Job — Chapter 11

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Zophar is the third of Job's friends to speak, and the last to join the first round of speeches (chs 4–14). Nothing is known of Naamah, the place his title points to. The ancient Greek translation lists a Zophar among Esau's descendants, which fits the view that the friends came from the region of Edom, a people known for their wise men. Bildad has just told Job that God never rejects a blameless man (ch 8), and Job has answered him at length (chs 9–10). Job agreed that God is wise and mighty, then asked, "how can a man be in the right before God?" (9:2). He longed for an "arbiter" who could stand between him and God (9:33), and he spoke straight to God: "let me know why you contend against me" (10:2), "you know that I am not guilty" (10:7). Zophar has heard enough. He is the bluntest of the three. Eliphaz hinted that Job had sinned, and Bildad said it of Job's children. Zophar says it to Job's face: God is giving Job less than he deserves. His speech moves from rebuke (vv2–6) to a hymn about God's unsearchable wisdom (vv7–12), then a call to repent with bright promises (vv13–19), and a closing warning (v20). Zophar speaks only twice in the book. In the third round, when his turn comes, he is silent.

Zophar Speaks: You Deserve Worse (vv1–20)

• "Should a multitude of words go unanswered?" (v2). Zophar opens with an insult. Job is "a man full of talk," literally "a man of lips," all mouth and no substance. Proverbs warns that "when words are many, transgression is not lacking" (Prov 10:19), and the Tyndale notes point out that Zophar is borrowing this wisdom-school idea that fools talk too much. The trouble is that Job is not a fool or a sinner here. He is a man in agony, and his many words are the cries of someone who has lost everything.
• "Should your babble silence men, and when you mock, shall no one shame you?" (v3). "Babble" can also carry the sense of empty boasting. Zophar hears Job's protests in chapters 9–10 as mocking God, sneering at his justice. He thinks someone has to put Job in his place, and since the others have not managed it, he will. To Zophar, a sufferer who questions God is a scoffer who needs shaming, not a friend who needs comfort.
• "For you say, 'My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God's eyes'" (v4). Job never said this. He said God knew he was "not guilty" (10:7) of the kind of sin that would explain his suffering. He also admitted plainly that no one can be in the right before God (9:2) and asked why God would not pardon his sins (7:21). The Tyndale notes make the key point: Job was not laying out a doctrine. He was defending his integrity. Zophar flattens Job's honest, tangled words into a proud boast so he can knock it down.
• "But oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you" (v5). Zophar is sure that if God spoke, he would side with Zophar. This is one of the sharpest ironies in the book. God will speak (38:1), and when he does, he will say to Eliphaz, "you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). Zophar's wish will come true, and it will condemn him.
• "The secrets of wisdom! For he is manifold in understanding" (v6). The Hebrew behind "manifold" is literally "double." The word (kiphlayim) is the same one Isaiah uses when Jerusalem receives "double" for her sins (Isa 40:2). The lexicon reads the phrase as "double in sound wisdom," meaning far beyond what Job imagines. "Understanding" here is tushiyyah, a wisdom-book word for practical, effective wisdom that gets results. Job used the same word in 6:13, when he said this kind of "resource" had been driven from him. Zophar's reply amounts to "you may have none, but God has twice as much as you could ever grasp." He is right that God has hidden wisdom. What Zophar doesn't know is that the reader has already seen some of it. The heavenly scene of chapters 1–2 shows a secret purpose behind Job's suffering, and it is not punishment for sin. God's hidden wisdom, if revealed, would clear Job, not convict him.
• "Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves" (v6). This is the harshest line any of the friends has spoken so far. The Hebrew is vivid: literally, God "causes to be forgotten for you some of your guilt." The lexicon gives the verb (nashah) as "forget." It is the same verb Joseph used when he named his son Manasseh: "God has made me forget all my hardship" (Gen 41:51). Zophar's point is that God is letting part of Job's sin slide. Job has buried ten children and lost his wealth and health, and Zophar tells him it should have been worse. The Tyndale notes observe that Zophar simply assumed every disaster is punishment for sin. In general terms what he says is true. Scripture says of God, "He does not deal with us according to our sins" (Ps 103:10). But a truth about all people becomes cruelty when it is used to explain one person's particular grief.
• "Can you find out the deep things of God?" (v7). Now Zophar turns to God's greatness, and much of what he says is beautiful and true. "The deep things" are what can only be found by searching, and "the limit of the Almighty" is literally his outer edge or boundary. No human mind can reach either. The cross-references show how often the rest of Job says the same thing: "who can understand?" (26:14), "the Almighty—we cannot find him" (37:23), and Job's own confession at the end, "things too wonderful for me, which I did not know" (42:3). Paul echoes it: "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Rom 11:33).
• "Higher than heaven… deeper than Sheol… longer than the earth and broader than the sea" (vv8–9). Zophar measures God's wisdom in four directions, up, down, across the land and across the sea, and finds it bigger than the whole known world. Sheol is the Old Testament's name for the realm of the dead, pictured as deep below the earth. It is not the later Christian idea of hell. To the ancient mind it was the lowest place there is. Paul's prayer that believers would grasp "the breadth and length and height and depth" of Christ's love (Eph 3:18) uses the same kind of measuring language. The irony is that Job had already said all this. Back in 9:10 he praised God for "great things beyond searching out." Zophar is lecturing Job on a truth Job already believes. And there is a second irony: if God's ways really are this far beyond human understanding, then Zophar cannot be so sure he knows why Job is suffering.
• "If he passes through and imprisons and summons the court, who can turn him back?" (v10). The language is legal. God arrests, locks up and calls an assembly to hear the case. Job had longed for a fair trial with God (9:32–33). Zophar's answer is that God's court has no appeal. "Who can turn him back?" repeats Job's own words from 9:12, "he snatches away; who can turn him back?" Job said it in anguish. Zophar throws it back as a reason for Job to submit and stop protesting.
• "For he knows worthless men; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it?" (v11). "Worthless" translates shav, emptiness or falseness. It is the same word as in "You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain" (Exod 20:7). God knows people of empty, false character, even when no one else can see through them. The point aimed at Job is clear: you may not see your sin, but God does. Job had complained in 10:6 that God was hunting for his sin. Zophar says God doesn't need to hunt. He sees it already.
• "But a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey's colt is born a man!" (v12). This is a proverb, and it ends the section with a sneer. In Hebrew it is a play on sounds. "Stupid" is literally "hollow" (nabub), the same word used for the hollow wooden altar of the tabernacle (Exod 27:8). "Get understanding" (yillabeb) means literally "get a heart," in a culture where the heart was the seat of thinking. So: "a hollow man will get a heart when a wild donkey is born human." The wild donkey (pere') was the Bible's picture of untamed, stubborn wildness. Ishmael is called "a wild donkey of a man" (Gen 16:12). Zophar's meaning is that Job is hopeless. He will become wise about the day a donkey gives birth to a person. He says this just before offering Job hope, which doesn't sit well with what follows.
• Two readings of v12. Modern translations (ESV, NIV, CSB) read it as above, a proverb of something impossible, and the lexicon supports them. It explains the verse as "shall an empty man get a mind, or a wild ass's colt be born a man?" The KJV reads it differently: "vain man would be wise, though man be born like a wild ass's colt." On that older reading, the verse is about all people: we want to be thought wise, but we come into the world stubborn and untamed. Matthew Henry and JFB both follow the KJV here. It is a true thought about human nature, but the Hebrew is more naturally read the modern way.
• "If you prepare your heart, you will stretch out your hands toward him" (v13). Now comes the turn to hope. "Prepare" (kun) means to set firm or make steady. The word ties back to v12: the "hollow" man must get a heart, and here is how. The Tyndale notes count three conditions for restoration: an inward change of heart, which is more than outward ritual; hands stretched out to God, the ancient posture of prayer and surrender (Exod 9:29; Isa 1:15); and putting sin away (v14). Taken on its own, this is good counsel for any sinner. Hebrews 11:6 and James 4:8 say much the same about drawing near to God.
• "If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and let not injustice dwell in your tents" (v14). Notice the hint. "Your tents" means Job's household. Zophar implies that something wrong was going on in Job's home. Job's children are dead and his servants are gone, and Zophar suggests the household had it coming. Job will answer this kind of suspicion fully in chapter 31, where he lists the ways he treated his servants, the poor and the stranger with justice.
• "Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish" (v15). This answers Job directly. In 10:15 Job said, "If I am in the right, I cannot lift up my head." Zophar promises that if Job repents, he will lift up his face again without shame. "Secure" is literally "cast" or "poured out," like molten metal hardened into a solid piece. Job will be firm and unshakable instead of trembling.
• "You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away" (v16). This is a lovely picture. A flash flood roars through a dry streambed and then is gone, and afterward people barely remember how frightening it was. Job had used the image of streams that vanish to describe his unreliable friends (6:15–17). Zophar uses it for suffering that will one day be past. Zophar is wrong about why Job is suffering, but the shape of what he promises is real. Restored people do look back on old pain this way, as Joseph did when he named his son Manasseh.
• "Your life will be brighter than the noonday; its darkness will be like the morning" (v17). Job had just described death as "the land of darkness and deep shadow… where light is as thick darkness" (10:21–22). Zophar reverses the picture: even Job's darkest hour would be like dawn, and the rest of his life like the noonday sun. Proverbs 4:18 uses the same image for the path of the righteous, which "shines brighter and brighter until full day."
• "You will feel secure, because there is hope" (v18). Job had said his days "come to their end without hope" (7:6). Zophar insists hope is still possible, if Job will repent. "Look around" may also be translated "dig," as in digging a well or searching around a campsite before lying down. Either way the picture is a man settling in for the night, sure that he is safe.
• "You will lie down, and none will make you afraid; many will court your favor" (v19). "Court your favor" is literally "stroke your face," the gesture of someone seeking a favor from an important person (Prov 19:6). Zophar promises Job that he will again be the respected elder people come to for help, as he was before (29:7–11). In a way, this comes true. In the end God restores Job's fortunes and his family gathers around him (42:10–11). But it comes in a way Zophar never imagined. Zophar himself has to come to Job, with sacrifices, and ask Job to pray for him (42:8–9).
• "But the eyes of the wicked will fail… and their hope is to breathe their last" (v20). Zophar ends with a warning. The wicked look for rescue until their eyes give out (Deut 28:65), every escape route disappears, and the only "hope" they have left is death. This is pointed. Job has said again and again that he wishes he could die (3:21; 6:8–9). Zophar suggests that this wish marks Job as one of the wicked. It is a cruel way to end a speech that claimed to offer hope.
• Was Zophar right? Readers have always wrestled with how to judge the friends. Most of what Zophar says, taken sentence by sentence, could be found elsewhere in the Bible: God is unsearchably wise, he sees sin, people should repent, and he restores the humble. Yet God says the friends did not speak rightly of him (42:7), and Job calls them "miserable comforters" (16:2). The best explanation is that Zophar's theology was too small and too sure of itself. He assumed he knew exactly why Job was suffering, and he used true statements about God to wound a man God himself had called blameless (1:8). Some readers stress that the friends' general theology was sound and only their application failed. Others argue the problem goes deeper, a system that leaves no room for innocent suffering. Both agree that Zophar was wrong about Job.
• Commentators: Matthew Henry says Job's friends brought no "oil" or "balm," and Zophar "pours into them as much vinegar as the two former had done." He says Zophar "falls upon him without mercy," yet still defends Job on v4: Job "was sound in the faith, and orthodox in his judgment." On God's greatness (vv7–9) Henry writes, "we may apprehend him, but we cannot comprehend him," and asks, if we cannot find out God, "how dare we then find fault with him?" He takes Zophar's call to repent (vv13–19) as sound counsel in itself, noting that "where sin sits heavily affliction sits lightly." He also flags the hint about Job's household (v14) as Zophar's suspicion, not a known fact. Guzik makes Zophar the harshest of the three. He shows that Zophar misquotes Job, since Job admitted his general sinfulness several times (7:20–21; 9:2, 20) and claimed only that no particular sin caused his suffering. Guzik observes that Zophar's "less than you deserve" line takes a true belief about human sinfulness and turns it into a weapon, and he passes on Bradley's remark that the friends offered half-truths, which can do more harm than plain lies. JFB, like the Tyndale notes, says Job was defending his sincerity, not claiming sinlessness (v4). JFB takes "double" wisdom (v6) to mean God's wisdom is twice man's, and reads v10 as courtroom language: God shuts a person up for trial and calls the assembly to pass sentence. JFB has no comment on vv1, 5 and 9. On v12 both Henry and JFB follow the KJV's reading, and JFB says the Hebrew has "a wild-ass man," as in Genesis 16:12. The lexicon does not support that. It reads the words as "a wild ass's colt" that might "be born a man," which is the ESV's sense.

Pointing to Christ

Zophar cried, "Oh, that God would speak" (v5), and God has spoken. He spoke to Job from the whirlwind, and "in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Heb 1:2). The "deep things of God" that Zophar said no one could find out (v7) have been made known in Christ, "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col 2:3), and the Spirit "searches everything, even the depths of God" (1 Cor 2:10). Zophar told an innocent man that God was exacting less than his guilt deserved. For us that is true: God does not deal with us as our sins deserve (Ps 103:10). But at the cross the reverse happened. The one man who was truly blameless was treated as a sinner, mocked and accused of blasphemy, so that the guilty could go free: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin" (2 Cor 5:21). And where Zophar offered restoration only as a reward for getting oneself right, Jesus prays for those who wronged him, as Job did in the end for Zophar.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik notes that Zophar combines the worst elements of both previous friends: he has Eliphaz's certainty without his initial gentleness, and Bildad's dogmatism without his appeal to authority. Zophar speaks from pure arrogance. His theology of God's transcendence (vv.7-9) is correct, but he uses it as a blunt instrument rather than a source of comfort. The irony: Zophar says God's ways are beyond finding out, then proceeds to explain exactly what God is doing with Job.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• BibleProject: bibleproject.com On the whole book: the speech from the whirlwind, and why it answers Job the way it does.
• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of Job -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

Links open on the publisher's own site. Nothing here is reproduced on this page.

Reflection

• Certainty That Condemns (v.6) — Zophar doesn't suggest Job might have sinned; he flatly claims God is punishing Job less than he deserves, speaking with total confidence about a situation he doesn't understand. When you feel most certain about someone else's spiritual condition, is that certainty rooted in truth or in judgment?
• Transcendence Used to Silence (vv.7-9) — Zophar rightly describes God's wisdom as higher than heaven and deeper than the grave, but he uses that truth to shut Job's questions down rather than to humble his own assumptions. Does acknowledging God's mystery make you more humble about what you claim to know, or more confident in your own conclusions?
• Contempt Dressed as Counsel (v.12) — Zophar compares Job to a wild donkey's colt, mocking any hope that a "foolish" man could gain understanding. Have you ever let frustration with someone turn your words into contempt instead of genuine help?
• A Simple Fix for Complex Pain (vv.13-14) — Zophar's prescription — just repent and everything will be fine — assumes guilt without evidence and offers no room for Job's actual situation. When someone you care about is suffering, do you offer quick formulas or take the time to actually understand what they're carrying?
• Truth Turned Into a Threat (v.20) — Zophar closes with a warning about the fate of the wicked, aimed squarely at Job as an accusation rather than a general truth. Do you ever use a real biblical truth as a weapon against a specific person instead of letting it stand on its own?