Job8chapter 8

Job 8:1-3

Bildad the Shuhite opens the book's second speech by comparing Job's words to a strong wind, noise without substance. His question doth God pervert judgment, or doth the Almighty pervert justice, is true doctrine, and Henry notes that the speech-attribution problem starts here, since God will affirm this very sentence at 42:7 and the fault is not in what Bildad says but in the case he is about to build on it. Gill reads the question as rhetorical, assuming the answer no as a fixed premise from which Job's guilt must follow.

Job 8:4-7

True doctrine drives a false inference: if thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression treats the death of Job's ten children as evidence rather than as the tragedy the reader has already watched unfold in chapter 1. Barnes notes the conditional structure Bildad offers Job, if thou wouldest seek unto God betimes, as a bargain that assumes present guilt is the reason help has not yet come. Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase promises restoration on the condition of repentance for a sin Job has not committed, which the friends never allow as a possibility.

Job 8:8-10

Bildad appeals to tradition as the court of final appeal: enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers. Delitzsch reads the humility clause, for we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, as Bildad's own admission that his generation has no independent standing and must borrow its wisdom entire from the fathers. Shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their heart makes accumulated proverb into unquestionable authority, the same move the friends make throughout the debate.

Job 8:11-15

The wicked-man poem opens with the rush and the flag, plants that flourish only where water stands and wither before any other herb once it is withdrawn. Gill reads the figure as the hypocrite's hope, rooted in circumstance rather than in God, so that whose trust shall be a spider's web names a structure built to look secure and unable to bear weight. He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand extends the same collapse from plant to building, the poem's first picture of a confidence with nothing under it.

Job 8:16-19

A second portrait follows the spider's web, a garden plant green before the sun, its roots wrapped about the heap, thriving in full view before it is torn from its place. Delitzsch notes the ground's own indifference in if he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee, the earth giving no memorial to what it once supported. Out of the earth shall others grow closes the portrait with the wicked man's place filled by another, exactly as Bildad implies Job's own place stands ready to be filled or restored depending on his response.

Job 8:20-22

Bildad states the friends' creed as cleanly as the book ever states it: behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help the evil doers. Henry notes the devastating irony a reader carries from chapter 1:1, where the narrator has already called Job perfect and upright in the narrator's own voice, so Bildad's true doctrine collides directly with the case in front of him. Till he fill thy mouth with laughing promises Job the same reversal Bildad has just described for the wicked man's ruin, restoration offered as a reward Bildad assumes is still Job's to earn.