Job 8
Bildad: God is good to good folks
Bildad critiques Job
1Bildad from Shuah said:2Yap, yap, yap.
How long does it take you to say nothing?
All you do is blow hot air. [1]
3Does God play fast and loose with justice?
Does he say wrong is right?
4Your dead family sinned against God.
So he gave them what they deserved.
5Go to God and tell him you’re sorry.
Ask his forgiveness.
6Live honorably and make good decisions.
Then God will see to it that life goes better for you.
7By comparison with what you had,
Your future will be much brighter.
Water is to plants what God is to Job
8Think about what sages have said about this—Those wise thinkers from past generations.
9We’re too young to know much about this.
We haven't been here very long,
Barely long enough to cast a shadow in the dirt.
10They can teach you something.
They knew what they were talking about. [2]
11Does papyrus grow far from water?
Can their reeds survive without it. [3]
12Without water,
These flowering plants die where they stand,
Uncut, yet wilted from thirst.
13That’s what happens to people separated from God.
Without him, there’s no hope. There’s death.
Trust God more than yourself
14Their self-confidence is a trap,Open House at a spider’s web.
15If you lean on that web you’ll fall in.
If you fall in, you’re not getting out.
16Without a connection to God,
People can still survive a while,
Like a plant in the ground,
17Anchored to rocky soil—
A little dirt and a lot of rock.
18If they get torn loose, [4]
No one’s coming to save them.
Home is history to the homeless.
And the hometown doesn’t want to get involved.
19Hometown folks will say,
“That plant’s gone.
Next?”
And others will take its place.
We know how God treats good people
20We know this about God.It’s a settled matter.
He won’t turn his back on the righteous.
And he won’t shake hands with the sinner.
21He can fill your mouth with laughter
And flap your lips with words of joy.
22He’ll shame your enemies
Out of house and home,
Leaving them tentless with nothing but evil. [5]
Footnotes
18:2
From the first “Yap” onward, Bildad sounds like he may have come for a tar and feathering.
28:10
Which is why their advice has survived for generations. That seems to be the presumption.
38:11
This may have been one of the popular sayings from ancient wisdom literature.
48:18
Some scholars say the writer probably wants us to conclude that as far as Bildad was concerned, God was doing the uprooting in both the illustration and in Job’s life.
58:22
That’s a pretty nasty speech for a man who lost everything but his life and what appears to be a poor excuse of a wife. She told her broke and broken husband, “Cuss God out and let him put you out of your misery” (Job 2:9). As a hospice nurse today, she could have helped the profit margin until someone arrested her.
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