Job responds to Eliphaz, Round 2

Job 16-17

Apologies, friends.  I split up the second encounter between Eliphaz and Job.  I think those 4 jokers in the ash heap are starting to rub off of me, and I’m using more words and saying less.

But they keep going, so we will, too. 

Job takes the next two chapters (16 and 17) to respond to Eliphaz, reaffirming his innocence and asking for relief.  He calls out his friends for doing a poor job of making him feel better, which I don’t disagree with, but then he goes on to say that he could do (and in fact has done) a better job at encouraging people than they have.  There is not a lot of gratitude going on here.

In 16:6, Job notes that speaking out loud doesn’t help him feel better, but neither does keeping silent.  Given the number of Job’s words in this story, it appears to me that his natural inclination is to speak.  We’ve established that in the past he has spoken to help other people feel better, so perhaps that’s the reason for his verbosity now:  he’s a verbal processor trying to work through this and make himself feel better.  Sometimes talking about things can make them seem less daunting or less scary.  I think telling our stories is important for a lot of reasons.

But Job doesn’t seem concerned about actually telling his story. He doesn’t recount exactly how he was wronged.  If we take him at his word(s), he’s not thinking about each messenger’s individual bad news or the first sore that he noticed on his skin.  That has been more my experience.  I tend to run an internal loop of the big and small ways that others have been intentionally cruel to me.  The background to this loop is that I was really, truly trying to do everything right, but the loop itself is the events that happened to me and how they made me feel and how I let those events and feelings define me. 

Job’s loop is the opposite:  he focuses on his innocence, his righteousness, and his reputation.  The cruel events are the background.  And it strikes me that Job is a man who is accustomed to talking his way through things.  Maybe that’s what he’s trying to do in most of the book.  Maybe people have been getting stuck in internal loops for ages.

Job also gives another little nod to the idea of something that sounds a little like Jesus:  in 16:19, Job longs for someone in heaven to speak to God on Job’s behalf:

16:19:  Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high. (NRSV)

16:19:  There must be Someone in heaven who knows the truth about me, in highest heaven, some Attorney who can clear my name—My Champion, my Friend. (The Message)

A couple of chapters ago, we got hints of resurrection. Now we get hints of someone who can vouch for Job, clear his name. While he’s not exactly asking for someone to clear him of his sins (because, let’s be clear, Job has no sins), he is asking for someone to set the record straight. It’s not exactly how I think of Jesus, but it’s getting close. Or maybe I just desperately need to remind myself that the OT God actually has a New Testament, too.