Job42chapter 42

Job's answer is short. He repents in dust and ashes — the material he has been sitting on for the whole book — and says the line the book has been driving at: I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. He does not confess to the crimes the friends invented. He withdraws his demand for a hearing, having received something better than a verdict.

God's judgment on the argument is then given in plain words, and it goes the way nobody in the story expected. To Eliphaz: my wrath is kindled against thee and thy two friends, for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. The men who defended God are found guilty of misrepresenting him; the man who complained is called right.

Their remedy is patriarchal to the core. Seven bulls and seven rams, offered by the friends themselves, with Job praying for them — a large sacrifice, and no priest and no sanctuary anywhere in view, exactly as in chapter 1. The last thing Job does before his own restoration is intercede for the men who tormented him, and the text says the LORD accepted Job and turned his captivity when he prayed for his friends.

The restoration details are dating evidence in themselves. His brothers and sisters come and eat with him and each gives him a qesitah, an archaic unit of value that appears in only two other places in the whole Old Testament, both patriarchal — Jacob buying ground at Shechem and the same purchase recalled in Joshua. Nobody using a later Hebrew vocabulary would have reached for that word. His livestock is doubled, he has seven sons and three daughters again, and the daughters are named — Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch — and given an inheritance among their brothers, which was unusual enough that hearers would have caught it. He dies old and full of days, having seen his sons to the fourth generation.