Job 39 and God and Book of Job

God speaks for 70 verses in these two chapters before Job has an opportunity to respond. When Job next speaks, in response to the divine prodding, he can only mumble words suggesting that God's speech has undone him (40:3-5). What is it in the words of Job 38-39 that evoke such a changed reality from Job? The contrast between the defiant Job of 31:35 and the abashed Job of 40:3 should be as arresting to the careful reader as the contrast between the instinctively faithful Job of 2:10 and the sufferer of 3:3. Job is overcome, I suggest, because he begins to learn three things from God.

Job Learns his Ignorance of the Natural and Animal Worlds

Job's central claim to knowledge was in the moral realm. He knew he had been unjustly targeted by God to suffer enormous pain. He knew that his Redeemer lived and would set matters straight. But, he did not know a lot of things, many of which God decided to explore in Job 38-39. The purpose of God's tour through the cosmos and the animal world is to show Job the shocking extent of his impotence and lack of knowledge. Job can neither create nor control the sea (38:11). He knows nothing of the paths to darkness or light, the sources of the snow or rain or the patterns of the heavenly bodies (38:16-38). Ordered nature owes nothing, and is nothing understood, by Job.

The same holds true for the disordered or untamed world of wild animals (38:39-39:31). Job knows little of hunting prey (38:39), the calving of the deer (39:1) or the lives of the wild ass and ox (39:8-12). Of the soaring hawk and the laughing ostrich Job knows nothing.

Job Learns Nature's Amorality

God takes Job on a tour of the cosmological and natural worlds because it is God's theater of action, it is God's "home." What is striking about this world, other than the fact that Job does not understand or control it, is that rules of morality do not apply to it. In three instances, while narrating the habits of the wild creatures, God points out the seeming amorality of their world. First, without comment, God upbraids Job for his inability to hunt the prey for lion and raven, prey that God provides (38:39-41). God does not seem to have a problem with animals lying in wait to kill other animals.

Second, if one examines the life of the ostrich, one realizes that "it deals cruelly with its young, as if they were not its own (39:16)." Ostriches leave their young exposed to other beasts, who may trample or consume them. Granted, God characterizes this as the ostrich's forgetting wisdom (39:17), but it makes the reader wonder why God is "going there" in describing the ostrich.

Third, even the majestic hawks pick out their prey from afar, swoop on it, and kill it. "Its young ones suck up blood (39:30)." The last words of God in the chapter are the potentially chilling, "and where the slain are, there it is (39:30)." These final words of God's first speech should leave the reader breathless. How did we get from the majestic waves of the sea stilled by the imperious command of God to the hawk spending time sating its children's mouth with blood?

Job's Learns (and Fears) that There is no Moral Realm

God's barrage of words unsettles Job deeply (40:3-5). Is Job upset merely because "he (God) crushes me with a tempest (9:17)?" Though Job is probably overwhelmed by the cosmic fireworks, the form of God's self-disclosure, he is more likely undone by the content of what God suggests. God is probably suggesting not only that Job is ignorant of the nature of the cosmos but that part of Job's limitation is his cramped view of morality. In a word, the thesis I advance here (and will test in the next mini-essay) is that God is beyond good and evil, beyond all human categories of moral action and therefore completely unaccountable to the human. The only thing that can shake Job to the core of his being, which seems to be happening in 40:3-5 and 42:1-6 is that Job's central categories of living were wrongly articulated and maintained. As the elders showed their respect (and fear) for Job by laying their hands on their mouths (29:9), so Job lays his hand on his mouth (40:4) and is silent. His whole world, which was firm and then collapsed, is collapsing further.

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