Canter Bridge

For Elihu and his bombast, things are really very simple. Job is suffering. God brings suffering only upon those who deserve it. Therefore, Job must have sinned to deserve his wretched boils, his insufferable loss, his rude and public indignity.

When Elihu has freed himself of his alleged restraint, the words flow like a river in flood. A just God never had so enthusiastic an ally as this pubescent orator. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

It is probably not wise to interpret the book of Job until one has clawed his way to sympathy for Job’s companions. Contrary to much glib exposition, they are not straw men.

If, in the end, they turn out to be fools, it is not because they did not have their claws into worthy wisdom but rather because they had lost the personalistic context in which such wisdom longs to sink its roots. To paraphrase Martin Buber, they exercised formidable mastery over the content of a conversation but were tone deaf to the I-Thou relationship that should have linked the participants. Continue Reading »

The symmetrical certainties of Job’s companions sound merely insipid in the light of the man’s unexplainable pain. Job recognizes the tattered, commonplace worthlessness of their regurgitated wisdom:

Who does not know such things as these?

It seems that Job does not so much question the validity of received wisdom as he does its absolute utility. Such convention explains many things, Job, might allow. But it does not interpret these boils. Continue Reading »

Job’s bitter audacity in challenging God’s ways is perhaps matched only by his ironic familiarity with biblical traditions that place the deity in a more favorable light.

Scholars debate the degree to which the author of the book of Job is interacting with actual biblical texts. Regardless, he knows intimately the traditions that have nourished those texts and deploys his verbal expertise to stand them on their head. Continue Reading »

It is facile, conventional, and mostly true to consider the Bible a life-affirming book. Like any simple description of complex reality, it is also reductionistic. Continue Reading »