Job answered the Lord:
“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.’
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”
And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring. The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. After this Job lived for one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
This is Job’s response after God’s verbal and sensory onslaught. Who could stand before such terror? How could the faint, wheezing breath of the wretch be heard over the thundering howl of the hurricane? Can the divine see through its resplendent majesty and witness the pain and despair of mortality? Throughout the book, Job has maintained his innocence and the text itself has asserted his righteousness. This righteousness has been maintained to the end; does Job here relinquish even this? God refuses to recognize the inquiries of the righteous; instead of answering, God shouts down the persuasion of righteous indignation with pugnacious and unlimited power. How can Job assuage such voracious power that has already claimed his family, wealth and health, and is now threatening even his righteousness, the last dignity he retains?
Jack Miles translates the above verses this way:
Then Job answered the Lord:
“You know you can do anything.
Nothing can stop you.
You ask, ‘Who is this ignorant muddler?’
Well, I said more than I knew, wonders quite beyond me.
‘You listen and I’ll talk,’ you say.
‘I’ll question you, and you tell me.’
Word of you had reached my ears,
But now that my eyes have seen you,
I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.”
This translation emphasizes the tragic irony that is elided in most Christian translations. Christian translations choose to emphasize human penitence; it is important that Man recognize the utter depravity of their moral standing before the Almighty. Man is ever in need of repentance. The same is true of Job, as his friends had consistently pointed out: there must be something from which to repent.
But from what does Job need to repent? The history of Christian interpretation provides reasons enough: Job had a secret sin God was purging, Job questions God’s justice/power, Job assumes a transactional relationship and is just complaining that he did not receive what was owed, etc. All of these arguments fall flat from the evidence of the text: “Yet through all this, Job did no wrong.” But someone has.
Tone is difficult to replicate with words, but the tone of Miles’ translation I think should be heard as defiant to the end. God, in his formidable speech, attempted to bat away the piteous cry of the righteous with an overwhelming show of force. God knows he was wrong to take everything from Job, but he will not admit it, not to Job! The wretch’s simple words, shouting into the maelstrom, snaps the reader’s attention from wandering among the stars back to the issue at hand - wrong has been done and the Almighty will not be let off so easily.
Job thought God could do anything. Once, God told a man that he would spare a town if ten righteous men were found within its walls. Job was mistaken indeed to assume such benevolent restraint; for God is willing to consume everything, even the righteous.
The wretch has indeed said more than he knew. The Almighty may set the boundaries of the oceans and land, send rain and open the floodgates of heaven, provide prey for the lion and food for the raven; but these wonders even the Almighty has not known: the weight of mortality, the fear of death, pain, hopelessness, the pursuit of desperate purpose to make life meaningful and the crushing weight of worthlessness that results when even righteousness is vanity and grasping after the wind.
Calamity first visited Job as a whirlwind, but he was spared the trauma of witnessing the destruction. He was told by messengers of the disaster and he assumed the traditional position of grief by wearing torn sackcloth and sitting in ashes. He was then beset with hideous sores that could not bear the touch of the sackcloth. Naked, sores oozing with puss, the potshard gripped in a quivering fist, laying all but dead in his noisome bed - the Whirlwind visits again. After the thunderings, blowings and displays of power, Job is left intact. This does not mean nothing was taken. The Whirlwind destroys, it is its nature. Job had one thing left - hope. Job had hope that his eyes would witness something other than his ears had heard. But the Whirlwind is the same, his eyes do not deceive. Job once said with confidence, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed by the name of the Lord!” Job has now seen the Lord fully, completely. He augments the second clause with a shuddering, agonizing sob, “I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.”
Extremes define the limits of people, and of God it appears. As the Whirlwind retreats, we are left with two images of extreme figures forever imprinted in our imaginations. In no other book of the Bible have I read God so eloquent in describing his awesome power and who also appears in such power to an individual. The Exodus comes close; but there, God displays his power to an empire that has oppressed peoples for four hundred years, and he never directly appears to the empire but acts through proxy. The Exodus describes when power meets power. With Job, God meets a different type of adversary, one for which he is not prepared - and his power is ineffectual. If anything, it feels grotesque; like a bully kicking the nerd while he is down. That this does not make God look good is precisely the point. Job clearly has all the power; the visceral state of his body and his righteousness swallows God’s displays of power and glory. God thunders, “I can do all things!” And he certainly can exert power over anything, but he cannot do this again. Uncontrolled power cannot meet humility and stand. If God is to be persuasive to the humble man, God must assume a station of humility. As God departs I imagine him looking back to his servant, Job, and understanding that if he is to meet Man again, he must appear in his own bed of ashes.
With the Whirlwind’s retreat, with God’s retreat, nothing is accomplished. Job is not given an answer for why he suffers, though he knows unequivocally that he is dealing with a dangerous and unpredictable force. God does not win the bet he made with the Devil (forgot this happened? So did I!), neither does he cow Job into submission with his display of power. God does, however, retreat and restore Job’s fortunes. The restoration can easily be understood as an act of repentance. It can also be understood as God attempting to reset history to the time before this whole debacle; an attempt to pretend this whole episode never happened. Regardless of how successful erasing the past or offering recompense is, Job and God come away forever changed. Job - and by extension humanity - has discovered an unexpected power that can be used to their benefit. God afterall cares about righteousness, which is good to know in case anyone else finds themselves face to face with wanton destruction from the Almighty. In the Hebrew Bible (which is organized differently than the Old Testament), God speaks directly to humanity for the last time in the whirlwind. When God breaks his silence, it is when he appears as a man in the New Testament. He even faces the Devil again, but is much more careful in his interactions with him. I imagine this episode with Job consumed the mind of God during his silence. He asked the Devil, “Have you considered my servant Job?” No doubt God himself considered Job much more.
A note to the reader:
Job has a deep, rich and very long interpretive history. Both ancient and modern Jewish and Christian writers must contend with the content of this book - particularly how God joins in with the Satan to prove a point. How one approaches this book, what is heard and the conclusions drawn are a product of significant subjective conditioning. History, culture, personal experience and deference to authority all play their part. For myself, I wanted to emphasize the pain and tragedy this story so beautifully explores. To me, these feelings are important and should not be diminished with trite platitudes that appeal to the hidden wisdom of God, or the enduring hope that God is always good, or that suffering is just a symptom of our evil human nature. I think the power of Job is that it forces us to reconsider these typically accepted theological propositions. Wisdom is supposed to promote life; making a deal with the Devil is foolishness. God may be good, but he can also be dangerous and unpredictable. Consider Abraham, who was asked by God to sacrifice his only child after a decade of obedience; or Uzzah, who is killed trying to protect the Ark from falling; or the Pharisees in the New Testament who are told by Jesus, “Not everyone who calls me Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven.” That people can suffer as a result of their own evil conjuring is self-evident; but Job suffers not because of his evil nature, but because he is righteous. I do not think God would have accepted the bet were Job anything other than righteous, neither would the Devil have been interested.
I also wanted to explore the alternative to the classically proposed characteristic of God’s unchangeability. I used to think this characteristic of God important, even necessary for God to be good. Recently, however, I have begun to question this. Morality, what is good and bad, changes through history: it can even change depending on personal relationships. The difficulty of morality, of choosing between good and ill, is too often not applied to God because God conveniently makes what is good or can only do good. But maybe the victory of righteousness is better felt when there is a real chance that things could be otherwise. God is good, not just because he can’t be otherwise, but because there is always the threat that he could choose otherwise. Job presents a situation where God chooses to do ill, helping me appreciate when he chooses good in the future.
Several times, often at the end, I make allusions to Jesus. Christian theologians through history reference the necessity of the incarnation (read the Gospels, especially John, or Anselm, or Athanasius, Luther, Calvin, etc.). The necessity of God becoming man is often understood within the context of the redemption of man. This is a bottom-up progression. I have tried to flip the script and understand God becoming man as a type of redemption for God, not just for man.
I have really enjoyed writing about Job, exploring my own understandings of God, man and evil. It is not that hopeful, but as I mentioned before, hope is not really the point of Job. I am sure we will get to hope later in the Old Testament, but I should also warn that Advent is coming wherein we must pass through the night to witness the morning.