and Sarah threw a festive party for their neighbors. Satan came to Abraham’s tent disguised as a poor beggar, asking for a morsel of bread. But Sarah was busy nursing Isaac and Abraham was occupied seeing to his guests, and no one took heed of the beggar at the door. (The midrash warns us that “Satan is always present when no poor people are invited to a celebration.”) Satan then went to God and complained, “You have blessed Abraham with so much, but he could not spare a slice of bread for a starving beggar. Such a man You call Your faithful servant?” God then resolves to prove Satan wrong and Abraham worthy of His trust by arranging the test of Abraham’s loyalty.
Another midrash pictures Satan saying to God, “Isn’t it sufficient that the righteous will enjoy the rewards of the World to Come? Why should they have a greater share of the good things of this world? Spread pain and pleasure more evenly in this life, and save the real rewards for the next life.”
As I understand these stories, the sages, like the author of the Poem of Job, are trying to reconcile their faith in God’s uncompromised goodness with the reality of good people suffering and bad people getting away with selfishness. They do it in part by seeing the misfortunes of the righteous as the misapplication of God’s commitment to justice. Abraham rejected a beggar because he was busy at a party? I will teach him a lesson. Good people are too concerned with their comfort and prosperity in this world? I will remind them of what their priorities should be.
Job knows nothing of Satan. He has outgrown the idea of Satan as God’s spy, as in the Fable, and understandably is unacquainted with the rabbinic-medieval notion of Satan as the Tempter, the cause outside ourselves of everything we do wrong. For him, there is only God, and it is to God that he now turns in a beautiful, deeply moving speech that forms the middle section of chapter 10. He says to God, You formed me so lovingly. You guided me through the miraculous process by which an embryo becomes a human being. Why did You do that if You knew that the end of the story would see You discard me in shame?
Your hands shaped and formed me …
You poured me out like milk, congealed me like cheese.
You clothed me with skin and flesh and wove me of bones and sinews.
You bestowed on me life and care …
Yet these things You hid in Your heart …
To watch me when I sinned and not clear me of my iniquity. (10:8, 10–14, 16)
There remains only Zophar, third and last of the visitors to speak. One commentator summarizes Zophar’s remarks by writing, “There is little new to say, however many ways there are to say it.” Zophar repeats the argument that God is wiser than we are, and it is not for us to question Him. One almost wonders why Zophar is even there, unless there is something in the human psyche that is more comfortable with three actors than with two or four. Think of all the children’s stories where things come in threes: three bears, three pigs, three blind mice. Think of all the tales of landowners with three sons, princesses with three suitors. It may be that our minds respond to dealing with one extreme, followed by the other extreme, and then a satisfying resolution. To offer a comparison that may never have been made before in the history of literature, Goldilocks’s experience with the porridge is surprisingly similar to Hegel’s doctrine of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. But in the book of Job, the third statement seems more of an afterthought than a satisfying resolution.
Job now concludes the first cycle of speeches with a long oration in three parts, one part addressed to the friends, a second part to God, and the third a spoken lament on the brevity of life.
Indeed you are the voice of the people, and wisdom will die with you.
But I, like you, have a mind and am not less than you.
Who does not know such things?
But ask the beasts and they will teach you,
The birds of the sky, they will tell you …
That the hand of the Lord has done this. (12:2–3, 7, 8, 9)
(I would love to read “tamut [wisdom] will die with you,” not as a verb, to die, but as a noun meaning wholeness, totality, from the Hebrew tam, “complete,” so that the phrase would read “all wisdom is with you.” The phrase “wisdom will die with you” strikes me as a strange image. Unfortunately, tamut in that sense never appears in the Bible. Then again, the author of Job uses so many words that appear nowhere else, so perhaps …)
It is not clear just what Job has in mind in calling up images of birds and beasts. Following Gordis’s interpretation in his commentary The Book of God and Man, these lines make the most sense if we hear a note of sarcasm in Job’s words. He challenges his friends: Since you will never convince me that there is moral order in the world, with people getting what they deserve, you try to distract me with these descriptions of natural order, the beauty and richness of Nature, where everything has its place. Then you claim, without logic or evidence, that the same God who fashioned the perfection of Nature imposed that same perfection on the moral world.
But Job is not so easily persuaded. “Truly the ear tests arguments as the palate tests food” (12:11). Just as his mouth can recognize spoiled food, his mind can recognize shoddy reasoning, and the friends’ arguments are unconvincing. For one thing, the same world of Nature that can be so impressive and orderly can turn destructive in a moment. When God holds back the waters, the streams dry up. When He lets them loose, they flood the land (12:15). And just as natural forces, let loose, can wreak havoc on a land, human rulers can lose their minds or be carried away by ambition and do great damage: “Erring and causing to err are from Him” (12:16), a point extended in the verses that follow.
Like many critics, I am suspicious of the reference to God as YHWH in verse 9: “the hand of the Lord [YHWH] has done this.” It is the only use of that special name of God in the entire poem, though it is used freely in the Fable. YHWH is God’s personal, intimate name used in His dealing with the Israelites. It was deemed so holy that, to this day, observant Jews do not pronounce it but use substitutes. The author of the Poem has been scrupulous in avoiding any hint that Job, Eliphaz, or the others are Jewish. They do not have Hebrew names, they live in foreign lands, they never allude to the Exodus from Egypt in discussing God’s beneficence. There are no references to God’s promises to the patriarchs or to the Covenant at Sinai, with its warnings along with its promises. With one crucial exception, to which we will come at the climax of the book, there is nothing to connect the theological discourse to anything in the Torah. Job’s problems are the problems of Everyman, not only of Jews. It would be passing strange for the author to violate that rule in this casual context. Most likely, a scribe, unaware of the point the author was making, unconsciously substituted the personal name of God for the more universal names indicating divinity, like El, Elohim, and Shaddai.
But if Job the person is not Jewish, Job the book is a thoroughly Jewish book, beginning with its arrogating to itself the right to challenge and question God on moral grounds. Israel, as its name (“the God-wrestler”) implies, has always been a people who not only sought to serve God but has struggled with God, and not only because of the bad things that happened to it.
Ancient Israel had no monopoly on suffering, but Israel’s response to misfortune was different from that of its neighbors. The Babylonian steamroller that demolished the Temple of Jerusalem also crushed all the other little kingdoms of that part of the world. Israel was unique not in its fate but in its response. Edomites and Moabites who saw the power of Babylon acknowledged that the god of the Babylonians must be stronger than the gods they were accustomed to worshipping, gods who were not able to protect them, and they shifted their allegiance. Superior power compelled obedience. Only the Israelites, contemplating the destruction of their homeland and sacred Temple, refused to do that, saying to themselves (as Jeremiah had warned them), God did this to us because we violated His covenant. We were unfaithful and this is our punishment. (It was a response that made Israel’s survival as a separate people possible in the sixth century BCE. It would serve less well—indeed, it would strike most of us as grotesque—when used to explain the Holocaust.) Other nations worshipped a powerful god, the most powerful they could find. Israel served a God who was both powerful and just, and they would spend the next 2,500 years trying to reconcile those two attributes with each other and with the collective suffering of the Jewish people and the anguish of so many individual Jews.
Is there a uniquely Jewish sensibility when it comes to talking about God? Job is not Jewish, but the author who put words in his mouth was. Let me suggest that at the core of Jewish God-talk is the unshakable conviction that God’s most dominant attribute is His commitment to justice rather than power. Earthly kings lust for power, for total control, and are prepared to sacrifice justice, to hurt innocent people, to hold on to power. But as far as the God of Israel is concerned, in a conflict between justice and power, justice will prevail. God will not do wrong. That more than anything gives Job reason to hope.
A thoroughly unfair cliché would have it that Judaism is a religion of law whereas Christianity is a religion of love. But we find rules and we find condemnations of rule-breakers in Christianity (religion has to have standards), and we find a frequent emphasis on the need for divine and human forgiveness in Judaism. What is Yom Kippur about if not an articulation of our turning to God to accept us despite our all-too-human failings? The rabbis taught us long ago that a world of strict justice, with no allowances for human weakness, would be an unlivable world. An exercise of the rabbinic imagination adds yet another dimension to that. One of the sages asks, “Does God pray?” His answer: God does indeed pray, and His prayer is “May it be My will that My attribute of compassion overrule My attribute of justice.” Justice is more of a primary divine attribute than power, but divine compassion is on a par with divine justice.
Job has been compared to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both men are powerful figures stripped of their wealth and power. Both are bereaved, both are afflicted, and both cry out their rage against an unfair world. But where Lear includes God among those forces that torment him (“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport”; the original King Lear was probably a pagan, but that need not have colored Shakespeare’s character), Job never gives up hope that God’s sense of justice will prevail over the arbitrary exercise of divine power.
Despite what I wrote earlier to the effect that more advanced spiritual development need not mean a later date of composition, it is tempting to see the universality of Job, expressed through Jewish eyes, as pointing to a post-exilic origin. There is no Israelite parochialism here, no asumption that everyone we are concerned with is Jewish. Job’s cry is not “Why do these things happen to us, God’s people?” but “Why do these things happen at all?” It is a perspective that might well have arisen in a Jewish community living in exile among other exiles, or in a restored Zion shared with other ethnic groups imported by Babylonia after 586 BCE, refugees and war victims just as the Israelites were.
Indeed I would speak to the Almighty, I insist on arguing with God.
But you invent lies, all of you are quacks.
If you would only keep quiet, it would be considered wisdom on your part …
Will you speak deceitfully for Him? Will you plead God’s cause?…
He will surely reprove you if in your hearts you are partial toward Him …
I will take my life in my hands,
He may slay me, I may have no hope,
Yet I will argue my case before Him.
In this too is my salvation: that no impious man can come into His presence. (13:3–5, 7–8, 10, 14–15)
Verse 15 is familiar to many churchgoers and readers of the King James translation: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” It is a beautiful line and a beautiful thought. It can be taken as saying to God, “I love You at least as much as You love me. No matter what You do to me, I will always love You.” Those words can be an expression of the deepest, truest love, or they can be the outlook of a dependent person without the self-respect to stand up for his or her rights. But it is hard to believe that that is what Job is saying. Job believes in God but is in no mood to do God any favors. He would have no problem loving God if God would only play fair. In the face of rampant unfairness, that love and faith are hard to come by. When Job says in 13:16, “In this is my salvation, that no impious person can come into His presence,” I hear echoes of 6:10: If God is a God worth worshipping, He will prefer honest anger to calculated flattery. On those grounds, I prefer the JPS reading, “I may have no hope.” (Notice the “may,” which is not explicit in the Hebrew.)
Job then ceases arguing with his visitors and turns directly to God, as if to emphasize that his quarrel is not with well-meaning friends over their theology, but with God Himself over the way He runs His world.
Remove Your hand from me, let not Your terror frighten me.
Then summon me and I will respond,
Or I will speak and You reply to me:
How many are my iniquities and sins?
Advise me of my transgressions.
Why do You hide Your face and treat me like an enemy?
Will You harass a driven leaf …
That You decree for me bitter things and make me answer for the iniquities of my youth? (13:21–26)
In other words, Job is saying to God: If I am important enough for You to keep track of my every mistake and punish me for them, then am I not worth five minutes of Your time to tell me what I am being punished for? And if I am too insignificant to merit Your personal attention, then why am I important enough for You to measure out my punishment?
Chapter 14 is among the most beautiful sections of the entire book. It reads equally well in Hebrew or in English. Job laments the brevity of life and challenges God: If life is so short, why do You have to spoil it by calling down punishment on us for every trivial violation? You are eternal, but You will be rid of us soon enough.
Man born of woman is short-lived and sated with trouble,
He blossoms like a flower and withers.
He vanishes like a shadow and does not endure.
Do You fix Your gaze on such a one and bring me to trial against You?
[JPS reads, “Will you go to law with me?”]
Turn away from him, that he may be at ease
Until like a hireling, he finishes out his day. (14:1–3, 6)
Although no one has raised the prospect of life after death as compensation for unjust suffering or of a person’s resurrection to a second go at life—it seems the notion probably did not exist in Israel before the time of the Maccabees and the book of Daniel—Job anticipates it and rejects it.
There is hope for a tree:
If it is cut down, it will renew itself. Its shoots will not cease.
If its roots are old in the earth and its stump dies in the ground,
At the scent of water, it will bud and produce branches like a sapling.
But mortals languish and die, Man expires, where is he?…
His sons attain honor and he does not know it. (14:7–10, 21)
With Job, I feel the special poignancy of that last line. The most painful aspect of mortality is that a person will not live to see his or her children grow old. (Clearly this is not Job of the Fable with whom we are dealing. He had no surviving children. This is Job as Everyman.)
So ends the first cycle of speeches. The friends have invoked tradition and the widely held consensus that God is great, that God knows us better than we know ourselves, and that He punishes only when He has a reason to punish. If Job would just stop insisting on his innocence—what human being is perfect?—and throw himself on the mercy of God, then a merciful God will likely forgive him. Don’t let one week of misery outweigh the satisfaction of years of piety.
In contrast to the friends’ theoretical arguments, Job offers his own experience. You cite abstract beliefs, he tells them, theological generalities, undocumented opinions based on nothing more than the fact that most people agree with you. I offer the real, hard, undeniable facts of my bereavement and my illness, and to me, these are more persuasive than your theories. (The friends’ position calls to mind Chico Marx’s line in the movie Duck Soup: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”)
While the remarks have occasionally been pointed, for the most part they have been respectful. The friends genuinely want to comfort Job, not to convert him, and more than anything else, Job wants a hearing. He would rather be told what he has done wrong than to have God concede that He is wrong and Job is right.
Much of that will change in the second cycle.