Job and Law I

One first has to understand the Book of Job in terms of its strategy as legal argument before coming to the realization that what the author of the book really wants to do is to transcend legal categories as the book develops. That is, even though Job frames his Complaint in legal terms, envisioning a legal process in which God will appear and have to answer to Job's allegations, he also wants to transcend that same legal process. Ultimately what Job wants is not so much a verdict in his favor as a restored intimacy with God.

This is most evident in the tremendous poem of loss and grief in Job 14. It comes at the beginning of the second cycle of speeches of Job and the three friends, and is part of one of Job's longest speeches in the book. After lamenting the sad and brief days of human existence (14: 6), noticing the hope in nature for rebirth (14: 7-9), but recognizing also that humans have no such restorative or recuperative powers as nature (14: 10-12), he lets his heart take wing and utter a most profound an moving longing: "Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath is past (14: 13). If God would do this then "You [God] would call and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands (14: 14-15)." Instead of Job calling, through the Complaint, and God answering, now God would initiate and Job would joyfully answer. Mutuality, rather than studied distance and silence, would reign. But, as nature also give lessons of erosion and destruction (14: 18-19) as well as rebirth, Job's hope likewise erodes.

Job so much wants to recapture the langauge of longing and restored intimacy with God, but he ultimately feels that God's silence is tantamount to God's absence. Thus, the lawsuit must continue.