Commentary on Job 42:1-6, 10-17

This is the last of four lections from Job. All four portray God in disturbing ways, and this concluding text should be understood in relation to what came before. These remarks build on my comments about the previous lections, especially the book’s disturbing opening and its particular challenges.

Job 42 in context

Over the last several lections, we’ve seen three key moments from the book of Job: part of the opening narrative that lays out the problem of God prompting the satan to torture innocent Job, an excerpt from one of Job’s poems of agony in which he grapples with undeserved suffering in the face of a silent God, and then the beginning of God’s long-awaited speech. By the time we come to the end of the book, we’re likely desperate for resolution—but none comes.

Job’s reply

When God wraps up his litany of rhetorical questions and his poem about the wonder of Leviathan, Job gives a brief reply filled with ambiguities. The beginning can be read as humbly capitulating to God: “No purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2).^[1] But we should also keep in mind that in an earlier lection, we saw Job express the same idea, and that there, the sentiment was clearly negative: Job laments that God is going to do whatever he wants—no purpose of God’s can be thwarted—despite Job’s faithfulness (23:13–14). The sense in 42:2 is open to interpretation, especially in light of the verses to come.

If you had last week off, you might want to go back and read the Job 38 lection now (and if you wish, my comments on it, on which these comments now build). Those verses in Job 38 are the beginning of God’s interrogation of Job, which Job is about to quote. The structure of the rest of 42:1–6 is this: twice in a row, Job quotes God and then offers a response.

First, Job repeats God’s opening question of the interrogation (“Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?”—a near-quotation of 38:2). The response Job offers reflects the same humility and piety we saw in Job 1, where Job’s blamelessness is repeatedly affirmed, he even offers sacrifices just in case his children have sinned, and he responds to the first round of divine assault by worshiping God. Job’s words in 42:3 are a humble acknowledgment that he lacks complete understanding. At the same time, think about what would seem a glaring omission in an apology made to you. Job concedes that he didn’t have full knowledge—but he never actually says he was wrong. Is that still to come?

Job then quotes from the next line of God’s interrogation: “I will question you, and you will inform me” (from 38:3, my translation; see comments on Job 38). He responds that previously he had heard God, but now he has seen him—but what is the result of this for Job? The next verse (42:6) is notoriously unclear. The second half of the verse is often translated “I repent in dust and ashes,” but the preposition ‘al doesn’t mean “in”; it means “upon, concerning.” The verb translated “repent” also means “regret, be sorry.” What does “dust and ashes” mean, then, and how do we put it all together?

Edward L. Greenstein addresses the well-known ambiguity of 42:2–6, and especially verse 6. He understands the phrase “dust and ashes,” logically, to have the same meaning it has earlier in the book, where Job says, “I have become like dust and ashes” (30:19), referring to “the debased human condition.” In Greenstein’s reading, Job is “sorry” concerning dust and ashes—that is, he regrets that this is the sad state of humankind.^[2]

Taking a step back, translations of the first half of verse 6 regularly add a word that gives the reader a very different impression than what the Hebrew actually says, which is simply “I reject” or “I despise.” Because we don’t use these words without an object in English, so translations routinely add one: “I despise [myself].” (The verb usually means “reject,” though “despise” is fine too.) But the notion that it’s himself he despises is not in the text. Greenstein notes a sense of this Hebrew verb that fits well here: Job is “fed up.”^[3] He’s fed up, and sorry that this is the wretched human condition.

Greenstein concludes that Job “does not capitulate at all, but continues to express the same despair he has been expressing all along,” and that it’s problematic that interpreters want to see Job contradict his earlier views so much that they assume that’s found in the text itself.^[4]

And sure enough, in the next verse, God affirms that Job had spoken rightly, while his friends did not. Once again, the lectionary has eliminated some uncomfortable material: in between the two excerpts, God states twice that Job spoke the truth about him, and refers to the friends’ “folly” (42:7–8). And what was that truth that Job spoke, which the friends foolishly opposed? That Job was innocent, and that God had indeed brought upon him unjust harm.

A conclusion without resolution

One hopes that God will make good in the end, but the epilogue is just as inhumane as the prologue. It’s nice that Job’s fortunes are restored. But there’s no restoring his dead children, who were killed the first time God prodded the satan to attend to Job, greenlighting attacks on everything in Job’s life but his body. (The death of Job’s children doesn’t seem to faze God, who then prods the satan a second time, now okaying everything up to Job’s life itself.) In 42:12–13, Job is given new animals and new children—as if replacement children. (Translations often add the word “also,” that after being blessed with more animals, Job “also” had more children—perhaps in an attempt to soften the disconcerting effect of the line—but the word doesn’t appear in the Hebrew verse.)

This is not a happy ending. There’s no way to mitigate the loss of the dead children. Not for their parent, and clearly not for the children themselves.

The book of Job powerfully grapples with divine injustice from beginning to end. Even in the last moments of the tale of Job, the narrator refers to “all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (42:11).

I began my comments on the first of these four lections from Job by noting that it’s worth resisting the temptation to clean up the story, to read a happy ending into Job and tie it up with a bow. Having come to the end, I reaffirm several of those early points now. The profound power of the book comes from its most disturbing aspects, from the distressing opening scenes to the lack of resolution at the end. The wisdom of this book is in its refusal to offer an easy out. We have so much to learn from the ancient authors, who grappled with the injustice of God without resorting to pat answers.

Throughout my writing and teaching on Job, one hope I carry is that readers will choose to wrestle with the difficult questions the book presents, without supplying simple solutions the book never gives. Every time I study this book, I am blown away by the wisdom and poignancy of letting those questions linger. Instead of sanitizing the book, we can follow in the path of the ancient thinkers as they reflect, ponder, and wrestle with questions of the greatest theological significance.

Notes

1. All biblical translations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition unless otherwise indicated.
2. Edward L. Greenstein, “In Job’s Face/Facing Job,” in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation, ed. F. C. Black, R. Boer, and E. Runions (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), 308–12.
3. Greenstein, “In Job’s Face/Facing Job,” 311. Elsewhere, Greenstein translates the whole verse, “That is why I am fed up; I take pity on ‘dust and ashes.’” Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 185.
4. Greenstein, “In Job’s Face/Facing Job,” 311–13.