Zophar

attitude of repentance. Darkness, terrors, and calamity await those who are truly wicked. The friends did not name Job in their descriptions; they did not need to. Each response of Job was increasingly vehement as he tried to break through their stagnated world views, describing to the best of his ability God’s vicious attacks against him. Third Cycle of Dialogue (chs 22-27) In this go-round, the composure of the friends disintegrated, each responding in a different way. Eliphaz turned to direct cruel and false accusations, followed by the boiler plate call to repent in order to enjoy God’s beneficence again. Bildad’s feeble attempt started with extolling the grandeur of God in the heavenly realm and quickly degraded to calling humans worms. Zophar wisely went undercover and said nothing. In Zophar’s place, we have Job growing more loquacious and bold, alternately longing to find where God had gone and acknowledging the mystery of God’s ways, affirming his own uprightness, and picking up the same threads of the friends in terms of what ought to happen to the wicked. “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” (ch 28) At this juncture, there is an interlude. Either it was Job’s taking a deep breath to regain his perspective after the torrent of words and thoughts, or the narrator has called for a needed pause in the drama. The quest is for wisdom, recognized as exceedingly valuable, but eluding all attempts to package it. Job’s Self-Vindication and Self-Incriminating Oaths (chs 29-31)…

to each of these and we will get there – all in due time! Even if the prose and poetic materials were two disparate texts later brought together, at some point this apparent dissonance needs to be addressed. Additional Literary Complexities Even within the poetic materials, there are complications. What appears to be the dissolution of the dialogue in the third cycle has prompted numerous commentators to reposition segments of those chapters. We will unpack the suggestions in a subsequent…

Nevertheless, scholars differ in their assessments. For an overview of possible reconstructions of the third cycle of speeches, see S.R. Driver and George Buchanan Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary of the Book of Job (vol. 1; ICC; New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1921), xxxvii-xl; John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, 24-26, and H.H. Rowley, Job, 170-179. Because chapter 27 sounds like a recapitulation of orthodoxy, some suggest that it was originally spoken by Zophar but the designation was…

sustaining light and peace throughout those heavens. Job, on the other hand, noted less comforting aspects of the unseen realms, Sheol and Abbadon and the necessary destruction of Rahav and the fleeing serpent (ch 26). As we have already observed, Bildad’s exceedingly abbreviated speech may be a hint that Job simply cut him off just as he was getting started. Perhaps because Job knew what Bildad would say, he mockingly introduced his own version of Bildad with 26:4 – “who helped you utter these…

God’s infliction of underserved punishment are emphasized. The blame cannot even be placed with Satan, as God admits that he was incited by Satan to destroy Job for no good reason. Ultimately Job’s suffering was God’s will, reaffirming the divine origin of suffering for not only the wicked, but also for the righteous. Before the resolution, the bulk of the book deals with analyzing Job’s predicament through the eyes of his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who collectively use…

What are we to make of Elihu? By his own admission, he was younger than all the rest and, in respect to them, a combination of deferential and boldly critical. He was the one who said, “I was afraid of declaring my knowledge to you” (32:6c) and “I waited for your words; I heard your reasoning; while you were searching for words, I gave to you my attention” (32:11-12a). At the same time, he came across as rather self-assured - “I get my knowledge from afar; I will ascribe righteousness to my…

This verse is significant, because it reveals the cosmic view of relative and absolute truth. In this verse, Job is implying that no one can understand the ways of the Lord or the true greatness of His power, because, according to the cosmic view, humans are limited to inside-the-box, relative truth thinking. On the other hand, only God knows absolute truth and can view the world from outside of the box. Nevertheless, Job is able to understand these truths because, through faith, the Lord has…

We as humans are fascinated by misery and adversity, just so long as it is someone else's and not our own. In both the Book of Job and A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers, the audience is told a story of how a very well-off man loses what he has for seemingly no reason at all. In order to better understand their situations and figure out why bad things were happening to them, both Job and Larry seek help from other members of the Jewish faith. Job's friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, all try…

In the Book of Job a great quarrel or debate between Job and his three friends, liphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite. This debate only occurs after Job’s outburst in which he cursed the day of his birth and began wondering why those who long for death continue to live. Following his cries, Job’s friends offer their though that ultimately lead Job in the wrong direction. Each friend of Job’s offers a reason to Job’s suffering. For example, Eliphaz justifies his…

When an individual comes face-to-face with extraordinary circumstances that are largely out of their control, the normal physiological reaction of fear. But fear of what? When assessing the motivations of the characters of both the biblical Book of Job and Night by Elie Wiesel, a definitive pattern appears. In Job, the friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, are shown to have a frustratingly narrow and harsh interpretation of God and his sense of justice, much to Job’s detriment. Even though Job is…