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Despite his conflicting thoughts, Job throws in his lot with law. He prepared his case, marshalled all the arguments, signed the complaint and turned it in. Once he did that the text is utterly succinct, "The words of Job are ended (31:40)." Nothing more needs to be or can be said. Yet Elihu and then God undermine Job's reliance on law, showing it to be a flimsy construct that ignores the central category of divine existence: power.

Elihu on Law

The way the universe really works, Elihu says, is that God speaks to people using a variety of methods. The mediatorial method, which Job seemed to love so much (Job 16:19; 19:25) is reinterpreted by Elihu to include not simply the mediator's help but also the person's repentance, prayer and confession (33:23-27).

Because this is the rhythm in which God operates, the process of the law courts and legal procedure is foreign to God. God has not yet "appointed a time for anyone to go before God in judgment (34:23)." Rather, God is judge and jury alike, giving instant "justice" by shattering the mighty without investigation and setting forces in their places (33:24).

Job's problem, according to Elihu, is that rather than calling on "God" the "Maker" who gives "strength in the night," he whines and utters empty cries to God. And, to make matters worse, Job utters these empty cries while claiming that he cannot see God (35:12-14). The irony is that Job the blind one now places the case before God and waits for the ever-present God to appear (35:14)! Instead of realizing that God is leading Job into a broad place where his table will be laden with fatness (36:16), Job is "obsessed with the case of the wicked; judgment and justice seize you (36:17)." Elihu thus interpreted Job's last series of oaths (Job 31) as Job's obsession with "justice" over everything else. The reason that Job cannot "see" God is that his quest for justice has "blinded" him.

God's Interpretation

God dispatches of justice much more summarily. In his second speech to Job, after pointing out the amoral and even violent ways of the creatures of the earth, and hearing Job's discomfited reply, God asks, "Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified (40:8)?" Literally, the first part may be rendered, 'Will you frustrate (or 'make ineffectual') my justice?' By putting his case as he has done, and by thus elevating 'justice' to the acme of his pantheon of virtues, Job has impliedly and expressly nullified God's justice. 'If God was really interested in justice,' he says, 'he would act in such and such a way to deliver me. Law, therefore, must mean nothing to God.'

But note how God continues after this rhetorical question of 40:8. "Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his (40:9)?" In other words, Job's claim that God has abandoned justice [and, hence, that God ignores law] is met by God's question about power. The rest of God's words will concern humbling the mighty, bringing down the proud and admiring or restraining terrifyingly powerful forces (Behemoth and Leviathan). That is, law and justice are not so much devalued by God, as is the impression one gets from Elihu, but swallowed up completely in the voracious maws of the divine power. It is as if God is saying, 'Job, you say I have abandoned justice. In fact, the real moving force in the world is power, raw, brutal, unadulterated, terrifying power. Your appeal to law and justice is so flimsy I only need to refer to it in a rhetorical question, and then move on to the real issue of life: power.'

And so law, which occupied an increasingly big share of Job's consciousness as he prepared his "case," comes crashing down, another victim of the overwhelming divine potency.