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Job's Reply to Bildad
You Have Really Been Helpful
1Job said:
2You have really been helpful
to someone weak and weary.
3You have given great advice
and wonderful wisdom
to someone truly in need.
4How can anyone possibly speak
with such understanding?
5Remember the terrible trembling
of those in the world of the dead
below the mighty ocean.
6Nothing in that land
of death and destruction
is hidden from God,
7who hung the northern sky
and suspended the earth
on empty space.
8God stores water in clouds,
but they don't burst,
9and he wraps them around
the face of the moon.
10On the surface of the ocean,
God has drawn a boundary line
between light and darkness.
11And columns supporting the sky
tremble at his command.
12By his power and wisdom,
God conquered the force
of the mighty ocean.
13The heavens became bright
when he breathed,
and the escaping sea monster
died at his hands.
14These things are merely a whisper
of God's power at work.
How little we would understand
if this whisper
ever turned into thunder!
Job Continues
I Am Desperate
1Job said:
2I am desperate because
God All-Powerful refuses
to do what is right.
As surely as God lives,
3and while he gives me breath,
4I will tell only the truth.
5Until the day I die,
I will refuse to do wrong
by saying you are right,
6because each day my conscience
agrees that I am innocent.
7I pray that my enemies
will suffer no less
than the wicked.
8Such people are hopeless,
and God All-Powerful
will cut them down,
9without listening
when they beg for mercy.
10And that is what God should do,
because they don't like him
or ever pray.
11Now I will explain in detail
what God All-Powerful does.
12All of you have seen these things
for yourselves.
So you have no excuse.
How God Treats the Wicked
13Here is how God All-Powerful
treats those who are wicked
and brutal.
14They may have many children,
but most of them will go hungry
or suffer a violent death.
15Others will die of disease,
and their widows
won't be able to weep.
16The wicked may collect riches
and clothes in abundance
as easily as clay.
17But God's people will wear
clothes taken from them
and divide up their riches.
18No homes built by the wicked
will outlast a cocoon
or a shack.
19Those sinners may go to bed rich,
but they will wake up poor.
20Terror will strike at night
like a flood or a storm.
21Then a scorching wind
will sweep them away
22without showing mercy,
as they try to escape.
23At last, the wind will celebrate
because they are gone.
Reflect
Job’s response to Bildad is pure scorn. 26:1-4 are to be read as sarcasm: “You have really been helpful to someone weak and weary” (CEV). Bildad is silenced and we don’t hear from him or his friends again.
It is tempting to read the verses that follow through 21st century Western eyes, especially 26:7, which seems to indicate that Job understood the earth, as we do, as suspended in space. But we should be cautious, since it isn’t altogether clear from the text what Job meant, and he seems in the rest of the chapter to be thinking within the worldview of the Ancient Near East. At that time people were more concerned with the function of things in the universe than with their materiality and physical nature. (If you want to know more about this, see John H. Walton, Job, (NIV Application Commentary) on this chapter.) Some translations refer to “Rahab” in v 12—this isn’t the woman who sheltered the spies in the Book of Joshua, but a sea monster. And all this reflection on the power of God at work in the natural world is “merely a whisper of God’s power at work.”
We can reason only so much about God from the world he created. Human wisdom can take us only so far, and can make terrible errors. Job knew there was something more, and we will see it when God reveals himself at the end of the book. We know so much more than Job ever did—not because of the discoveries of science but because Jesus came to show us what God is like.
But at this point Job is at the end of his rope. He will speculate on wisdom in chapter 28, and have to listen to Elihu for seven chapters, starting at chapter 32, before he hears from God.
Respond
Father God, Thank you for Job’s complete intellectual integrity. Help me to have this kind of honesty as I wrestle with things I don’t understand. Don’t let me be put off by people who have glib answers. I trust you to be all-loving and ultimately fair, even when I can’t see that at present.
Annabel Robinson
Annabel was born in Kew, near London, England. She committed her life to Jesus Christ at a Scripture Union camp when she was 16, and immediately found joy and peace. At Oxford she was active in the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, where she met her husband, Reid. They emigrated to Canada in 1965, where she taught Classics at the University of Regina until 2007. She has two children, Heather in Oslo and Alasdair in Calgary.