Something from Job

For all its pain, the book of Job has its delights. My daughter, a bit of an equestrian, loves its ode to the horse (39:19-25). I myself have recently been delighted by a different kind of find.

To the first-time reader the monologues of Job and those of his four friends seem all of the same cloth. In a second reading, tonal differences emerge: the discourses of Eliphaz, Bibldad, Zophar, and Elihu seem detached, clinical, bloodless, and seminarial --- as if God had nothing better to do all day than be a doctrine. Job's words, by contrast, are emotional, transparent, and human.

But here is the most interesting thing. At no time in the book do the friends ever break from the "horizontal," Job being their addressee and God their subject matter. We feel the friends are speaking about God as about someone far off, like the sun.

But look what happens when Job speaks. He goes along like the four visitors at first, on an eye-to-eye level. But at some point he seems to switch --- seamlessly --- from talking to men to speaking to God. He goes airborne. In 6:8 we are not sure. In 7:7 we have a clear eruption to God in the midst of a response to Eliphaz. By verses 12 to 21, the transition is complete, though we never saw a signpost.

In chapter 9, Job begins earthbound in answering Bildad. But so very present is God to him, that like an unsuppressible bubble of carbon gas at the bottom of a glass, he rises to God. And by verse 28, he is pleading with his Savior as if alone with him in the sanctuary, his friends' noisy cavils having faded to white noise.

In the ways of a person who lives in constant intimacy with God, there is a fluidness of conversation between the vertical and horizontal all day long.