12/28/2023 0 Comments Book of jobNow a whirlwind appears - perhaps in addition to Elihu, or supplanting him - and the full voice of God challenges Job, demanding to know where Job was when God laid the foundations of the earth. And speaking with what seems to be God's voice, Elihu proclaims that he will see Job "tried to his very end," because now Job has "added rebellion to his sin." Job should not have dared to question his fate, it is said. He is God, and like kings and princes, Elihu says, He is not to be questioned. The core of Elihu's words are that "it profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God." God is not around to be liked by men such as Job and his neighbors. He is angry at Job for concentrating on his own innocence rather than trying to justify why God had done this to him, and he is angry at the neighbors for condemning Job (and probably also for being such massive pricks). Elihu, who speaks without his approach having been narrated, speaks with great anger. "How then comfort ye me in vain, seeing in your answers there remaineth falsehood?"Īfter a long series of exchanges between the three neighbors and Job, a mysterious new voice, that of Elihu, interrupts. Job puts no stock in the sophistry of his neighbors, who only want to justify their own good fortune as rewarded virtue. Few are our days, says Job, and suffering is our lot. He suggests it might be a different level of understanding of the world by his deity: "Seest thou as man seeth?"Īfter repeated assertions by his neighbors that they will not listen to his lies, and that he can't justify his evil and deserved misfortune with a "wind of words," Job mocks them as the "end of wisdom" and finishes a final litany of despair for mankind. Job does not directly question God, but he says that if God were present, Job would ask him why these things had happened. Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me." If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean “ ”"If I be wicked, why then labour I in vain? And if he was evil, then why struggle as he does? When he protests that he is the most pitiable of men but cannot think of anything he did to deserve his fate, they decry him for implying that God might "pervert justice."īut Job refuses to accept a burden of sins he did not commit, and protests that false obeisance could not possibly serve to appease a God who is so vastly greater than he is, and that indeed the very action of pleading would be to question God, and thus, to sin. Why would a just God torment an innocent man, they ask. In contemporary thought, it was believed that misfortune was divine punishment, and the neighbors suggest that Job must deserve his fate. Job's neighbors approach him and commiserate, and their discussions actually constitute a majority of the story (with the "action" occurring in only the first two short chapters). Finally, as his wife speaks to him bitterly, Job curses the day he was born in a full chapter-length poem of woe. With God's permission, the Adversary (possibly Satan ) kills Job's children, destroys all of the man's possessions, and strikes Job with hideous diseases.
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