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Job's second speech is very disorderly. It's full of wildly contradictory images that may
reflect the shock and the pain and the rage that now overwhelm him. He seems to be haunted
by Eliphaz's connection of his suffering with some sin and so he turns to address God directly.
He admits he's not perfect but surely, he objects, he doesn't deserve such affliction.
In chapter 8 we have Bildad's speech and it's tactless and unkind. He says, "Will God pervert
the right? / Will the Almighty pervert justice? / If your sons sinned against Him, / He dispatched
them for their transgressions," 8:3-4 [JPS translation]. In other words, God is perfectly
just and ultimately all get what they deserve. Indeed, your children, Job, must have died
because they sinned, so just search for God and ask for mercy. The friends' speeches lead
Job to the conclusion that God must be indifferent to moral status. God doesn't follow the rules
that he demands of human beings. This is chapter 9:22, "He finishes off both perfect and wicked."
When Job complains, "He wounds me much for nothing," chapter 9:17, he's echoing God's
own words to the satan in the prologue. Remember when God says to the satan you have "incited
me to destroy him for nothing," and we suspect by this verbal coincidence that Job is right.
Legal terms dominate, as Job calls for the charges against him to be published, and then
he hurls countercharges in a suit against God. Charges of unworthy conduct, of spurning
his creatures while smiling on the wicked, on scrutinizing Job even though he knows Job
to be innocent, and this too is a subversion of a common prophetic literary genre that
we've seen: the riv or the covenant lawsuit in which God through his prophets charges
Israel with flagrant violation of the terms of the covenant and warns of inevitable punishment.
Here, in Job, it's a man who arraigns God and yet, Job asserts, since God is God and
not a human adversary, there's really no fair way for the lawsuit between them to be tried
or arbitrated. "Man cannot win a suit against God," chapter 9:2. Job is powerless in the
face of this injustice. These ideas all find expression in Job 10:1-7 [JPS translation]:
I am disgusted with life; I will give rein to my complaint,
Speak in the bitterness of my soul. I say to God, "Do not condemn me;
Let me know what You charge me with. Does it benefit You to defraud,
To despise the toil of Your hands, While smiling on the counsel of the wicked?
Do You have the eyes of flesh? Is Your vision that of mere men?
Are Your days the days of a mortal? Are Your years the years of a man,
That You seek my inequity And search out my sin?
You know that I am not guilty, And that there is none to deliver from Your
hand…
Job repeats his wish to die, this time less because of his suffering and more because
his worldview has collapsed. He sees that divine power is utterly divorced from justice
and that's a second fundamental biblical assumption subverted.