26:1–4 If it is true that both Job (23:1–2) and Bildad (25:1–6) have taken a brief break from direct insults, that ceasefire ends here. Job’s answer (26:1) attacks Bildad for his lack of help and sound counsel to “him” (vv. 2, 3) in his weak condition (“no power”/“no strength”; v. 2):

Notice that these are not questions. The ESV’s exclamation points rightly enhance the sarcasm. The sarcasm continues in verse 3: “How you have counseled him who has no wisdom, and plentifully declared sound knowledge!” Job, who has “no wisdom” in Bildad’s eyes, has been “counseled,” given plentiful “sound knowledge.” The scent of sarcasm, added to what Job says in verse 4, can be smelled a mile away. “With whose help have you uttered words?” (Surely God is whispering in your ear these prophetic rebukes, for they are out of this world!) “And whose breath has come out from you?” (Surely it is the Spirit of God himself, for you speak not like a mere wormlike man but like a god.)

26:5–14 Is Job done with his opening sarcastic rebuke? It seems to be so, for he shifts from Bildad (the “you” of vv. 2–4) to the “dead” (v. 5), who seem not to be dead but to be living in some sort of hell. Though dead, they “tremble.” It is as if they are being drowned over and over, trying to live with the strange, gilled creatures (the “inhabitants” of the waters) found roaming the depths of the dark sea. However, it is not the dead who will be Job’s focus. Once again (see esp. 23:3–16; 24:1, 12, 22–23), it is “God,”122 who is named in 26:6 of the ESV and mentioned in every verse thereafter (26:7–14). With one of the most remarkable parallelisms in the book of Job, Job declares:

“Sheol” (the place of death) and “Abaddon” (the place of destruction; “the bottomless pit,” Rev. 9:11) are seen by God even though the sun (“his light”; Job 25:3) cannot possibly penetrate the depths of the lowest point of the earth.

Job is on an inspired theological roll. He is talking about God, and he is doing so in the right way. Everything that follows makes us say, “Amen.” As we have seen earlier, God’s actions are listed: “He stretches” (26:7a), he “hangs” (v. 7b), “he binds up” (v. 8a), “he covers” (v. 9a), he “spreads” (v. 9b), “he has inscribed” (v. 10a), he rebukes (v. 11b), “he stilled” (v. 12a), “he shattered” (v. 12b), and “his hand pierced” (v. 13b). God has created the universe, stretching out the northern skies over emptiness (“he stretches out the north”; v. 7a; cf. 9:8), and suspending the earth in the middle of immense blackness (he “hangs the earth on nothing”; 26:7b). How did he do it? Without any help from some other so-called deity or his own created angel, “he binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not split open under them” (v. 8). In other words, as he stretched out the universe, so he stretched out what is above the earth (“the heavens,” Gen. 1:1; “God called the expanse Heaven,” Gen. 1:8) so that the clouds would make a natural barrier between heaven and earth. And with the moon, that great light of the earth that reflects the light of the sun, he can create the remarkable eclipse, covering “the face of the full moon” with darkness, like a “cloud” might cover the earth (Job 26:9). It is awe inspiring to watch “his cloud” (what we know to be the earth doing its divinely ordained duty)!

Job is not done. He has four more wonderful verses to go. He is in awe of God. Wherever he has been in his relationship with God, he has returned here to the fear of the Lord. He is on his knees before his awesome Creator, as we should be. Verse 10 picks up the theme of the God of Genesis: “He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.” Put differently, “God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Gen. 1:4b–5). Job rejoices in the fact that God in his wisdom drew a horizon over the waters, setting a daily boundary between the day and the night.

In Job 26:11–13 Job recounts the power of God not in creation but over creation. Verse 11 speaks perhaps of a thunderstorm (“the pillars of heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke”). Martin Luther was turned toward God in a thunderstorm. Who of us, when rightly meditating on God’s power, is not taken aback by a crash in the heavens during a summer storm that makes us shake in our boots, or fear even for our lives? Even more, God demonstrates his power by taming the untamable: the sea (“he stilled the sea”/“the heavens were made fair”; vv. 12a, 13a) and its greatest monsters (“Rahab”/“the fleeing serpent”; vv. 12b, 13b).

We do not need to think of Jesus taming the seas (Matt. 8:23–27) or walking on the waters (Matt. 14:22–33), but we should. We do not need to think about Revelation 21:1—“the sea was no more”—but it might be a reasonable Christian way to read the text. God has absolute control over the uncontrollable!

Job concludes with perhaps the three greatest lines of the thousand or so Oscar-winning lines in the book of Job:

    Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,

    and how small a whisper do we hear of him!

    But the thunder of his power who can understand? (26:14)

His “behold” here is the best behold thus far (twenty-six times in the book; fifteen times from Job). What is detailed in verses 6–13 is awesome. For Job to say, “Look, what I have just recounted is just the fringes of what God has done and can do. Indeed it is but a faint whisper of his workings in the world,” makes us fall on our faces—flat on the ground with poor, suffering Job—asking the only question one should ask: “The thunder of his power who can understand?” (v. 14c).

27:1–23 Why does Job pause in his praise? Is he used to interruptions? It is, after all, Zophar’s turn to trounce him. We do not know. What we do know is the narrator also notices the unusual pause. We read “and Job again took up his discourse, and said” (v. 1), not, “Then Job answered and said” (Hb. wayyaʻan ʼiyyob wayyoʼmar; 6:1; 9:1; 12:1; 16:1; 19:1; 21:1; 23:1; 26:1). And while it is a continuation of Job’s God theme (“As God lives” is his first line; 27:2; also throughout this chapter he names “God” as ʼel or ʼeloah seven times [with an eighth assumed instance in v. 8a], and four times as “the Almighty” [Hb. shadday]), the focus is first on Job’s innocence (vv. 2–6; see the paragraph below) and second on his “enemy”: the “wicked” (v. 7a; cf. v. 13a), the “unrighteous” (v. 7b), or the “godless” (v. 8a), as he calls them. Every line but one (v. 12, the second and only other “behold” of chs. 26–27) speaks of the wicked. The pronouns “he,” “his,” and “him” ricochet off the walls of Job’s heart. He wants his friends to feel the weight of a latter wise man’s beatitude: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely” (Matt. 5:11).

27:2–6 In Job 27:2–6 Job again speaks of his innocence. He begins with one of the most interesting parallelisms in the book:

Is he here accusing the powerful (“Almighty”) living God (“as God lives”), whom he has just worshiped (26:6–14), of foul play? He might be. He is an honest bloke. But as he returns to his friends’ folly in 27:3–5 (explicit in v. 5) and speaks of God’s “spirit” within (in v. 3), Job’s target seems to be Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad. Notice the word “you” below:

    As long as my breath is in me,

    and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,

    my lips will not speak falsehood,

    and my tongue will not utter deceit.

    Far be it from me to say that you are right;

    till I die I will not put away my integrity from me.

    I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go;

    my heart does not reproach me for any of my days. (vv. 3–6)

As long as Job lives (“as long as breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils”; v. 3), he will maintain his purity. He will not lie (“speak falsehood”/“utter deceit”; v. 4) nor admit that his foolish friends are right (“far be it from me to say that you are right”; v. 5). Instead, he will hold to his “integrity”/“righteousness” (vv. 5b, 6a). He will be vindicated! His conscience is clear (“my heart does not reproach me”; v. 6b) for as long as he can remember (“for any of my days”; v. 6b).

27:7–23 In these verses Job turns from his awesome God and his obedient self to his enemy: his three best friends (the “you” is plural in vv. 11–12). He wants his “enemy” to “be as the wicked” (v. 7a) because they have risen up against him (v. 7b) and been his “oppressors” (v. 13b), calling him a wicked man under God’s judgment for his wickedness. By the end of the drama, he will forgive his enemies. But here he curses them. He wants them dead—punished!

Unlike his last speech on the wicked (what we labeled “The Inexplicable Blessedness of the Wicked”; Job 21) but, ironically, much like Zophar’s last speech (Job 20; cf. 20:29 with 27:13), Job recounts the fate of the wicked. He begins with the hopeless death of the “wicked,” also called the “unrighteous” and the “godless” (vv. 7–8). When the godless man dies (“when God cuts him off”/“when God takes away his life”; v. 8), there is no hope. God will not hear him in the grave and save him from his misery (“Will God hear his cry when distress comes upon him?”; v. 9). The wicked man cannot pray to God or praise him from the grave.

Job pauses in verses 11–12 to inform his friends of the purpose of his imprecatory homily: he wants to teach them (“I will teach you”/“I will not conceal”) about the power of God (“concerning the hand of God”/“the Almighty”; v. 11). They both believe that God judges the wicked. Their counsel to him, however, has been like smoke curling up in the air. An air bubble. “Altogether vain” (v. 12). Vaporous. Their verdict has been totally off. Job is not wicked, they are. They are wicked because they are saying Job is wicked. And as such, verses 13–23 serve as a reminder of what happens when God, in his time, rectifies wrongs.

What does the wicked man get (“the portion”/“the heritage”) from God (v. 13)? First, after his death (vv. 8–10, 15), his family does not fare well. If he has many children (“if his children are multiplied”), it is only so that more of them might be violently killed (“it is for the sword”) or so that there will be too many mouths to feed (“have not enough bread”; v. 14). Whether the sword or the plague gets them, death (“the pestilence buries”; v. 15a) will have the last laugh. No one will care that they are gone, not even their wives (“his widows do not weep”; v. 15b; cf. NASB). Second, the wealth of the wicked man will vanish with him. Though his bank account is massive (“though he heap up silver like dust”) and his wardrobe extensive (he piles “up clothing like clay”; v. 16), the righteous—not his children!—will inherit it:

The wicked man might think his stone house is indestructible. But it is like a cocoon (“his house like a moth’s”) or a shack (“like a booth that a watchman makes”; v. 18). “He goes to bed rich” one night, but the next day he wakes up (“he opens his eyes”) and everything—the house, the money, the clothing—has vanished (“his wealth is gone”; v. 19). And instead of breakfast in bed, he gets the ride of his life! Like floodwaters (“like a flood”; v. 20a) or a hurricane (“a whirlwind,” v. 20b; “the east wind,” v. 21a), “terrors overtake him” (v. 20a); he is lifted up, carried off, swept “out of his place” (vv. 20–21). The terrors (“it”), or perhaps God himself (as “it” can be translated “he” in vv. 22–23), mercilessly prevail upon him (“hurls at him without pity”; v. 22a). The wicked man tries in vain to escape the judgment (“he flees from its power in headlong flight”; v. 22b). The terrors of death and hell taunt him, scorning (“claps its hands at him”) and deriding him (“hisses at him”; v. 23).