Job 38 and God and Book of Job

The last extended words in the poetic section of Job belong to God. God has remained silent ever since the prologue; He has, aternatively, been the subject of withering attack by Job and valiant, if uninspired, defense by the friends. Elihu made a significant contribution to the discussion by encouraging Job to see his distress as an occasion for God to lead him into a "broad place" whose table was weighed down with "fatness (36:16)." My thesis here is that God's remarkable set of speeches (38-39 and 40:6-41:30) provide the intellectual freedom for Job that Elihu alluded to, the "broad place" of the mind and heart for Job freely to reinterpret his pain. Job will complete his reinterpretive act in 42:5, where he contrasts his former mode of knowing God ("hearing") with his current one ("seeing" God).

Creating the Broad Place

All students of Job note the remarkable and majestic tone of the poetry in Job 38-41. While Elihu began with images of inflation (32:18) that were then matched by his profusion of words, God launches into cosmological and meterological tours of the natural world (38) and an arresting catalogue of untamed animals and their traits (39).*

[*There is some debate whether the reference to the horse in 39:19 is to the domesticated or wild horse. If the latter, the catalogue of nine earth and air creatures in 38:39-39:30 would suggest to the reader that the broad place created by God is primarily a place not controlled by humans. That theme is then reinforced through the poetry of 40-41.]

The purpose of these tours is succintly suggested through a question in 38:18. "Have you comprehended the expanse ('rahab') of the earth? Declare, if you know all this." Job is being introduced to the broad space of God and, by being so introduced, is enabled to reexamine the cramped nature of his interpretive efforts to date. When we reflect on the fact that what we have from Job in chapters 3-31 is probably the most eloquent expression of loss known to Western literature, we as readers are also struck by the stark fact that the author is claiming that our most sophisticated literary and interpretive expressions also are reflections of confineded conditions and crabbed style. We, too, need to be brought to a "broad place" of our own as readers.

God Speaks

When God finally speaks, he does so out of the "whirlwind" or "tempest." As Edwin Good mentions, the language is meant to suggest "an awesome atmosphere of darkness and noise to accomplany God's cosmic outpouring (Harper Collins Bible Commentary, 2d Ed, 2000, p. 390)." Three observations about the tone and content of God's speech are appropriate.

First, on one level, it seems that God's response to Job fulfills Job's greatest fears. Job hesitated to call up on God in the context of a legal dispute because if God appeared and spoke, "he crushes me with a tempest (9:17--the same Hebrew word, 'saarah' is used in 9:17 and 38:1, the latter to describe the "whirlwind" out of which God speaks)." Job was worried that the disproportion of strength between him and God would lead to his being crushed by a divine tempest. Has that, in fact, happened?

Second, Job 38:1 talks about God's speech using the technical term from law, "to answer ('anah'-38:1, cf. 9:14-16)." One of the options Job mulled over in chapter 9 was where he would call upon God and God would answer, either through a series of questions (as here) or specific responses to Job's concerns. God's response in 38-41 is thus framed in the context of legal discourse but will be an answer that will ultimately destroy the very lawsuit that it is addressing.

Third, when we look at the words of Job 38 (the next mini-essay will also address this), we notice a profusion of images of light and darkness. As such, as literary critic Robert Alter has pointed out, the first speech of God functions as a reversal of Job's first descent into the darkness in Job 3. (The Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 97). In that chapter Job used imagery of darkness and return to the womb to express his longing for the reversal of life forces. In Job 38, the author uses the same language to show how God broke forth from those limitations into light and birth (38:7,8,19). God both answers Job's complaint and reverses the tenor of his thought in chapter 38.

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