vv1-6: Job’s words are now few and culminate in “…I repent”. However, depending on how one interprets the context, these words will have different meanings. Therefore, and since the context are parables and riddles, opinions diverge what Job’s repentance was all about.
Some find the ending of Job’s story more confusing than satisfying. As one Hebraist put it:
The ordinary readers who in their own lives have experienced grief or unacceptable injustice, and who struggle with the concept of a credible God in a world filled with inequitable suffering, are often disappointed by the end of the book of Job. …after all, the militant Job finally backs down and admits his guilt, and is subsequently put in the right by God. As if admitting guilt is sufficient to overcome one’s own misery.
van Wolde, Ellen J. (1994). Job 42,1-6: The Reversal of Job, in Beuken 1994: 223-250.
As an alternative, she and others suggest that Job didn’t repent in, but rather from dust and ashes*:
- Indeed, since Job considered himself dust and ashes long before his encounter with God (30:19), turning to dust and ashes now (again) would hardly be a change that required any epiphany at all.
- More likely, Job’s repentance is that he renounced his morbid perspective: He accepted to turn a page and to move on after concluding a time of mourning.
What then has the power to bring about such change in a person who has suffered the loss of everything, including our peace with men and God? Did Job become alive again simply by discovering that “most things” are beyond our scope, and by accepting finally that we cannot have insight into the masterplan of creation (van Wolde, Ellen J., 1994)?
- If that were the case, why would Job have questioned God in the first place? Job himself clearly affirmed his awareness of our own limitations long before his epiphany: “God does great things beyond searching out, and marvelous things beyond number”, 9:10.
- And how could God’s answer have transformed Job if it were simply a lesson that His ‘wonders’ (hebr. pala) are beyond us to comprehend? Not only did Job already know this, it even became the very reason for him to instead question God’s motive (10:16). Likewise, the belief that God is all powerful was not new to Job at all, see 12:10-25.
- It takes no faith and no epiphany and no special revelation from God to know that there are things that we cannot know: This is so obvious! Eliphaz knew it (5:9), and so did every other philosopher**. Therefore, to claim that this was the lesson of hearing God’s own voice is not only silly, it also makes Job’s epiphany look utterly trivial.
v2: “I know that you can do all things…”: This reading follows the Vulgate (in Hebrew, depending on its vocalization, it could be “You know…”, cf YLT): Could it be stated more clearly? Job never questioned God’s omnipotence. He never accused God of acting with no purpose. Nor did he fancy that we can or should know that purpose. He questioned whether and how God’s purposes can be good if He does not use His power to prevent evil***. Therefore, if Job didn’t find peace simply from a new perspective of God’s superior powers, what else changed and restored him to embrace life again?
v3: By quoting God’s own verdict almost verbatim from 38:2, Job admits that in his ignorance of the “wondrous things” (hebr. pala), he had been wrong to suspect God’s purpose of being unjust. This suspicion could be overcome by nothing other than by Job’s epiphany of God’s loving purpose, namely that our redemption requires that we become united with Christ in His sufferings so that we may also partake in His resurrection (the latter is depicted metaphorically by how all of Job’s losses eventually became more than restored).
vv4-6: Not with one word does Job insinuate that his lack of understanding was about “the order of things“, or that he tried to “cut down the masterplan of creation to human size”, or that he finally agreed that he is and must remain blind! To the very contrary: He says plainly that now he does see, namely what is indeed revealed of God (i.e. in Christ), unlike before when it was only hearsay, or Gibberish. For “…what no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” – these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit (see 1Cor 2:9-10, where Paul quoted and explained Isa 64:4)
- After all, an epiphany was indeed granted to Job, and not to conceal what he wished to be revealed, but to reveal what God formerly concealed and now made known of Himself in Jesus Christ, first to Job and then, through His Spirit in Job and prophets like him, also to us.
* van Wolde cites P.A.H. De Boer (1991)Does Job Retract? Selected Studies in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. C. van Duin, Leiden, Brill, 1991, pp. 179-195): “As so many translations, the Syriac translation is an interpretation rather than a literal rendering, but it goes to the heart of the matter with ‘therefore I am silent and rise again from dust and ashes’. Syriac uses the same (verbal) stem as Hebrew and in Syriac literature this verb is also used to refer to the rising from the dead, the resurrection into life, the awakening from sleep, the continuation of life.”, p. 192, and she comments that a similar view was already expressed by the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides: L.J. Kaplan (1978) Maimonides, Dale Patrick, and Job XLII 6, in: Vetus Testamentum 28(3):356-358.
** ‘Things too wonderful’ (hebr. pala): to be surpassing or extraordinary; cf 5:9 (Eliphaz); 9:10; 10:16; Gen 18:14; Ex 3:20
*** cf The Problem of Evil, discussed in Job 38
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