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Context No. 319 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 21:17-34: in context

17“How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out, that their calamity comes on them, that God distributes sorrows in his anger? 18How often is it that they are as stubble before the wind, as chaff that the storm carries away? 19You say, ‘God lays up his iniquity for his children.’ Let him recompense it to himself, that he may know it. 20Let his own eyes see his destruction. Let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty. 21For what does he care for his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off? 22“Shall any teach God knowledge, since he judges those who are high? 23One dies in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet. 24His pails are full of milk. The marrow of his bones is moistened. 25Another dies in bitterness of soul, and never tastes of good. 26They lie down alike in the dust. The worm covers them. 27“Behold, I know your thoughts, the plans with which you would wrong me. 28For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’ 29Haven’t you asked wayfaring men? Don’t you know their evidences, 30that the evil man is reserved to the day of calamity, that they are led out to the day of wrath? 31Who will declare his way to his face? Who will repay him what he has done? 32Yet he will be borne to the grave. Men will keep watch over the tomb. 33The clods of the valley will be sweet to him. All men will draw after him, as there were innumerable before him. 34So how can you comfort me with nonsense, because in your answers there remains only falsehood?”

Job is arguing with his friends, and the argument is about how the world actually works. His friends keep insisting on a tidy formula: the wicked suffer and the righteous prosper, so Job's suffering must mean Job has sinned. It is a clean, comforting theology, and Job's whole speech here is a refusal of it, on the grounds that it is simply not true to what anyone can see.

He points them to the world as it is. How often, he asks, is the lamp of the wicked actually snuffed out? Look honestly, and you will see plenty of wicked people who live to old age at ease, well-fed and untroubled, whose bodies are strong to the end, who die quietly in their beds and are carried to the grave with a crowd of mourners and an honored tomb. And meanwhile another person dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted anything good. They lie down alike in the dust, he says, the worm covering them both. The neat correspondence between goodness and prosperity, sin and suffering, does not hold up against a single walk through a cemetery. And Job will not accept the comfort his friends are offering, because it is built on that falsehood. How can you comfort me with nonsense, he says, when your answers are nothing but lies?

There is a hard courage in this. Job would rather sit in the honest, unexplained mystery of his pain than accept a tidy explanation that blames the sufferer and flatters the comfortable. Have I ever handed someone in pain a neat explanation, or reached for one myself, that comforted mainly by being false, when the honest thing was to admit I do not understand?

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