Commentary on Job 23:1-9, 16-17

This is the second of four lections from Job. We saw in Job 1–2 that Job is blameless, and that God prompted the satan to do terrible things to him. These remarks on Job 23 build on my comments on the previous lection, which address the book’s theologically challenging first scenes.

Job 23 in context

The first two chapters of Job tell the story that sets the stage for everything that follows. After that, the book shifts to an extended poetic deliberation over the nature of God and divine (in)justice, as Job grapples with undeserved suffering and a silent God, especially as his friends increasingly blame Job for what has befallen him.

I often hear Eliphaz and company referred to as Job’s “so-called friends,” but this gives us a certain self-congratulatory ease. These men are his friends. They come to be with him in his grief; they weep, they mourn alongside him, and they know how to sit in silence with him because his suffering is so terrible (2:11–13). But they’re human, and the more Job insists he did nothing wrong (and he didn’t), the more they each dig into their positions and react with blame. The argument escalates.

We might feel, when we read this poignant book, that we identify with Job. And we may, but leaving it at that is a bit too comfortable. We’re also the friends.

Much of the book of Job consists of three cycles of poetic speeches between Job and his friends, with Job responding to each friend in turn—Eliphaz/Job, Bildad/Job, Zophar/Job; another such cycle; and the beginning of a third. The current lection is part of Job’s response to Eliphaz at the beginning of that third cycle. (The pattern breaks down soon after.)

This means that we’re catching Job deep into an escalating argument. Eliphaz has just accused Job of awful things. All his friends are confident that he’s to blame.¹ Job now laments that he can’t take God to court to prove his innocence.

Taking God to court

Verses 3–7 are full of legal language. Job wishes he could find God, because if he could, “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments” (23:4).² He wants to be vindicated, “acquitted forever by my judge” (23:7). This picks up on a theme throughout Job’s earlier speeches: that he wishes he could meet God at trial (9:32), that he wants to argue his case with God (13:3).

This court theme is provocative in two ways. First, it shows that Job shares a core premise of his friends’ arguments, and it’s a premise with which many of us are likely uncomfortable—though we may inadvertently buy into it sometimes. Even from the gentle start of Eliphaz’s first speech (4:1–9), we see the assumption that suffering indicates wrongdoing on the part of the sufferer. Job doesn’t actually contradict this. He agrees on principle that suffering befalls the unrighteous (as in his final speech, 31:3–4).

In wanting to take God to court to argue his case and be “acquitted,” he’s agreeing that the suffering God inflicted upon him is an implicit statement that he’s guilty. He just knows that he’s innocent, and that in his particular case there has been a miscarriage of justice. (There has.) Even as he has moments of self-doubt throughout the book, he continually comes back to this—he knows in his bones that he’s not guilty, despite how his suffering makes it look (to them). Recognizing that Job shares that core premise with his friends is valuable because it helps us see how Job is grappling with divine injustice, not arguing a theological point.

The fact that Job shares his friends’ sense of the general principle also matters because there’s a line of Christian interpretation claiming that Job has a “new” outlook that counters the friends’ “traditional” theology. This smacks of supersessionist tendencies (even though the story takes place outside of Israel and none of the characters are Israelite). But the book of Job doesn’t show “new” theology versus “old”; it shows a multifaceted ancient Jewish reflection on the problem of divine injustice, to which no neat answer is provided.

The association between suffering and sin is problematic wherever it appears—in the Bible, and in various forms in modern religious discourse, including in Christianity. If we object to the association, then instead of pinning it on the “old” or on others’ views (which can be easier to critique than our own), we can learn something from how the book of Job continually calls into question different ideas about suffering and attitudes of people toward those suffering. We can recognize our discomfort and let that prompt us to question our own assumptions and to consider how we respond to people who are suffering.

The second way in which the court theme is provocative is that it’s a repeated callback to the opening of the book. Job’s suffering all began with the meetings of the heavenly court in which God, as judge, prodded the divine prosecutor, the satan, to go after Job. On one level, wanting desperately to take God to court is a powerful expression of grappling with divine injustice. But on another level, Job’s hope to find justice by taking God to court serves as a painful reminder that his suffering began with God’s miscarriage of justice in the heavenly court.

The twin dangers of the absence and presence of God

Verses 8–9 comprise one of Job’s many laments about the inaccessibility of God. There are intriguing correspondences between parts of Job 23 and Psalm 139. But while the poet of Psalm 139 can’t flee from the presence of God because God is in each place, Job laments that he could search every place and never find God.

Job goes on to reaffirm that he hasn’t strayed from God’s commands and has treasured God’s words in his heart—but that God is going to do whatever God wants anyway (23:10–14); “Therefore I am terrified at his presence; when I consider, I am in dread of him” (23:15).

The lectionary skips verses 10–15. As we saw in Job 1, the lectionary has omitted the part that doesn’t sit comfortably with some modern Christian theological emphases. It’s fair to choose one’s emphases, but it’s important to be aware that the lectionary doesn’t simply condense texts; it presents an interpretation by excising certain types of material. One type is material that clearly contextualizes the scripture within ancient Israel or Judaism (the way the lectionary cuts the final two verses of Psalm 51, even when including all the rest). Another type is what we see here and in Job 1: passages that show the diversity of biblical views of God’s nature.

The lection skips to 23:16, where Job repeats that God has terrified him. Moving directly from the inaccessibility of God in verse 9 to Job’s fear in verse 16, we could imagine—or even assume—that Job fears God’s absence. But those verses in between are blunt: Job laments that although he has been faithful, God is going to do whatever he wants regardless—“therefore I am terrified at his presence” (23:15). Job is in a bind. The only thing as terrible as God’s absence is God’s presence.

In the first Job lection, we saw that Job has good reason to fear. In the next, we’ll see what happens when God does finally respond, as the book of Job continues its poignant exploration of questions of divine injustice.

Notes

1. The friends’ views and arguments differ from one another. On this, and for those wanting a brief, excellent treatment of the book overall, see Stuart Weeks, An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 49–70.
2. All biblical translations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition unless otherwise indicated.