Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Bildad: Inquire of the Former Age
Job 8:1-22
1 Then Bildad the Shuhite answered, · WEB
The second friend defends God's justice by reasoning from the children's deaths to the children's guilt.
Bildad has none of Eliphaz's courtesy. He opens by calling the speech wind Job 8:2 and puts his position as two questions that answer themselves: does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert righteousness? Job 8:3.
Nobody has said he does. Job's complaint has been that he cannot get a hearing, not that God is corrupt. The friends will keep defending a proposition that is not under attack.
Then the sentence that makes this the cruellest speech in the first cycle. If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their disobedience Job 8:4.
The reasoning runs backward from the outcome. Ten young people died; God is just; therefore they deserved it. It is offered as consolation — the deaths are explained, God is cleared — and it is delivered to their father eight days after the funeral.
The reader has information Bildad lacks, and it happens to concern those very children. Job had been sacrificing for them habitually, in case they had sinned in their hearts Job 1:5. The one man who took their possible guilt seriously enough to act on it is now being told what their deaths prove.
The offer that follows has a conditional buried in it that is really an accusation. If you were pure and upright, surely now he would awaken for you Job 8:6. The visible fact is that God has not awakened; the conclusion is left for Job to draw about himself.
Bildad's authority is tradition. Please inquire of past generations. Find out about the learning of their fathers, because we are but of yesterday, and know nothing Job 8:8–9. The humility is real and the use of it is not: he distrusts his own generation's judgment and trusts the accumulated verdict, which is how a rule survives long after the cases that would have tested it.
His illustrations are botanical and both cut the same way. Papyrus cannot grow without water and withers first, while it is yet in its greenness Job 8:11–12 — so a sudden collapse proves the roots were never in anything. The godless man's trust is a spider's web, and he leans on a house that will not stand Job 8:14–15.
A collapsed house is the specific thing that killed Job's children Job 1:19. Bildad has reached for it as a figure of speech.
The close is meant kindly. God will not cast away a blameless man Job 8:20, with laughter and shouting promised. But the sentence is a trap in the shape of a comfort, because the man in front of him has been cast away and the narrator has called him blameless twice Job 1:1 Job 1:8. Either the rule is wrong or Job is not blameless, and Bildad has already chosen.
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