Job 35
About JobWritten by AI
Job is a long poem framed by a short story. A good man loses his wealth, his children, and his health, and no one tells him why. The writer and the date are unknown: the story is set in the age of the patriarchs, but the book may have been written much later, and Christians hold different views on when. Some Jewish tradition credits Moses.
After two prose chapters, Job and three friends trade speeches in rounds. The friends insist suffering must be punishment for sin; Job insists he is innocent and pleads for God to answer him. A younger man, Elihu, speaks next. Then the LORD Himself answers out of the whirlwind, and the story closes in prose.
Read the friends with care. They say many true things about God, but they apply them wrongly, and at the end God says they have not spoken of Him accurately as Job has (42:7). Watch for Job's flashes of hope in the dark: “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Before you read Job 35Written by AI
Elihu asks whether Job really thinks he is more righteous than God. Our righteousness does not add to God, he says, and our sin does not harm Him. People cry out under oppression but do not seek their Maker. Readers differ on whether Elihu is wise or another brash comforter.
Elihu Recalls God’s Justice
And Elihu went on to say:
“Do you think this is just?
You say, ‘I am more righteous than God.’
For you ask, ‘What does it profit me,
and what benefit do I gain apart from sin?’
I will reply to you
and to your friends as well.
Look to the heavens and see;
gaze at the clouds high above you.
If you sin, what do you accomplish against Him?
If you multiply your transgressions, what do you do to Him?
If you are righteous, what do you give Him,
or what does He receive from your hand?
Your wickedness affects only a man like yourself,
and your righteousness only a son of man.
Men cry out under great oppression;
they plead for relief from the arm of the mighty.
But no one asks, ‘Where is God my Maker,
who gives us songs in the night,
who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth
and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?’
There they cry out, but He does not answer,
because of the pride of evil men.
Surely God does not listen to empty pleas,
and the Almighty does not take note of it.
How much less, then, when you say that you do not see Him,
that your case is before Him and you must wait for Him,
and further, that in His anger He has not punished
or taken much notice of folly!
So Job opens his mouth in vain
and multiplies words without knowledge.”