Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Elihu: What Does It Profit You?
Job 35:1-16
1 Moreover Elihu answered, · WEB
God gains nothing from a man's goodness and loses nothing by his sin, which removes the transaction the whole book has been arguing about.
Elihu takes up the question Job asked in chapter 7 and answers it, which nobody else attempted. Job had said if I have sinned, what do I do to you, you watcher of men? Job 7:20.
The answer is put twice, symmetrically. If you have sinned, what effect do you have against him?... If you are righteous, what do you give him? Or what does he receive from your hand? Job 35:6–7.
He prefaces it with an instruction to look up: look to the skies, and see. See the skies, which are higher than you Job 35:5. The distance is the argument. Nothing a human being does adds to God or takes from him, and this cuts the ground out from under both sides of the debate.
It undoes the accuser's premise from the first chapter, which was that Job's piety was bought and paid for Job 1:9–10. If God gains nothing from human righteousness, he has nothing to buy it with in that sense, and the transaction the whole book has been arguing over does not exist.
It also answers the friends, whose system runs on a ledger — good conduct in, prosperity out. And it answers Job, who has been asking for a settlement of accounts.
Where the effect does land is stated in the next verse and it is not nothing: your wickedness may hurt a man as you are, and your righteousness may profit a son of man Job 35:8. Human conduct matters enormously, and it matters horizontally. It is other people who are damaged or helped.
The second half deals with unanswered prayer, and it is harsher. People cry out under oppression, but no one says, 'Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night' Job 35:9–10.
The distinction is between a cry of pain and a cry to God. Elihu says the oppressed often want relief without wanting the one who relieves, and that such a cry is not really addressed to anyone — God will not hear an empty cry Job 35:13.
That is a real distinction and it is being applied to the wrong man. Job has spent thirty chapters addressing God directly, by name, insisting on being heard. Whatever else is true of him, his cry is not empty. Elihu's category is sound and his aim is off.
One phrase in the passage is finer than anything the friends produced. God gives songs in the night Job 35:10. Not deliverance from the night, and not an explanation of it. Something to sing while it is still dark.
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