Canter Bridge

In a manner of speaking, Job gets his wish in the end. In another way, he does not.

As the book’s pain-wracked central figure has plead, YHWH breaks silence and speaks. Yet he does not provide Job with the simple justification he has so volubly desired:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

In just such an unpromising mode does the books’ famous ‘YHWH speech’ begin. Job seems doomed to face down divine omniscience as his most daunting adversary. It seems YHWH will answer Job’s complaint with words, only to crush him with the weight of them.

Indeed this is just the impression the YHWH speeches make as they gather up a head of steam. Yet it is far from the whole truth. YHWH will stop the flow of Job’s complaint, it is true. Thousands of words that the man has employed to insist upon his own integrity in the face of his human accusers’ sterile logic seem to lose their force when, as the apocalypts would style it, heaven opens and a divine word is declared.

Yet YHWH’s objective, it will turn out, is not to undo Job but rather to remake him. Before he can do so, the boil-covered wordsmith must learn the limits of his understanding. His insight is not, like that of his companions, dessicated by the hot winds of irrelevance. It is simply not, like YHWH’s, unfathomable. Job must take the measure of it and confess this.

Yet this is not the error his companions would have him embrace. It is, instead, the circumstance of being human, and in pain.