Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Zophar: Can You Find Out God?
Job 11:1-20
1 Then Zophar, the Naamathite, answered, · WEB
The third friend is the first to state a figure for Job's guilt, and he does it by claiming access to wisdom nobody has.
Zophar has no preamble and no sympathy. Job is a man full of talk whose boastings should not silence people Job 11:2–3.
He then quotes Job, and the quotation is not accurate. For you say, 'My doctrine is pure. I am clean in your eyes' Job 11:4. Job has said he is blameless, which is what the narrator and God have said; he has never claimed to be sinless, and he has twice asked to be shown his error Job 6:24 Job 10:2. The reply is aimed at a position Job does not hold.
The wish that follows is the boldest thing in the first cycle: oh that God would speak, and open his lips against you Job 11:5. Zophar wants God to enter the debate on his side. God eventually does speak, and the verdict is against Zophar Job 42:7.
Then the sentence that gives the speech away. Know therefore that God exacts of you less than your iniquity deserves Job 11:6.
This is the first quantified claim in the book. Not that Job has sinned, but that his suffering is a discount — that what he deserves is worse than ten dead children and a body covered in sores. Zophar has no evidence and does not offer any. He has a rule, and he is now running arithmetic with it.
What makes the arrogance remarkable is that he says it two verses after asking can you fathom the mystery of God? Job 11:7. God's ways are high as heaven and deeper than Sheol, unknowable and unmeasurable — and Zophar has just measured them well enough to price a man's punishment. The humility is for other people.
His prescription is the standard one, put as a sequence of conditions. Set your heart right, stretch out your hands, put away the iniquity in your hand, keep unrighteousness out of your tents Job 11:13–14. The third condition assumes the thing to be proved.
The promises are lovely and they are the same promises Eliphaz made. Misery forgotten like waters that have passed away; life clearer than the noonday; darkness turning to morning; lying down unafraid Job 11:16–19.
They are also, once again, a description of Job's life before chapter 1. Each friend in turn offers him back what he had when he was blameless, on condition that he confess he was not.
And the alternative is stated without softening in the last verse. The eyes of the wicked fail, they have nowhere to run, and their hope will be the giving up of the spirit Job 11:20 — which is precisely what Job has been asking for since chapter 3. The threat held out to the impenitent is the thing the man in front of him has been praying for.
settled What this mark means