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19. When Job "gives up" or "relinquishes" himself in 42:6, it frees God to admit HIS mistake. I have tucked this point into the end of my observations both because it relates to Job 42 and because I suppose it won't get much hearing among many people. Yet, it is a crucial point for understanding the flow of the Book of Job. In a word, I understand God's words in 42:7,8 to be a sort of divine confession, an admission of error, that was triggered by Job's heartfelt and honest self-assessment in 42:1-6. The point should not be lost--when a great man is big enough to admit his complete undoing, it stimulates other great beings, such as God, to admit his own shortcomings. But God, like the United States or like the United States Supreme Court, has a very difficult time saying that it/He was wrong. Indeed, a huge presence or institution almost never does so even if it so clearly is taking a different tack that everyone in the world knows is different from before.

That is, I think it is incredibly difficult for "big people" or "big institutions" to admit a mistake. There is something in the fabric of being big, in the fear of being exposed to further mistakes, in the terror at facing tons of additional complaints, that keeps really big guys from admitting wrong. It isn't good for business and it can open you to more lawsuits in the future. That is why when God does admit his mistake, he even does it in somewhat ambiguous terms. He just cannot come out and say that Job was right, and that He, God, had been messing with Job's life without cause.

The dynamics of 42:7-8, then, are fascinating from the perspective of human psychology. Job has confessed his fault, his ignorance, his impotence, his littleness. His confession in 42:6 is basically a statement of complete and utter personal annihilation. Nothing makes sense anymore. Nothing from his past helps him now. Nothing is secure or tied down anymore for Job. He is completely undone. He "gives up" whatever he had tried to build up again after the disasters of 1-2. His complaint had been his guide and his friend, his stay against the further ravages of disease and inner distress. Job now sees that he must also give up his complaint. Nothing he does, nothing he can conceive of doing, will reverse his situation or give him meaning. The great man is fully devastated. He thought that he was completely undone during his speeches in chs. 3-31 but at least he had words. At least he had a mind and a brain and a competitive and combative spirit in which to frame his concerns. But now even that is gone. Humiliation vies with ignorance and impotence as he abandons himself.

I think I am having difficulty describing Job's sense of self-abandonment because I, the writer, still have words to "attack" the world or to state my case against God, others or my situation, if I so desire. That is, I still have my "faculties," even if I sometimes feel that distress has come my way. But Job now has seen that his "faculties" get him nowhere also. What does he have left? His wife? (I will want to address that in the next essay). Nothingness is all that fills his heart and mind now. He has to drop his complaint because it has been blown out of the water by God. There is no future for Job. Now he knows that, even as he knew at one time that his redeemer lived.

But this essay is supposed to be about God, right? What do I mean that God admitted a mistake, and how does Job's admission trigger or encourage God to do so? God says to Eliphaz:

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

Note how God drops in the remark about Job's being right at the end of the verse. As I have repeatedly said, the most significant things in life are said AFTER the comma. God is admitting that Job spoke "right" of him. But when? One interpretation will have Job speaking right of God in his confession in 42:1-6. Finally, this construal argues, Job has gotten it "right." He admitted his humanity, his limitations, his sin. Good for Job. But, a better reading of the text is that Job has been "right" as long as the friends have been "wrong." When did the friends start being wrong? When they began to open their mouths in ch. 4. Therefore, God is drawing us all the way back to the beginning. Job is right from the beginning, just as Job knew he was. Thus, he was right when he said all kinds of scurrilous things about God, when he drafted his own Fescennine Verses against the Almighty. He was right when he said that God hated him, that God was motivated by anger, that God had assualted him as a city, that the arrows of God had gone into him and that his spirit had drunk their poison. Job is right about all of this.

Why is it that our respect for someone increases when that someone either admits a mistake or shows his/her vulnerability and weakness? We say we admire "strong." Why are we looking for examples of weakness, humanity and vulnerability, then, in a great person? Possibly because we know we are not strong, and we know instinctively that no one's life is "charmed," and we want the great person to realize that, after all, s/he partakes fully in the human condition. But, in any case, I will say that God's admission here, even though it is cloaked in semi-ambiguous words, makes my opininon of God rise considerably. God is big enough to admit his mistakes.

But where does that leave us? It means that Job was probably the one whose openness and fearlessness in facing himself led God to do the same about Himself. In one of my earlier essays I argued that Job's manner of argumentation in ch. 3 was picked up by God in his words in ch.38. The point is that God aspires to imitate Job, and He does so here also. Job is never so big as when he feels he is minutely little.

In the final analysis, however, Job is proclaimed right only when it is not important for him any longer to be right. He has already dropped his lawsuit, so to speak, in 42:6. When he said, "I despise," he also despised the fine manner in which he had built up his complaint since ch. 3. Nothing of the feisty Job, the fighting Job, the Job that knew he must be right, remains. He doesn't care any longer if he is "right." It matters no more. Job discovers how great he is, how right he is, how magnificent he is, when he no longer cares. Or, to put it differently, Job learns how right he is when he no longer can process the concept of being right. It is as if someone had feted Friedrich Nietzsche in 1897 with being the greatest mind in Europe, eight years after his mind had gone completely blank.

Job is right, and he doesn't care. Job came to the point of "giving up" everything, and it enabled God to admit his mistake too. In giving it all up, Job didn't secretely have a "stash" of self-confidence or words hidden away somewhere else. He was at the end of his resources. In Othello's words, "Here is my journey's end, here is my butt/ And very sea mark of my utmost sail" (5.2.267-268). Unbeknownst to Job, he experienced the freedom of having absolutely nothing.

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