Job — Chapter 8

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Job has just finished his reply to Eliphaz (chs 6–7). He ended it by speaking straight to God: "Why do you not pardon my transgression... For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be" (7:21). Now the second friend speaks. Bildad the Shuhite is probably from a tribe descended from Shuah, a son of Abraham by Keturah (Gen 25:2), somewhere in the desert lands east of Israel. Where Eliphaz began gently and appealed to a vision in the night (4:12–21), Bildad is short, blunt and sure of himself. His speech has three parts: God is always just, so Job and his children got what they deserved, and Job should repent (vv1–7); the wisdom of past generations proves it (vv8–10); and nature itself shows that the godless wither while the blameless are restored (vv11–22). Almost everything Bildad says about God is true. What he gets wrong is Job.

Bildad Speaks: Job Should Repent (vv1–22)

• "How long will you say these things?" (v2). Bildad doesn't open with sympathy or even a greeting. He opens with impatience. Job had just asked God, "How long will you not look away from me?" (7:19). The Tyndale notes suggest Bildad may be mocking Job's own question by turning it back on him.
• "The words of your mouth be a great wind" (v2). "Wind" is the Hebrew ruach, which also means breath or spirit. Job had used the same word twice: "my life is a breath" (7:7), and "the speech of a despairing man is wind" (6:26). Job asked his friends not to treat cries of pain like a lecture to be refuted. Bildad takes Job's own word and makes it an insult: your words are nothing but a gale of hot air. It is a small example of how the friends listen. They hear the words but miss the man.
• "Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?" (v3). This is the center of Bildad's whole speech. "Pervert" ('avath) means to bend or make crooked, like a merchant rigging his scales (Amos 8:5). The answer is obviously no, and Job would agree. Later Elihu says the same thing (34:12), and the book never denies it. But Bildad's logic runs on from there: God is just, Job is suffering, so Job must deserve it. Job will pick up this very word later in the book and say the unthinkable: "God has put me in the wrong" (19:6). The whole book hangs on this tension. God is just, and Job is innocent, and both are true. Bildad can't hold both at once, so he gives up Job's innocence.
• "If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their transgression" (v4). This is the cruelest line in the friends' speeches so far. Job's ten children died when the house collapsed on them (1:18–19). Bildad says, in effect, they had it coming. Their own sin caught up with them. The "if" is polite on the surface, but the point is clear. It is worth remembering that Job used to rise early and offer sacrifices for his children in case they had sinned (1:5). Bildad has found the deepest wound and pressed on it. The reader knows what Bildad does not: the children died because of a contest in heaven (1:12), not because of their sins.
• "If you will seek God and plead with the Almighty for mercy" (v5). The verb "seek" (shachar) is related to the word for dawn. The lexicon gives the sense of looking for something early, eagerly, with longing. It is the word in Psalm 63:1: "earnestly I seek you." And it is the same word Job used at the very end of his last speech: "you will seek me, but I shall not be" (7:21). Job pictured God searching for him one morning and finding him gone. Bildad flips it: it isn't God who needs to seek Job, it is Job who needs to seek God. It sounds pious. But Job has not stopped praying. He has done little else, even if his prayers are full of complaint.
• "If you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you" (v6). Here is the painful irony of the chapter. God himself has already called Job "blameless and upright" (1:8; 2:3). Bildad states the condition as though Job obviously fails it. "Rouse himself" ('ur) means to wake up and spring into action. Psalms use it in prayers to a God who seems asleep: "Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?" (Ps 44:23). Bildad means that God will rise up to help Job the moment Job deserves it. The idea that God might have reasons for his delay that have nothing to do with Job's sin never crosses his mind.
• "Restore your rightful habitation" (v6). Literally something like "your righteous dwelling," the home where a righteous man belongs. Bildad promises that God will put Job back where he belongs, once Job is righteous again.
• "Though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great" (v7). The Tyndale notes point out that Bildad's words came truer than he knew. At the end of the book "the LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning" (42:12), using the same two words, "beginning" and "latter days." But Job's restoration did not come because Job finally confessed some hidden sin, as Bildad expected. It came after God rebuked the friends and Job prayed for them (42:7–10). Bildad got the ending right and the reason wrong.
• "Inquire, please, of bygone ages" (v8). Eliphaz appealed to a private vision (4:12–17). Bildad appeals to tradition: ask the generations before us, and the "fathers" before them. Moses makes the same kind of appeal: "ask now of the days that are past" (Deut 4:32). Respect for the wisdom of the past is good and biblical (Prov 22:28). The question is whether Bildad has applied that wisdom rightly to this case, and he hasn't.
• "For we are but of yesterday and know nothing" (v9). Bildad includes himself, though he doesn't seem to believe it about himself. Our own lives are too short to learn very much, he says, so trust what the ages have learned. "Our days on earth are a shadow" echoes a common biblical picture of how brief life is (1 Chr 29:15; Ps 144:4). Job had said nearly the same thing: "my days are a breath" (7:16). Job says it to plead for mercy. Bildad says it to tell Job to sit down and listen.
• "Will they not teach you... and utter words out of their understanding?" (v10). "Out of their understanding" is literally "out of their heart." The fathers' sayings came from deep reflection, not from a desperate man's "wind" (v2). Bildad's contrast is pointed: their words came from the heart; yours come out of your mouth.
• "Can papyrus grow where there is no marsh?" (v11). Bildad now gives the kind of nature proverb the fathers might have taught. Papyrus (gome) is the tall reed of the Nile marshes. The Tyndale notes say it can grow ten to fifteen feet high. Moses' basket was made of it (Exod 2:3). The word for "reeds" (achu) is the Nile grass where Pharaoh's cows grazed in his dream (Gen 41:2). The lexicon says achu is originally an Egyptian word, and gome may be too. The picture belongs to the Nile, and Bildad's hearers would know it. Papyrus is impressive, but it lives entirely on water. Cut off its water and it is finished.
• "While yet in flower and not cut down, they wither before any other plant" (v12). Papyrus looks strong, but it has no deep reserves. When the marsh dries up, it dies faster than plain grass. Bildad means the godless man can look tall and green for a while, but he is living on borrowed water, and when it fails he collapses quickly.
• "Such are the paths of all who forget God; the hope of the godless shall perish" (v13). Here Bildad explains his picture. "Forget God" doesn't mean simply failing to think about him. The Tyndale notes explain it as living as though God doesn't exist or can't see (Ps 10:4; 14:1). "Godless" is chaneph. The lexicon defines it as profane or irreligious; the KJV translated it "hypocrite." The word appears more often in Job than in any other book (13:16; 15:34; 17:8; 20:5; 27:8). Bildad doesn't call Job godless outright. He doesn't have to.
• "His trust is a spider's web" (v14). Literally "a spider's house." Spiders are rare in the Bible; Isaiah uses the same picture for the useless schemes of the wicked (Isa 59:5). The godless man builds something he thinks will hold him, and it is as flimsy as a web. "His confidence is severed": the Hebrew is uncertain, and some translations read "his confidence is fragile," but the meaning is the same.
• "He leans against his house, but it does not stand" (v15). The picture continues. A spider can rest its weight in its web, but a man can't. Bildad may mean more than a building. "House" in the Bible often means a household, a family line. Job's house had literally collapsed on his children (1:19). Bildad's illustrations keep landing on Job's actual losses, whether he means them to or not.
• "He is a lush plant before the sun" (vv16–17). Bildad switches to a second plant, this one in a garden. It is green and spreading in the sunshine, with shoots running over the garden and roots that wrap around a heap of stones. The Tyndale notes take the roots in the stones as giving the plant stability. It looks like a plant that should last.
• "If he is destroyed from his place, then it will deny him, saying, 'I have never seen you'" (v18). Yet it is ripped out, and the ground it grew in acts as though it never knew it. Job had said of the dead man, "nor does his place know him anymore" (7:10). Bildad picks up Job's image. Job meant it as a sad description of human frailty. Bildad uses it as a description of what happens to the wicked. Psalm 103:16 uses the same idea for every human life: "its place knows it no more."
• "Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the soil others will spring" (v19). "This is the joy of his way" is biting sarcasm: so much for all his happiness. Then other plants grow up in his place, and the world carries on without him.
• Readings differ on vv16–19. Most interpreters, including the older commentators, read the garden plant as one more picture of the godless man: he flourishes, then is torn out and forgotten. Some modern scholars think Bildad is describing a different kind of plant in contrast to the papyrus. On that reading, this plant is well-rooted in the rocks, survives being uprooted, and new shoots spring up from the same soil. That would be a picture of the righteous man, who can be cut down but grows again, leading naturally into vv20–22. The Hebrew is difficult enough to allow either view. The ESV's wording ("the joy of his way," said with irony) fits the more traditional reading. Either way Bildad's point is the same: what happens to a man shows what kind of man he is.
• "God will not reject a blameless man, nor take the hand of evildoers" (v20). Bildad sums up. "Blameless" is tam, the very word the narrator and God used for Job (1:1, 8; 2:3). The lexicon gives its sense as complete, having integrity, morally sound. Bildad divides the world into two neat groups, the tam and the chaneph, and believes it is easy to tell which is which by watching what happens to them. "Take the hand" means take someone by the hand to help and strengthen him (Isa 41:13). God won't help evildoers. Job looks like a man God isn't helping, and Bildad leaves the conclusion hanging in the air.
• "He will yet fill your mouth with laughter, and your lips with shouting" (v21). Bildad ends on a hopeful note, and it is sincere. Psalm 126:2 uses the same words for the joy of God's people brought back from exile: "our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy." "Yet" holds the door open. Bildad seems to think Job is basically a good man who has fallen into some sin and can still be restored if he repents.
• "Those who hate you will be clothed with shame, and the tent of the wicked will be no more" (v22). Again, Bildad's words come truer than he knows, and in an unexpected way. At the end, God's anger burns against the three friends, not against Job, and they must bring sacrifices and ask Job to pray for them (42:7–8). Job's restoration did come, and it shamed the people who had judged him. Those people were the friends themselves.
• What Bildad gets right and wrong. Nearly every sentence in this speech could be found elsewhere in the Bible. God doesn't pervert justice. Sin has consequences. The godless are fragile. God restores the humble. Bildad's mistake is not bad theology so much as a theology with no room for mystery. He assumes that if God is just, every event in a person's life must be a visible reward or punishment. Scripture as a whole doesn't allow that. Psalm 73 wrestles with the prosperity of the wicked, Ecclesiastes notices the righteous perishing (Eccl 7:15), and Jesus rejects the idea that a man's blindness proves his or his parents' sin (John 9:2–3). God himself sides with Job against his friends (42:7). Bildad's words are a warning about using true doctrine as a club.
• Commentators: All three see Bildad as harsher than Eliphaz. JFB calls Job's words in Bildad's eyes "daring against God," and notes that "the repetition of 'pervert' gives an emphasis galling to Job." On v4 JFB paraphrases Bildad's meaning bluntly: "Thy children have sinned; God leaves them to the consequence of their sin." JFB takes "rouse himself" (v6) to mean God "seemed to be asleep toward the sufferer." Matthew Henry summarizes Bildad's claim that Job "and his children had suffered justly," and that if Job repented "God would soon turn his captivity." Henry also observes that Bildad, unlike Eliphaz, doesn't claim that no righteous person ever perishes, only that God usually brings the prosperous hypocrite down in this life. Henry adds that Scripture has now given believers a surer guide than the "fathers," and that Job's losses did not prove him wicked: "Let us judge nothing before the time" (echoing 1 Cor 4:5). Guzik draws on Andersen, Mason and Smick to describe Bildad as blunt, rigid, black-and-white and unmoved by Job's grief, and he argues that even early history breaks Bildad's rule, since righteous Abel was murdered by Cain. Like G. Campbell Morgan, whom he cites, Guzik says Bildad's principles are true but wrongly applied to Job. On the plants, Henry and JFB both read vv16–19 as the godless man flourishing and then torn up, JFB calling v19 "bitter irony" and adding wryly that "there is no end of hypocrites on earth." JFB takes v20 to show that "Bildad regards Job as a righteous man, who has fallen into sin," which fits the hopeful tone of vv21–22. Guzik, following Andersen and in line with the Tyndale notes, contrasts the tam of v20 with the chaneph of v13, describing the second as one who is secretly wicked. The lexicon supports "godless" or "profane" for chaneph, but doesn't build the idea of secrecy into the word itself. That idea comes from the context of Bildad's argument, not the vocabulary. JFB comments on nearly every verse here, but has no note on v1.

Pointing to Christ

Bildad's rule was simple: watch what happens to a man, and you will know whether God approves of him. By that rule, the cross is the clearest verdict of all. The crowd at Calvary reasoned the same way: "He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him" (Matt 27:43). The one truly blameless man was rejected, stripped of everything, and seemingly abandoned by God. "We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted" (Isa 53:4). Yet he suffered not for his own sin, but for ours. Bildad was right that God does not pervert justice. At the cross God's justice was fully satisfied, and the blameless one was not finally rejected. He was raised and exalted, his "latter days" greater than anyone could imagine (Phil 2:9). Bildad promised Job laughter if he would only prove himself pure. In Christ the gospel offers something Bildad never could: joy given to those who are not pure, because the Pure One took their place (2 Cor 5:21).

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik emphasizes the cruelty of v.4 — Bildad essentially says "your children died because they sinned." This is theology as weapon. Guzik notes that Bildad's appeal to the fathers (v.8) reveals his insecurity: he has no personal experience or revelation to offer, so he hides behind tradition. His nature metaphors are beautiful poetry but brutal when applied to Job's situation: you withered because you had no root in God.
• 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

• God's Justice Doesn't Mean Every Case Is Explainable (v.3) — Bildad insists God never perverts justice, and he's right, yet he wrongly assumes that means every instance of suffering must be traceable to a cause. Can you affirm that God is just without needing to explain every hard thing that happens?
• Never Assume the Grieving Deserved Their Loss (v.4) — Bildad tells a father that his children died because of their own sin. When someone you know is grieving, are you careful never to imply, even subtly, that they brought it on themselves?
• Watch for Encouragement That's Really an Accusation (v.6) — Bildad's promise that Job will be restored if he's pure quietly implies that his current suffering proves he isn't. Do you ever offer conditional comfort that leaves a hidden accusation behind it?
• Tradition Is Valuable but Not Infallible (v.9) — Bildad leans entirely on inherited wisdom from previous generations rather than his own relationship with God. Where might you be relying on "what's always been said" instead of examining whether it's actually true in this case?
• Analogies Illustrate — They Don't Prove (vv.11-19) — Bildad's images of withered plants and fragile spider webs are memorable but wrongly applied to Job's situation. When you use an illustration to make a point about someone's life, are you certain it actually fits their situation?