Job 20 and Zophar and Book of job

Zophar completes the second cycle of speeches (Job 12-20) with a ghoulish description of the ultimate destiny of the wicked. Eliphaz devoted 1/2 of his second speech to their fate, Bildad about 80%. Now Zophar devotes more than 85% of his to their lot (20:4-29). Instead of focusing on the specifics of Zophar's memorable language, this essay will focus on why the friends devote so much attention to that subject.*

*Make no mistake about it, however. Zophar's language in Job 20 is the most vivid of all the friends. For example, the wicked perish "like their dung (v.7);" food turns into the "venom of asps" in their stomachs (v.14); they suck the "poison of asps (v.16):" a bronze arrow will strike them through until the "glittering point comes out of their gall (v.25)."

WHY the Wicked?

The three friends spend so much time excoriating the wicked and describing their fate in the second cycle because they finally realize Job's very personal ruminations about his pain call their religious system into question. In the first cycle the friends, with various degrees of earnestness, wanted to bolster Job's hope. Now they see that Job will have none of their words; he really thinks that God has undermined his life. This poses a huge challenge to the system of retributive justice, and so the friends rush into the breach by asserting with ever louder shouts that the theological system is healthy, that the doctrine is intact, and that the wicked will get their just desserts--just as the fathers have taught since time immemorial.

Why the WICKED?

But this does not explain why they focus on the fate of the wicked rather than the blessings of the righteous, since the latter is the flip side of the former. Is this just a case of seeing the glass "half empty" rather than "half full?" I believe they focus on the wicked rather than the righteous because they are incensed at Job for upsetting their intellectual world. They can (and do) attack Job personally, but they sense by now that his real challenge is not just to their ability to comfort him but to the stability of their world order. Attacking the wicked may be shorthand for attacking Job.

Only those who have received the ire of representatives of the established order, whether it be academic, religious, legal, medical or other "world," truly know how vicious that order can be when attacked. So the cruelty of Zophar's words here is a window into the way authorities respond when their neat worlds are assaulted. Seen in this light, Zophar's second speech becomes a way to understand how authorities feel when their privileged position is called into question.

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