Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Job: With the Aged Is Wisdom
Job 12:1-25
1 Then Job answered, · WEB
Job answers the appeal to tradition with an appeal to the animals, and then recites God's power as a catalogue of who gets undone.
The sarcasm is the sharpest in the book. No doubt, but you are the people, and wisdom will die with you Job 12:2. Then, plainly: who doesn't know such things as these? Job 12:3. Nothing the friends have said is new to him, and that is his complaint about it.
What he says about his position is worth pausing on. He is a joke to his neighbor, and the identification he gives of himself is exact: I, who called on God, and he answered Job 12:4. His former standing with God is now the punchline.
And he names the mechanism behind the friends' confidence. In the thought of him who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune Job 12:5. Comfortable people find the ruined contemptible, and the contempt is a defense — a way of keeping the ruin explicable and therefore avoidable.
The counter-evidence is one line and it is fatal to the system: the tents of robbers prosper Job 12:6. Every reader has seen it. The friends' rule requires that it not be so.
Then the answer to Bildad, who had said to consult the past generations Job 8:8. Job says to consult something older. Ask the animals now, and they will teach you; the birds of the sky... speak to the earth... the fish of the sea will declare to you Job 12:7–8.
The move is not sentimental. Bildad appealed to inherited human opinion; Job appeals to the created order itself, which has no tradition to defend. And what the animals teach turns out to be what the friends say — that Yahweh's hand has done this, and that in his hand is the life of every living thing Job 12:9–10. He agrees with their doctrine and denies that it is theirs to hand out.
The last section is a hymn to God's power, and every line of it is about power taking something apart.
Counselors led away stripped, judges made fools, kings unbelted, priests led away stripped, the mighty overthrown Job 12:17–19. Trusted men lose their speech, elders lose their understanding, princes are covered in contempt Job 12:20–21. Nations are enlarged and led captive; chiefs are made to wander in a wilderness where there is no way Job 12:23–24.
Every figure in the catalogue is an authority — the counselor, the judge, the king, the priest, the elder. Job is reciting God's sovereignty back to three men who have been claiming to speak for him, and every example is of an expert being dismantled.
And one clause in the middle of it is the most unsettling thing he has said: the deceived and the deceiver are his Job 12:16. Both are inside God's government, and Job does not soften it. He is not explaining how that can be just. He is refusing to leave it out of the account.
settled What this mark means