Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Now My Eye Sees You
Job 42:1-6
1 Then Job answered Yahweh: · WEB
Job withdraws his case without ever learning why, and what changed is not his information but that he has met the one he was arguing with.
Six verses, and the whole poem turns on them.
He begins by conceding the thing the speeches established: I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be restrained Job 42:2. Then he quotes the charge back — who is this who hides counsel without knowledge? — and accepts it: therefore I have uttered that which I didn't understand, things too wonderful for me, which I didn't know Job 42:3.
What he retracts is precise. Not his innocence, which God will confirm in the next paragraph. Not his complaint, which God has just called right Job 42:7. He retracts speaking about things beyond him — the running of a world he cannot see the half of.
Then the sentence that carries the book. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you Job 42:5.
He has not been given any new information. He still does not know about the councils, the accuser, or the wager. He does not know that God called him blameless twice, that his ruin was without cause, or that his refusal to curse was the answer to a charge laid against God's government. None of it is disclosed, and he dies without it.
What changed is the difference between a report and a presence. He had a theology, and it was better than his friends'. Now he has met the one it was about, and the questions that mattered so much have not been answered so much as absorbed.
That is worth stating plainly, because it is the book's actual resolution and it is not the one a reader expects. The problem of the innocent sufferer is not solved. What is offered instead is an encounter, and Job treats it as sufficient.
The last verse is the hardest in the book to render, and honesty requires saying so. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes Job 42:6 — the English translations divide here, because the first verb has no stated object in the Hebrew and can be read as retracting a statement, as melting away, or as loathing oneself, and the second can be read as changing one's mind or as being consoled about the dust and ashes he has been sitting in since chapter 2.
What the verse will bear on any reading is a man withdrawing from the position he had taken. What it will not bear is the reading the friends wanted, because God rules on that four verses later and rules against them. Job does not confess the sins Eliphaz invented, and he is not asked to.
He repents of arguing about what he could not see. His integrity, which he swore he would not let go of until he died Job 27:5, he never lets go of — and it was the whole point.
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