Canter Bridge

The book of Job arrays against its suffering central figure young Elihu, its fourth righteousness-clogged speechmaker. His self-description is laborious. Elihu has restrained himself just long enough for his three elders to give up their speechifying in an indignant harrumph over Job’s alleged insistence upon ‘justifying himself’.

But no more. Elihu is young and he cannot wait.

The youngster is incensed that a venerable old man of the community can go wrong as spectacularly as Job has done. Rather than battle for the old man’s dignity and find a quiet door through which he might shuffle off the scene so that good things can be said on the odd occasion that his name comes up in conversation, Elihu must set things right.

That is what a righteous young man does when his elders have failed to guarantee the integrity of the system that has has raised him. It gets the hero up in him. It shouts at him that his moment has come. It threatens enduring irrelevance if he does not speak now.

Elihu, one imagines, didn’t require much convincing. His self-presentation soliloquy nearly drowns in the first-person pronoun. Not only does this right-thinking up-and-comer sharpen his teeth to devour Job, he also displaces his three allied elders by turning the facets of their failure to the light like a diamond held aloft by an admiring pretender too poor to step beyond the cubic-zirconium counter.

Elihu will speak some truth, yet he will get everything wrong. He is not, in the end, any different than his elders, only more clownish for having allowed the vigor of his hot blood and the raw appeal of his novice rhetoric convince him that this was his moment for vaunting over them.

Wisdom is a many-faceted gem. Folly, too, has its abundant variants.