Job · chapter 8 of 42
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In Job 8 Bildad the Shuhite, the second friend, speaks. He asserts that God does not pervert justice, implies that Job's children died because of their sin, and advises Job to seek God earnestly. He appeals to the wisdom of earlier generations and uses the images of papyrus without water and a spider's web to say that the hope of the godless vanishes.
Bildad is the second of Job's three friends, and his speech is shorter and harder than Eliphaz's. Where Eliphaz appealed to a vision and to his experience, Bildad relies on the tradition of the ancestors. The conclusion is the same, but the tone is sharper, and he dares to say aloud what Eliphaz had only hinted: that Job's children died because of their sins.
Bildad begins with indignation: how long will Job go on talking like this, with words like a great wind? He asks whether God perverts justice and whether the Almighty perverts what is right. Then he says something very harsh: if Job's children sinned against God, he delivered them into the hand of their transgression. But if Job seeks God earnestly and is pure and upright, God will rouse himself for him and restore his rightful place. His beginning will seem small, but his latter days will be very great.
To support his argument, Bildad calls Job to ask the former generation and to consider what the fathers discovered. We are of yesterday and know nothing, he says, and our days are a shadow, but they will teach you and speak from their hearts.
Then he uses images from nature. Can papyrus grow where there is no marsh, or reeds flourish without water? While still green and uncut, it withers before any other plant. Such are the paths of all who forget God, and so the hope of the godless perishes. His confidence is a spider's web, and his house does not stand. He is like a green plant in the sun, spreading its shoots over the garden, but when it is torn from its place, that place denies it: I never saw you.
Bildad ends with a promise: God will not reject the blameless or take the hand of evildoers. He will yet fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with shouts of joy, and your enemies will be clothed with shame, and the tent of the wicked will be no more.
References follow ESV book names and verse numbers. Read each verse in your Bible before the explanation.
Bildad asks whether God perverts justice or whether the Almighty perverts what is right. The question is correct, but he uses it as a weapon against Job: if God is just, then Job's suffering must be deserved.
Bildad says that if Job's children sinned, God delivered them into the hand of their transgression. It is one of the cruelest lines in the book: he uses the children's death as proof of guilt, before the father who has just lost them.
Bildad promises that Job's beginning will seem small but his latter days will be very great. He speaks a truth that will come true in the last chapter of the book, although the reasoning behind his promise is mistaken.
Such are the paths of all who forget God, and the hope of the godless perishes. Bildad sums up his doctrine in one sentence: whoever does not trust God is left without root, and so he hints that Job must be in that condition.
6 questions with answers and references, ready for Sunday school, small group or a Bible quiz night.
Answer: Bildad the Shuhite. — Job 8:1
Answer: Whether God perverts justice and whether the Almighty perverts what is right. — Job 8:3
Answer: That if they sinned against God, he delivered them into the hand of their transgression. — Job 8:4
Answer: The former generation and what the fathers have discovered. — Job 8:8
Answer: Papyrus without a marsh and a spider's web. — Job 8:11-14
Answer: That God will not reject the blameless and will fill his mouth with laughter and his lips with shouts of joy. — Job 8:20-21
Bildad teaches us what not to do with a brother who suffers. He used a true fact, that God is just, to tell a father that his children died because of their sin. No Sunday school teacher should say such a thing. When someone in your group loses a loved one, right doctrine must come with tenderness, and sometimes with silence.
The chapter also warns us about using tradition as a closed argument. The wisdom of the fathers is valuable, but Job was living through something that did not fit the known categories. A living faith is able to learn from others and also to admit that there are questions our usual answers do not settle.
Job 8 ends with a promise that tastes like a blessing but starts from a mistaken diagnosis. In Job 9 Job will grant that God is just and powerful, but will ask how a person can be in the right before him, and will voice his longing for an arbiter between the two.
He was one of Job's three friends. He is called a Shuhite, probably because he belonged to a tribe or place named Shuah, linked to the descendants of Abraham and Keturah. He speaks three times in the book, and each time defends the idea that God punishes the wicked and rewards the good.
Because it attributes the death of Job's children to their own sin, in front of a father who has just lost them. The book has already said that Job was blameless and that God permitted the test. Bildad speaks without knowing the facts, which is why his doctrine, however pious it seems, turns into cruelty.
It is a marsh plant, like the reed, that grows in water and withers quickly without it. Bildad uses it as an image of the person who lives without God: vigorous while there is water, but soon wilting. It is a poetic image, not a scientific description.