Bible Commentaries

JOB 25

BILDAD'S THIRD AND FINAL SPEECH:

THIS BRIEF RESPONSE IS THE LAST WORD JOB'S THREE FRIENDS HAD TO SAY

Job 25:1-6

"Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said,

Dominion and fear are with him;

He maketh peace in his high places.

Is there any number of his armies?

And upon whom doth not his light arise?

How then can man be just with God

Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?

Behold, even the moon hath no brightness,

And the stars are not pure in his sight:

How much less man, that is a worm!

The son of man that is a worm!"

All that Bildad said here was as applicable to himself as it was to Job; and there does not appear to be any logical argument whatever in this speech.

"The stars are not pure in his sight" (Job 25:5). One may well wonder where he got an idea like this. When God viewed the Creation, "He beheld everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). This means that the stars were pure in God's sight; thus Bildad's word here is another example of the fact that Job's friends had not spoken of God the things that were right (Job 42:7).

It is believed by many scholars that much of this last half of Job is obscured by the imperfect preservation of the text, The critical analysis of these middle chapters takes special notice of, "(1) The extreme brevity of Bildad's speech, (2) the similarity of some things in Job 24 to what Bildad said, and (3) the fact that much of Job 27 seems to contradict what Job had previously said."¹ Any rearrangement of the text in these chapters should be delayed until scholars can agree on the way it ought to be presented.. We shall limit our comments to an exploration of the text as it stands.

Meredith G. Kline has given us what this writer considers to be a completely sufficient comment on this chapter.

"Bildad avoids Job's challenge in the last verse of the previous chapter. Anxious, however, to say something, he repeats some of Eliphaz' earlier remarks (Job 4:17ff and Job 15:14ff). This inept repetition by Bildad indicates that Job's philosophical friends have exhausted their resources of wisdom. Bildad's brief and feeble effort represents their expiring breath. Zophar's subsequent failure to speak is the silence of the vanquished."²