No One Like Job

The richest man in the whole east sits on the ash heap. A week ago he had everything: seven sons, three daughters, herds of 7,000 sheep and 3,000 camels, standing, health, a life without a single crack. Then it came, in a single day, messenger after messenger, each with worse news than the last. The oxen have been stolen, the sheep burned, the camels taken. The last one can barely get the words out. The house has collapsed on the children, and they are all dead. After that it strikes his own body, with boils from crown to sole, itching, festering, until he can no longer bear his own skin. Now he sits outside the village, among the ash and the refuse, with a shard of pottery in his hand, scraping open his own sores, because the pain has to go somewhere. His wife, herself broken to the bone, says the only thing that rises in her: "Curse God, and die." Just die, for this is no longer a life.

The friends come. The best thing they do, they do in the first seven days. They say nothing. They sit with him on the ground, in silence, for they see that his pain is too great for words. If only it had stayed that way. But then their mouths open, and out comes theology, tidy, airtight, deadly theology. This is simply how it works, Job: God punishes sin and blesses the godly, so if this has happened to you, you must have done something; confess, and it will be well again. For four rounds, with young Elihu as the last, they explain God to a dying man sitting in the ashes, and every explanation is a fresh shard in his flesh. They defend God with answers. Job does not want answers. Job wants God. He demands a hearing, a trial, an audience; he wants to lay his case before the throne and ask the Almighty to His face why. He asks it raw, without courtesy or piety, like a man who has nothing left to lose but the truth.

Elihu is still talking about thunder and lightning, about the clouds God sends wheeling round, when the real storm rises. Out of that storm God answers. He does it Himself, with no friend or dream as go-between. Whoever expects an explanation, an account of all that suffering, holds his breath. No explanation comes. A counter-question comes instead, and it opens up a whole world. Where were you, God asks, when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you know so much. Who determined its measurements, who stretched the measuring line across it, on what were its pillars sunk, and who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job, who did not witness his own birth, is told of the birth of the cosmos, with music to it: there was a morning when the stars sang and the angels shouted, and you were not there. Have you ever commanded the morning to rise? Have you gone down to the springs of the sea? Do you know where light dwells, and darkness, so that you could bring them to their place?

God keeps coming, and it turns into a dizzying tour through a wild, glorious creation that Job did not make and cannot govern. The young ravens that cry to God when there is no food, and for whom He lays the food ready. The mountain goats giving birth on unreachable cliffs, where no man is present. The wild donkey who laughs at the uproar of the city and never hears a driver's shout. The ostrich who forgets her eggs in the sand and yet laughs at horse and rider when she takes off at full speed. The horse who paws the ground, who knows no fear and smells the trumpet from afar. The eagle who builds her nest on the rock and sees the prey with her eyes from far away. Finally the two beasts no man can withstand: Behemoth, with bones like tubes of bronze, and Leviathan, with fire that seems to flash from his mouth, who laughs at the spear and makes the sea boil like a pot. Can you hook him, God asks, tame him like a pet, put a rope through his nose? Who then can stand before Me? Who has ever given Me anything that I should repay him? Everything under the whole heaven is Mine.

Not a word, in all this, about Job's children. Not a single explanation for the boils, the ashes, the shard. And yet it is enough for Job; therein lies the wonder of the book. I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, he says at last, but now my eye has seen You; therefore I retract, and repent, in dust and ashes. He sits in dust and ashes as he says it, with the same shard within reach and the same empty arms. Nothing about his circumstances has changed. Everything has changed, for he has seen God. What the friends with all their answers could not give, the Presence itself, the storm gave without a single answer. Job asked for an explanation and received a Person, and that turned out to be more than enough.

The first thing God says about Job in this book sounds like pride: "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth" (1:8). What Israel sings about God, God says here about a human being, the way a father points out his son in a crowded hall. Then came the messengers, the boils, and 35 chapters of reproach and shouting. When God addresses the friends at the close, He calls Job "My servant" four times in two verses (42:7–8). The man who called Him to account has not forfeited that pride. God did not let go of him in the storm, not even when he screamed.

Job again has seven sons and three daughters. The sons remain nameless, the daughters do not. They are called Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-happuch, something like Dove, Cinnamon, and Eye-shadow, and their father gives them an inheritance alongside their brothers (42:13–15). A man who sat in the ashes with a shard of pottery chooses names that are fragrant and shine. It explains nothing of what he lost, and the first 10 stay buried. Who is like this God? Job knows it now down to his broken bones, and he dares again to name what is beautiful. No god that men ever devised let himself be questioned by a man with a shard of pottery and answered with the morning stars.

A note on the source text. God's pride in Job, "there is no one like him on the earth": Job 1:8; 2:3. Job on the ashes with the shard: Job 2:7–8; "curse God and die": 2:9; the friends silent for seven days: 2:13. The divine speeches from the storm, the morning stars at the founding: 38:1–7; the tour through creation (the young ravens, mountain goats, wild donkey, ostrich, warhorse, eagle): 38–39; Behemoth and Leviathan: 40–41; "who has given Me anything?": 41:11. Elihu on the thunderstorm: 36:27–37:24; Job's answer, "now my eye has seen You": 42:5–6; God's verdict on the friends and the fourfold "My servant": 42:7–8; the daughters and their inheritance: 42:13–15. "My God, why have You forsaken Me": Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1. The divine Name as YHWH.