Canter Bridge

The reader of Job must be prepared for complex turns and important nuance.

For example, Job’s bitter complaint against a God who does not watch over the poor as their lives are dismantled by the unjust rich suddenly turns at 24.22 into an assurance that God will in the end give the unjust their due. This is the very judgment whose absence Job has decried in 24.1. He is not, it would seem, quite the pure antagonist of conventional wisdom that he is so often made out to be.

And then there is the matter of nuance. In this case, it is that particular shading that distinguishes relative truth from its fullness. The veteran reader of this book will anticipate the oddly restorative humiliation that Job undergoes during the YHWH speeches of the book’s closing chapters. There Job bows his head as one who has spoken foolish words out of a darkened understanding.

Yet Job has not spoken so foolishly as his friends. This critical distinction assures Job’s abiding status as one who tells us true things about the shape of reality rather than one more discredited personality thrown into the mass grave of useless and forgotten wordsmiths.

In the passage before us, Job knows something that Bildad does not. The foolishness would be to overlook this qualitative—if shaded—difference between the central figure of the book and his fellows.

Bildad knows that man is a worm. Job intuits that he is not.

For Job, there is a latent glory in a man that is not badly described by calling a good man righteous. Job locks his grip on the moral distinction between evil oppressors and innocent sufferers. He knows the worth of the latter and will not level both to the undifferentiated scum that Bildad seems to think all men and women are born to be.

The inevitable outcome of this is that something is wrong with the world as Job knows it. It cannot simply be faced with a stiff upper lip or Stoic passivity. Something is broken, Job knows, with the certainty of one who rails against what he cannot describe in scholastic detail.

Humanity was not made to live this way. Human beings possess a glory better than all this.

The book vindicates this Joban conviction and makes it available to its reader. Bildad is on the side of the moralistic angels, all pinheads and smirkers and advocates of the status quo.

Job, who hears ‘the groans of the city rising from the city’, is on the side of reality.