Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Seven Days of Silence
Job 2:11-13
11 Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come on him, they each came from his own place: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to sympathize with him and to comfort him. · WEB
The best thing the friends do for Job takes a week and involves no speech at all.
Three men hear, and what they do first is coordinate. They come each from his own place, and made an appointment together Job 2:11. Three separate households arrange a meeting and travel to a fourth, which is not a casual undertaking in that world.
Their stated purpose is given in two verbs: to sympathize and to comfort. Both will be relevant later, because the poem is largely a record of the second one failing.
What they see stops them. They didn't recognize him Job 2:12 — the disease has taken the face. And their reaction is not composure. They raise their voices and weep, tear their robes, and throw dust into the air over their heads. Three respectable men perform a public mourning for someone who is still alive, in front of him.
Then: so they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him Job 2:13.
Every element of that is deliberate. On the ground, not on chairs — they take his position rather than visiting it. Seven days and seven nights, which is the full period of mourning for the dead, given to a living man. And silence throughout.
The reason is stated and it is not awkwardness: for they saw that his grief was very great. They judged the size of the pain and concluded that nothing they had to say would fit it. That judgment was correct, and it is the last correct judgment any of them makes.
This is the best thing anyone does for Job in the entire book, and it consists of showing up, sitting down, and not talking. Everything that goes wrong between these men begins in the next verse, when the silence ends.
It is worth being fair to them about what follows. They stayed. Thirty-five chapters of argument, much of it cruel, are delivered by men who traveled to a plague victim's ash heap and were still there a week later. Their failure is a failure of speech, not of nerve.
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