Job 8

1. THEN answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 2 How long wilt thou speak these things? And how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a mighty wind? 3 Doth God pervert judgment? Or doth the Almighty pervert justice? 4 If thy children have sinned against him, And he have delivered them into the hand of their transgression: 5 If thou wouldest seek diligently unto God, And make thy supplication to the Almighty; 6 If thou wert pure and upright; Surely now he would awake for thee, And make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous. 7 And though thy beginning was small, Yet thy latter end should greatly increase. 8 For inquire, I pray thee, of the former age, And apply thyself to that which their fathers have searched out: 9 (For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, Because our days upon earth are a shadow:) 10 Shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, And utter words out of their heart? 11 Can the rush grow up without mire? Can the flag grow without water?

BILDAD the Shuhite now comes forward to rebuke his fallen friend, and to vindicate, as he supposes, the ways of God. “There is,” as Chalmers remarks, “sound general truth in Bildad’s affirmation respecting the dealings of God with the upright and the evil;” but the application of this “general truth” to Job in particular is his fault, and is unauthorized by anything he knew or could charitably conjecture. Kitto, —Bildad infers from the justice of God that chastisement implies guilt, and that one is as surely the consequence of the other as effects in the natural world are inseparable from their causes. This position, he says, was not a discovery of yesterday; it had been uniformly maintained by wise men through all ages past. Job, therefore, must have been guilty. His children had perished because they acknowledged not their sins; but Job might yet be restored, if he confessed his evil doings and asked pardon for them. Bishop Stock.—Siung by

12. Whilst it is yet in its greenness, and not cut down, It withereth before any other herb. 13 So are the paths of all that forget God; And the hope of the godless man shall perish: 14 Whose confidence shall break in sunder, And whose trust is a spider’s web. 15 He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand: He shall hold fast thereby, but it shall not endure. 16 He is green before the sun, And his shoots go forth over his garden. 17 His roots are wrapped about the heap, He beholdeth the place of stones. 18 If he be destroyed from his place, Then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee. 19 Behold, this is the joy of his way. And out of the earth shall others spring. 20 Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, Neither will he uphold the evil doers. 21 He will yet fill thy mouth with laughter, And thy lips with shouting. 22 They that hate thee shall be clothed with shame; And the tent of the wicked shall be no more.

Job’s reproaches, but unmoved by his distress and regardless of his protestations, this respondent calls the whole a storm of passion. With this spirit he enters upon his answer, wherein he supports the principle of Eliphaz, that all sufferings are punishments, and necessarily imply preceding guilt. He advances, in defence of that position, two arguments: the first is taken from the justice of God, the other from the sentiments of the ancient sages. These are the outlines of his short discourse. Scott.

The argument of Bildad the Shuhite rests upon the same principle as that of Eliphaz, but it touches more forcibly upon some points briefly indicated in the previous discourse, and the illustrations are novel and striking. There is vigor as well as ingenuity in the reasoning. Bildad feels aggrieved by Job’s complaints, which involve the charge of injustice in God (vs. 2, 3) and, admitting hypothetically the possibility of the Patriarch’s righteousness, he infers the guilt of his children who had perished, and the certainty of his own restoration to happiness (vs. 4-7). In order to maintain the general principle that God never abandons the righteous or gives permanent prosperity to evil-doers, he adduces the authority of ancient and universal tradition, and quotes three similes, or proverbial sayings, of singular beauty. The discourse winds up with an assurance that, notwithstanding Job’s belief that he “should no more see good,” he would still be happy as well as prosperous, supposing that his confident assertions of integrity and piety are well founded. Cook.

2,3. We thought Job spake a great deal of good sense and much to the purpose, and that he had reason and right on his side; but Bildad, like an eager, angry disputant, turns it all off with this, How long wilt thou speak these things? taking it for granted that Eliphaz had said enough to silence him, and that therefore all he said was impertinent. Thus reproofs are often grounded upon mistakes. Men’s meaning is not taken aright, and then they are gravely rebuked as if they were evil-doers. Bildad compares Job’s discourse to a strong wind. Job had excused himself with this, that his speeches were but as wind (6:26), and therefore they should not make such ado about them. “Yea, but,” says Bildad, “they are as a strong wind, blustering and threatening, boisterous and dangerous, and therefore we are concerned to fence against them.” He justifies God in what He had done. This he had no occasion to do at this time, for Job did not condemn God; and this he might have done without reflecting upon Job’s children, as he does here. Could not he be an advocate for God, but he must be an accuser of his brethren?

3,4. Job readily owned that God did not pervert judgment; and yet it did not therefore follow either that his children were castaways, or that they died for some great transgression. It is true that we and our children have sinned against God, and we ought to justify Him in all He brings upon us and ours; but extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces; and, in our judgment of another’s case (unless the contrary appears), we ought to take the more favorable side, as our Saviour directs (Luke 13:2, 4). Here Bildad missed it. H.

More probably v. 4 is complete in itself: If thy children have sinned, so (or, then) he hath, etc. The idea is that evil carries its own retribution with it, and that a sinner is destroyed by the very sin which he commits—a common idea in the book. Though Bildad puts his reference to the children of Job hypothetically, there is great harshness in the allusion, and we may understand how the father would smart under it from his own reference later in the book to the time when his children were yet alive: “When my children were about me.” A wiser and more human-hearted Teacher than Bildad has instructed us, from the instances of the affliction of blindness and the accident in the Tower of Siloam, that calamity is no proof of guilt in those on whom it falls, and that evil may serve in the hand of God wider uses than the chastisement of individuals. This is the very lesson of the Book of Job. A. B. D.

5-7. This very accurately describes both Job’s attitude toward God and what afterward befell him; only it contemplates Job’s approach to God as a return from sin and rebellion rather than as the hunger of an unselfishly righteous heart. We see through it all the irreconcilable difference between the friends’ point of view and Job’s; the friends reasoning that Job is a leper, and therefore, of course, a sinner; Job asserting, I am a righteous man, and my leprosy is a mystery that I cannot penetrate. Observe that Bildad, like Eliphaz, sets before Job merely a promise of reinstatement, restoration to worldly prosperity. This is all that the friends contemplate, and is their measure of blessing. Job’s ideal is much higher, being measured by nothing short of God’s presence. J. F. G.

8. Blessed be God, now that we have the word of God in writing, and are directed to search that, we need not inquire of the former age, nor prepare ourselves to the search of their fathers; for the Word of God in the Scripture is as nigh us as them, and it is the more sure Word of prophecy to which we must take heed. If we study and keep God’s precepts, we may by them understand more than the ancients (Psalm 119:99, 100). H.

9. The recency of man. In the distant past not a trace of man’s presence has been found. He is of yesterday. While the stone volume has preserved for us the slight impressions of the annelid and the foot-trail of perished mollusks in the soft mud over which they crawled; while it has restored to us in perfect shape the delicately constructed, many-lensed eye of the trilobite, and has kept exact record of the death struggles of fishes on the sands of olden seas; while it has delineated on carboniferous columns fern-leaves exquisitely delicate in structure as the finest species of modern times; and while the rain-drops of long bygone ages have left imprints which reveal to us the course which even the wind followed, not a trace of man is visible. Only at the close does he appear; science finds him where the Scriptures placed him, and sees in him the crown which continuous type had long foreshadowed. W. Fraser.—No fact of science is more certainly established than the recency of man in geological time. Not only do we find no trace of his remains in the older geological formations, but we find no remains even of the animals nearest to him; and the conditions of the world in those periods seem to unfit it for the residence of man. If, following the usual geological system, we divide the whole history of the earth into four great periods, extending from the oldest rocks known to us—the Eozoic, or Archean—up to the modern, we find remains of man, or his works, only in the latest of the four, and in the later part of it. In point of fact, there is no indisputable proof of the presence of man until we reach the early modern period. The absolute date of the first appearance of man cannot, perhaps, be fixed within a few years or centuries, either by the biblical chronology or by the science of the earth. It would seem, however, that the Bible limits us to two or three thousand years before the deluge of Noah, while some estimates of the antiquity of man, based on physical changes or ancient history, or on philology, greatly exceed this limit. If the earliest men were those of the river gravels and caves, men of the “mammoth age,” or of the “palaeolithic” or palaeocosmic period, we can form some definite ideas as to their possible antiquity. They colonized the continents immediately after the elevation of the land from the great subsidence which closed the pleistocene or glacial period, in what has been called the “continental” period of the post-glacial age, because the new lands then raised out of the sea exceeded in extent those which we have now. We have some measures of the date of this great continental elevation. Many years ago, Sir Charles Lyell used the recession of the falls of Niagara as a chronometer. Estimating their cutting power as equal to one foot per annum, he calculated that the beginning of the process which dates from the post-glacial elevation was about thirty thousand years ago. More recent surveys have, however, shown that the rate is three times as great as that estimated by Lyell, and also that it is probable that a considerable part of the gorge was merely cleaned out by the river since the pleistocene age. In this way the age of the Niagara gorge becomes reduced to perhaps seven or eight thousand years. Other indicators of similar bearing are found both in Europe and America, and lead to the belief that it is physically impossible that man could have colonized the northern hemisphere at an earlier date. These facts render necessary an entire revision of the calculations on the growth of stalagmite in caves, and other uncertain data, which have been held to indicate a greater lapse of time. The value of the demands made on other grounds is uncertain and fluctuating. Egyptian chronology is constantly varying as new discoveries are made. Anthropology cannot precisely measure the rapidity of variation in the infancy of mankind, and Hale has recently shown that American facts respecting language prove that it may vary much more rapidly than has heretofore been supposed. It is further to be observed that these demands for long time relate to the post-diluvian period, about which there is a consensus of historical evidences limiting it to at most 3000 n.c., and that there is no geological evidence of any considerable change, either physical or vital, within that time. It is true that announcements have been made from time to time of the discovery of remains indicating the existence of man in deposits as old as the miocene period; but these alleged facts have broken down on investigation, so that no certainty can be attached to them. Nor have we discovered in the tertiary formations older than the modern or later pleistocene any animals nearly related to man which might be regarded as his precursors. To this recency of man we have to add the further fact that the earliest known men are still members of the human species, not exceeding in their variation the limits presented by the various races of men in the present day. Nor do the bones or the works of the earliest men present any approximation to those of lower animals. In physical development and cranial capacity, the oldest men are on a par with those who have succeeded them, and, in some respects, superior to the average. There is, however, evidence of the contemporaneous existence of very rude and savage tribes with others of higher culture and development, which is also affirmed of the antediluvians in Genesis. J. W. Dawson.

10. Words out of their heart. Words, not the result of hasty and superficial generalizing, but of an experience which the lengthened lives of these men had enabled them to pass through, and the principles learned in which had sunk into their heart. The “heart” is in Hebrew the deepest part of human nature, whether intellect or feeling.

11-13. The moral maxims of the ancient time are thrown into gorgeous similes drawn from the rank and luxuriant vegetation of the swamps and river brakes of the semi-tropical East. The downfall of the wicked when God turns away from him is as rapid and complete as the sinking and withering of the stately reed when water is withdrawn from it. A. B. D.

13. The correct translation, “godless man,” for “hypocrite,” is important. So 13:16; 20:5; 27:8; 34:30; 36:13. It is unquestionable that in all these places there is no reference to hypocrisy. De Witt.

14. Like the spider, the self-righteous man weaves his web, his hope, his trust, out of his own bowels. It is the creature of his fancy, spun from the materials of self-righteousness. He may call it a garment to hide his shame, but it is a mere web, unfit to cover a naked soul, and easily rent. He may call it a house, but it is unavailable to “hide from the storm, or cover from the tempest.” He may hold fast by it, but it shall fall, and he perish in the ruins. There is, there can be, no shelter, safety, nor security in the cobweb of self-righteousness. If not stripped off in the world, it will be swept away by the first breath of eternity. Anon.

15. What more beautiful than those threads thrown from branch to branch of the golden gorse—an aerial bridge—all gemmed with diamonds of morning dew? But would any man in his senses trust his weight to it? Equally insecure are the hopes of the unbelieving and ungodly, “whose hope,” to use the words of Job, “shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider’s web. He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand; he shall hold it fast, but it shall not endure.” Guthrie.—His vain confidence will easily and certainly be swept away, as the cobweb with the besom, when God shall come to purge his house. The prosperity of worldly people will fail them when they expect to find safety and happiness in it. When a wicked man dies, his expectation perishes. The ground of his hopes will prove false; he will be disappointed of the thing he hoped for, and his foolish hope, with which he buoyed himself up, will be turned into endless despair; and thus his hope will be cut off, his web, that refuge of lies, swept away, and he crushed in it. H.

16-18. The godless man was first compared to a rush, secondly to a spider’s web, but now to a plant or tree. This third similitude puts him in the fairest posture that can be imagined, and yet all proves nought; his branches shall be cut down, and his root stubbed up. Caryl.—The profession and the power of godliness differ, as leaves on a tree and good fruit; a tree that hath fruit will usually have leaves; a man that hath the power will usually have a form of godliness; but as some trees, as the ivy, are never without leaves, yet never bear good fruit while they live, so many profess Christ all their days who never bring forth fruit worthy of repentance and amendment of life Some defy the devil with their lips who deify him in their lives. Swinnock.

They have the semblance of godliness, but not the substance; they have the lineaments of godliness, but not the life; they have the face of godliness, but not the heart; they have the form, but not the power. They are like a well-drawn picture which hath all the likeness of a man, but wants the principle of motion and operation. T. Brooks.—It is a ridiculous thing, and fit for satire to persons of judgment, to see what shifts formalists have, and what prospectives to make superficies seem a body that hath depth and bulk. Bacon.

20-22. Bildad here, in the close of his discourse, sums up what he had to say in a few words, setting before Job the blessing and the curse; assuring him that as he was, so he should fare, and therefore they might conclude that as he fared, so he was. Yet to argue (as Bildad does) that because Job’s family was sunk, and he himself at present seemed helpless, therefore he certainly was an ungodly, wicked man, was neither just nor charitable as long as there appeared no other evidence of his wickedness and ungodliness. Let us judge nothing before the time, but wait till the secrets of all hearts shall be made manifest, and the present difficulties of Providence be solved to universal and everlasting satisfaction, when the mystery of God shall be finished. H.

Bildad, still further than Eliphaz from weakening the erroneous supposition of a hostile God which had taken possession of Job’s mind, represents God’s justice, to which he attributes the death of his children, instead of His love, as the hand under which Job is to humble himself. Thereby the comfort which Job’s friend offers to him becomes a torture, and his trial is made still greater; for his conscience does not accuse him of any sins for which he should now have an angry instead of a gracious God. Delitzsch.—From the very beginning there is an evidence of harshness of judgment, first pronounced against Job’s children, in the formally hypothetical but nevertheless real assumption that their sudden death was the consequence of their sin, the merited punishment of their crime. At the bottom of this judgment there lies, unquestionably, a one-sidedly harsh, gross, and external representation of the nature and operation of God’s retributive justice. Zöckler.