Job’s Friends (2 of 3)

In context

Bildad speaks next. If Job’s children sinned, he says, God “delivered them into the hand of their disobedience” (Job 8:4), and God will not cast away a blameless man (Job 8:20). But in the Lord’s own words, Job was ruined “without cause” (Job 2:3). Bildad points Job to the wisdom of earlier generations, and to papyrus, a tall reed that withers without the water of the marsh (Job 8:8–13).

Job answers, “Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God?” No one, he says, could answer God “one time in a thousand” (Job 9:2–3). God makes “the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades” (Job 9:9); Amos names Orion and the Pleiades too (Amos 5:8). The Rahab of Job 9:13 is not Rahab of Jericho: it is a name in Job and some psalms for a power God overcame, perhaps a monster of the sea (Psalm 89:9–10). Lye (Job 9:30) is a strong cleanser.

Job says, “There is no umpire between us, that might lay his hand on us both” (Job 9:33): no one to stand between him and God. In Job 10 he speaks straight to God: “Your hands have framed me and fashioned me altogether, yet you destroy me” (Job 10:8). Again he wishes he had died at birth (Job 10:18–19).