Job36chapter 36

Elihu's final speech starts as argument and ends as weather report, and the two run together because a storm is visibly building while he talks.

His argument is that God uses affliction as instruction. He does not preserve the life of the wicked but gives justice to the poor; he does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous but sets them with kings on the throne. If they are bound in fetters and held in cords of affliction, then he shows them their work and commands that they return from iniquity. That is the discipline reading of suffering, and it is the most humane version of the case anyone in the book has made. His warning against it is that a man in that state must not choose bitterness, and must not let a large ransom turn him aside — the temptation to buy his way out rather than learn.

Then the sky takes over. He draws up the drops of water; they distil rain from his vapour, which the clouds pour down abundantly. That is a startlingly accurate description of the water cycle: water lifted, condensed, and returned. Can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacle?

The last lines are what a person actually sees at the front edge of a desert thunderstorm. He spreads his light on the clouds and covers the bottom of the sea; by these he judges the peoples and gives food in abundance; he covers his hands with the lightning and commands it to strike the mark. In that country rain was survival and a violent storm was terror, and both arrived in the same cloud.