Canter Bridge

The book of Job comprises some of the Bible’s finest poetry. Sophisticated and complex as a piece of Hebrew literature, the book is just as confident in its ideology as in its artistry.

Perhaps its greatest contribution to biblical thought—to say nothing of wider religious conversation—is its assertion that its eponymous figure’s speechifying defiance of God was theology more true than the polished certainties of Job’s rhetorical adversaries and sometime companions.

Students of the work tussle over what Job actually repented of in the final chapters of the book’s present form. Astonishingly, new proposals for understanding YHWH’s speeches and Job’s response continue to see the light of day in our time, such is the book’s generative potency.

The pages before us show Job railing against a governing deity who is both distracted and unfair. This is no ordinary theodicy and certainly not the treatise of a canonical trajectory bent on preserving religious order or sheltering in cool assurances that things are not as bad as they seem.

‘Why are times not kept by the Almighty, and why do those who know him never see his days? ‘, we find Job challenging with questions that by form are rhetorical. In the presence of defenders of the opposite conception of divine attentiveness, however, they are pointed and insistent upon a response. There follows a catalogue of the oppressions with which the mighty diminish and crush the lives of the weak.

Then this frontal attack on arguments regarding the redeeming work of God’s invisible hand:

From the city the dying groan, and the throat of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer.

Job brings up further rhetorical fireworks to list the felonies of ‘those who rebel against the light, and do not know its ways’, followed by yet further indictment of the deity who ought to put a stop to such villainy:

They harm the childless woman, and do no good to the widow. Yet God prolongs the life of the mighty by his power; they rise up when they despair of life.

Like some early Dostoyevsky, the poet gropes for the link between morality and divinity. Yet Job ends this speech with the strongest possible affirmation of moral behavior. His dilemma is that God is missing in action when justice is sought, or that he cravenly supports the wicked as he empties the poor of both substance and hope.

How predictable, then, the acid ad hominem assassination of Job’s person and his cry that flows from the orthodox lips of Bildad the Shuhite.

Job is convinced that man is a tragic figure, so capable of nobility, so bent on depravation, so wrongly divided up by a God who seems on the evidence to be untutored in the ways of justice if he is not merely vile.

Bildad, by contrast, considers man a maggot.

There is no drama in Bildad’s religion. No struggle tightens the muscularity of his understanding. No questions threaten to undermine his certainties.

Numbed by the drumbeat of religious certifying of all that is and all that shall be, Bildad is merely pathetic. He is, within sight of Job’s near collapse before Bildad’s very eyes, simply wrong about everything.