The Truth Be Told

And it happened after the LORD has spoken these words to Job, that the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My wrath has flared against you and your two companions because you have not spoken rightly of Me as did My servant Job.  Job 42:7 Robert Alter

Rightly – The end of the story is quite startling.  Not only do we have no rational answer for Job, we find that God is incensed by the claims made by his companions.  But how can this be?  Haven’t his friends argued for God’s ultimate sovereignty?  Haven’t they claimed what we so often hear today: “God’s ways are not our ways.  You shouldn’t question God.”  Haven’t they shown that the good are blessed and the wicked punished?  Don’t we believe exactly these same things?  So, why is God upset with them.  Why does He claim that they have not spoken n^ekônā(h)’ (rightly), not about Job, but about God!?

The verbal root of n^ekônā(h)’ is kûn, “to establish, fix, be certain, be right.”  Here it is Ni’fal, that is, passive, an action done to the subject.  God says that Job’s friends have not described God Himself correctly.  But wait!  Haven’t we just noted that all those things Job’s companions said about God are what we think about God?  Apparently not.  It might be that God is sovereign, that His purposes and intentions are in some way beyond human capacity to understand, that Man does not have the right to make a claim on God, but nevertheless, how we approach God with these declarations is perhaps more critical than the declarations themselves.  God objects that Job’s companions have not only misrepresented Job, who is in fact innocent, but in the process, they have maligned God’s reputation.  God’s character is vouchsafed by Job’s testimony.  To challenge Job, to claim that Job is lying about his true condition, is to impugn God’s choice of His servant Job.  It’s no longer about the theology (although we found their view wanting).  It’s about the implications that are attached to refusing the testimony of God’s servant.  Job’s friends should have argued for Job, not against him.  They should have seen that Job’s life was a testimony to righteousness and proceeded on that basis rather than obstinately insisting that their doctrines were correct despite everything they knew about Job.  They attacked Job’s credibility, and in so doing, they attacked the God Job served.  Job is vindicated, not because God gives him the ontological answer to the problem of good and evil, but because God endorses Job’s fidelity even when he gets no answer.  In other words, relationship trumps orthodoxy.

Perhaps this is the greatest lesson from the story of Job, especially in a world where orthodoxy has ravaged believing communities rather than joining them together.  The “us” and “them” philosophy so dominant in religion is fostered by insistence on doctrine rather than connection.  God’s wrath flares against those who would divide and conquer rather than empathize and console.  There just aren’t enough Mother Teresa’s.

Isn’t this story’s end a precursor to another story, centuries later, when another righteous man was rejected because he didn’t fit the accepted theological mold?  If this story really is late, if it really is a message to the post-Captivity community, what does it say about what happened in those centuries after the return to Israel?  Was orthodoxy glue or solvent?  What is it now?

Topical Index: n^ekônā(h)’, kûn, right, fixed, certain, relationship, character, Job 42:7