“shields-up”

Job, we are told in the opening verses of the book which bears his name, was ‏תם וישר וירא אלהים וסר מרע — “blameless and just, fearing God.” Much of the point of the book rests upon the veracity of this assertion. Job did not deserve to suffer as he did.

David Clines claims that this presents a somewhat difficult conundrum to Christian readers of the book. I’ll let him explain:

A Christian perspective on the Book of Job first attends to the very first sentence of the book, which depicts Job as “blameless and upright,” the first of these epithets also being conventionally translated as “perfect.” for a Christian reader such language, if meant literally and seriously, is inappropriate for any human being; Christian theology and culture takes for granted that no one is perfect and that even the best of people can never be wholly free of sin.¹

To expand, the Christian claim is that all deserve death for “the wages of sin is death” and “all have sinned…” Thus any claim that Job was innocent faces this theological objection founded in the NT’s assertion that all are under sentence of death. Why, then, should Job (or his reader) be surprised by his suffering — on this view it is no longer unjust, is it? Further, this leads one to suppose that Job’s friends do have a point, for Job has sinned as all have sinned.

Where this reading fails, however, is in its incomplete understanding of the measure of Job’s righteousness within the context of the OT. Job’s prologue does not claim that Job was sinless, indeed it offers hints that he may have been sinful. In spite of this, however, it is not incorrect for the author to affirm Job’s blamelessness and hence the incongruous nature of his suffering.

What hint is there of these things? It comes in Job 1:5:

‏והשכים בבקר והעלה עלות מספר כלם

he would get up early in the morning and offer burnt offerings for all of them…

This verse highlights the fact that Job was a sacrificing man. Sacrifices were designated as the means by which the offence of sin was removed. They implicitly incorporated an acknowledgment of the sin and were provided by God as the means by which sin was atoned.

Hence Job did not need to be sinless in order for the description in Job 1:1 to be accurate, rather he had to be faithful in making atonement for sin. In this manner he fulfilled the requirements of the Law and in so doing could be described as “blameless and just” and consequently underserving of punishment for any sin.

Furthermore, it is worth examining the terminology in Job 1:1. First, the adjective תם which I’ve translated “blameless.” My electronic copy of HALOT says the following: “It should be noted in general that in accordance with the meaning of the root ‏תמם‎ to be complete, perfect, the general sense of the adj. is also complete, perfect, a sense which develops in different ways with different usages: a) physical perfection as applied to the body; b) socially perfect; c) correct in law; d) ethnically [sic] and morally correct.” (I assume that’s meant to read “ethically” not “ethnically”!) I do not think this compels us to see in Job some form of sinless perfectionism, rather, as I’ve argued above, it highlights Job’s diligent observation of protocol when it comes to maintaining his relationship with Yahweh. It is also noteworthy that the adjective תם is not used of God anywhere in biblical Hebrew.

Neither can the adjective ‏ישר, which I’ve rendered “just” above, easily be understood to refer to sinless perfection.

Hence I think the problem Clines identifies is ultimately no problem at all. Doubtless it is a problem for some readers who fail to account for the fact that God had provided a means through which sin could be dealt with. What is important, however, is to recognise that the prologue clearly depicts Job as one who is blameless because any sin he may have been guilty of has been appropriately dealt with so that the claim of Job’s friends that he suffers for some sin is without merit (as is demonstrated conclusively in the epilogue to the book).

---

1. David J. A. Clines, Job 1–20 (WBC 17A; Word: Dallas, 1989) p. lv.

Andrew Barry has suggested that Job 42:7, which reads:

חרה אפי בך ובשני רעיך כי לא דברתם אלי נכונה כעבדי איוב

ought to be rendered thus:

My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken to me what is right, as my servant Job has.

The significant difference to most interpretations and translations is the “spoken to” in place of “spoken about.” Andrew’s suggestion is based on the observation that the Hebrew here, כי לא דברתם אלי, employs the preposition אל following the verb דבר which elsewhere almost always means “speak to.” Consequently, Andrew reads Job 42:7 as referring to prayer — to speech directed to God, not discussions about him.

Grammatically and statistically the reading “spoke to me” is both possible and well attested — indeed, even at the beginning of Job 42:7 we have an instance of דבר ‫+‬ אל describing Yhwh’s speaking to Job (דבר יהוה … אל איוב). As Andrew points out, the majority of uses of the verb דבר in the piel followed by the preposition אל mean “speak to.” Nonetheless, there are a few exceptions such as 2Chron 32:19; Jer 28:16; 33:14; 51:12 (although outside Job 42:7–8 there are no exceptions within Job).

In light of these observations, what reasons can be offered in support of the more common/traditional rendering? None of the commentaries I have at hand offer any discussion of the point, but I think a case can be made for the common understanding:

1. There is some indication of mixing of אל and על in BH, particularly later texts (although על tends to replace אל, not the other way around). על would more clearly mean “speak about.”

2. There are examples where דבר + אל does mean “speak about,” so it is a possibility (see above). We can’t simply go on statistics or else all language would be impossibly wooden — it simply doesn’t work that way.

3. The LXX translates the preposition with ενωπιον rather than with εις, προς or a dative, suggesting that the early translators read it as God rebuking Job’s friends for what they had said about him rather than to him.

4. Perhaps the strongest point in favour of the traditional reading, however, is the context. Context plays a far more important role in determining the appropriate meaning of words than should statistics, after all. Within the book of Job, Job’s friends had not spoken to God at all, so to rebuke them for not saying the right thing to God seems odd. OTOH, they had made lots of claims about God, specifically about his response to sin and so made him the cause of Job’s suffering and made the reason some supposed transgression on Job’s part.

Furthermore, there are few examples where Job is recorded as speaking to Yhwh. Andrew points to Job 1:21 which is perhaps one of the few actual occasions where Job is recorded addressing Yhwh (although in 1:21 he does so rather circuitously). In Job 5:8 Job expresses his desire to present his case to God (and do so by speaking to him). Job’s desire to speak with God is manifest in the speech cycles of Job 4–27, but that’s not quite speaking to God either. In fact, Job isn’t recorded as directly addressing God until Yhwh himself calls for a response from him and he replies in Job 40:4–5. At that point, Job’s words to Yhwh amount to an admission of his ignorance in light of Yhwh’s array of questions which all highlight Job’s lack of knowledge.

Consequently, Job 42:7 may well be indicating that God approves of Job’s words to him admitting his limits, while Job’s friends all proceeded from the point of view that they held certain knowledge which they then sought to apply to Job’s sufferings — information which we know (from the prologue) to be ill-informed (at least in Job’s case).

As to whether the book is about prayer, I don’t think that is correct. Certainly it has something to say about how we should pray, about the importance of prayer, and so about prayer. But this is not the main message of the book. Nor, for that matter, is suffering.

The book of Job contains no explicit dating information and so determining its precise historical context is difficult. Although the implied date of the story is widely acknowledged to be in patriarchal times (when wealth was measured in goods and chattels, where people reputedly lived well past 100 years of age, and where there was no centralised religious cult), there is no reason to think that this reflects the date of composition of the work as a whole or its component parts (if indeed they ever enjoyed any form of independent existence).

So, rather than appealing to explicit information within the story itself, scholars appeal to other aspects of the book in order to propose a date of composition. One argument often raised in support of an exilic date is the idea that the story of Job offers an account of innocent suffering supposedly parallel to the experience of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians when they were carted off into exile — they suffered although they were innocent. Leo Perdue appeals to this argument when he writes that “[t]he poet’s rejection of the doctrine of retribution… would enable the people in exile to realize they were not responsible for the tragedies of the destruction of Jerusalem, the devastation of the land, and their consequent removal to Babylon.”¹

It seems to me, however, that this argument is not as strong as is sometimes implied. First, it is by no means necessary for a national tragedy to prompt a writer to address the issues with which Job deals — personal tragedy or loss could easily offer similar impetus.

Second, it puts Job at odds with the prophets who unequivocally pointed to Judah’s sinfulness as the prime cause for the exile. Perdue suggests that the explanation offered by the prophets is one of a range of different responses to the tragedy and that Job offers an alternate perspective. While this may be true to some extent, I think that Job’s prologue counts against this interpretation. In a context where differing explanations were offered for the exile — in particular where national sin was held up as an underlying cause — the prologue to Job presents one who suffers in spite of exceptional and exemplary piety. There was, as the author states, none like him in all the earth. If the exiles were meant to see in Job’s predicament a reflection of their own, would they really have felt that they were as blameless as Job? In short, Job’s prologue makes Job too good to serve as a mirror to the nation.

Of course this is not to say that Job said nothing to the exiles about their own suffering. What I think it does say, however, is that the argument which sees Job as offering an explanation for the events surrounding the exile because Job’s predicament supposedly mirrors that of the exiles is far from compelling.

---

1. Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (Westminster John Knox, 2007), p. 84.