Canter Bridge

Job’s relentless honesty is all that he has.

All other assets have been lost to the crescendo of calamities that have come upon him as part of a cosmic drama that he will never understand. Job responds by cursing the days of his conception and birth, flinging at the unanswering skies his resentment of all powers that could have swallowed up that day and saved him the unceasing trouble into which he has fallen. Nothing he says is false. It is merely daring, as the speaking of truth so often is.

The poetic dexterity of the book is nearly as astonishing as the well-ordered universe with its watertight morality that Eliphaz—the first of Job’s ‘friends’—imagines he lives in. If bread and water are Job’s principle need, Job’s transparent bitterness turns even these into their ironic opposite, for ‘sighing comes to me instead of food; my groans pour out like water.’

Job’s lament endures because, though he will weep, he will not flinch.

In the face of Eliphaz’ clinical piety, Job’s complaint seems untrusting and then perverse. In fact, it is neither, as the book’s long march will eventually persuade the most doubtful of its careful readers. Job, in the end, will have spoken truth. The implication for Eliphaz’ wisdom is that it defines falsehood, all of it polished aphorisms and pious certainties without a hint of the contingency of human experience and the epistemological humility that is incumbent upon all who would dare to describe it.

Within this poetic framework, it is those who insist upon the world’s absolute goodness that err, not those who cry out from the deep places of its pain. This point of view and its inclusion in the canonical Scriptures is audacious, given the near credal status of Israel’s confession that ‘YHWH is good, his mercy endures forever’. What we are taught here—in addition to layered instruction that is virtually inexhaustible—is that though YHWH is good, the world over which he reigns is deeply conflicted.

Even the presence of ‘the satan’, an accusing ombudsman among the ‘sons of God’, opens the door to this conclusion.

All is not well. Job becomes the crucible of a celestial dissonance that—even if not pronounced at the macro level—has reduced Job’s life to ruin.

The reader is left to wonder what cancer eats at this world’s life. And his.