Job 42 and God and Book of job

Job thinks his life is over in 42:6, when he says "I despise" and sinks into his psychic desolation. Earlier Job described God's assault on him as "uprooting my hope like a tree (19:10)." My thesis is that Job's emotional strength returned during the third cycle, especially after he began to assert God's moral confusion in governing the world in chapter 21, thus putting his friends on the defensive, and then cut them off from further speaking in chapter 26. It culminated in his multiple oaths of personal righteousness in chapter 31. I argued further that the effect of God's words in chapters 38-41 is, figuratively speaking, to slice Job's emotional legs out from under him again.

God Speaks (42:7-9)

Job may be finished speaking and think that his life is over, but Job does not have the last word in the book. God does. God addresses the friends, but ends up saying something more significant with respect to Job. To the friends God says,

"My wrath is kindled against you (Eliphaz) and your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has (42:7)."

He also then tells them to offer sacrifice for themselves and that Job will pray for them (42:8). Four significant things come from 42:7. First is the reference to God's continued anger. Job spoke of it in 9:5,13 and he attributed God's attack on him in 16:9 to the divine wrath. Now, God's wrath is kindled against the friends. We wonder if Job is right after all, and that anger is a divine character trait.

Second, God is angry at the three friends and not Job. Note also that Elihu is not included as an object of God's anger. Many scholars take this as a sign that the Elihu speeches (32-37) were later additions to the book, but apart from the fact that there is no evidence at all for that assertion, another explanation suits the facts even better. God doesn't mention his anger at Elihu because God isn't angry at him! God makes a distinction, which I have tried to make, between the friends' parroting of the tradition of retributive justice and Elihu's more nuanced approach to Job.

Third, the friends have not spoken "what is right" about God. The implication is that the author of Job may be trying to put quite a distance between the traditional teachings of the wisdom tradition and his own theology. One might also argue that the author of Job is just trying to distance himself from the more "hyper traditional wisdom" speakers. In any case, the Book of Job presents profound and sustained criticism of the wisdom tradition here. Not only does Job criticize the tradition; God does also.

The Oblique Reference to Job

The most important five words of God's brief speech appear after the comma: "as my servant Job has" (2 words in Hebrew). The words are repeated in 42:8, lest we miss them. Job has spoken "right" about God. But when? Only in the last few verses where he humbly repented in dust and ashes? This cannot be right, because it is the friends' words that are condemned, and they began speaking as early as chapter 4. Thus we must conclude that God is telling Job he spoke the right words about God from the beginning.

The implications of these five words are seismic. If Job spoke what was right all along, then what is God really saying? Is He admitting the truth of Job's charges against him? That God indeed had hated him, had destroyed his life, had uprooted his hope like a tree, had assailed him unmercifully? Are these last five words an apology of sorts? And what might be the effect on Job? After his emotional depletion in 42:6 how does he or may he receive these words? Does the text give us any clues?

Furthermore, does Job care any longer whether he is right? Since "rightness" and "justice" have been concepts that God has exploded in chapters 38-41, does Job's being right mean anything at all? Or, on the other hand, are these few words possibly the most liberating, most affirming thing that God could have said because it confirms for Job what he knew was the case all along? Thus, it tells Job that his sense of life, his grasp of the world, was fundamentally correct all along. Are these five words, in a strange way, the indication that Job, the one who knows he is utterly lost, is now strangely found?

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