Now it’s Bildad’s turn to get it wrong. He continues pressing the false dichotomy and worse.
Bildad begins with less courtesy than Eliphaz, suggesting Job is a windbag. His rhetorical question misses the point. This is not a matter of justice in God’s sight, but God’s ineffable ways with mankind. There is much we cannot ever hope to know on this side of eternity. For Job to insist his conscience is clear is anathema to these silly legalists. So Bildad insists that if Job confesses and repents of his secret sins, God will immediately make things nice again.
Bildad has the nerve to suggest Job’s children must have been truly awful sinners or they would not have died so young. He blathers on about how God will make Job’s finish considerably greater than his past. He bases his appeal on human tradition. While it’s true the life span of individuals is too short to accumulate a depth of wisdom, that which accrues over generations is not necessarily trustworthy if it departs from revelation. It never occurs to him that human tradition might miss the point.
So he launches into a nice parable about papyrus reeds, symbolizing people. They grow only where it’s swampy; so it is with humans and righteousness. If people forget God, it would be like the water drying up. He also compares people who don’t trust God with spiders, whose webs are quite fragile compared to the majority of living creatures big enough to ignore such webs and rip them down without awareness. He continues to mix the symbols around.
He finally surmises that Job must be lying about his clear conscience. Whatever happened to Job can only be explained as God’s rejection of sin. Finally, he assures Job all would be well if he would just repent.
