Bible Commentary - Job 35

In this chapter, Elihu responds to Job’s claim that God is neither blessing the righteous nor punishing the wicked.

This chapter is all about motivation.  Beginning in verse 3, Elihu questions Job’s motivation.  Job never says it directly, but in chapter 24 Job was pretty clear that he saw the wicked go unpunished, and questioned where was the justice of God.  Elihu believes that Job was implying it was better to sin, and become wealthy through extortion, than to be righteous.  That is, Job was asking what was the “profit” of being righteous given that he was suffering as a righteous person and the wicked were going unpunished.

Interestingly, this moment recalls us to the very beginning of Job with the argument between God and Satan that started it all.  If my readers recall, Satan accused Job of not “fearing God for nothing” (Job 1:9).  In other words, that Job was “fearing” god and living righteously with an ulterior motive, that he was serving only for the blessing and prosperity that God bestowed upon the righteous, and not because Job had any innate desire to do what was good.  Here in this chapter, Elihu is now the one questioning Job’s motivation.  Now that Job is living without God’s blessing, Elihu claims that Job is losing his motivation to remain righteous.  If there is no “advantage” to being righteous, then why should we remain righteous?

Elihu answers this question by discussing righteousness and wickedness in relation to God.  Neither righteousness nor wickedness affects God.  God is not benefited when we do good, and he is not hurt when we do evil (v. 6-7).  Instead, the good and evil that we do is to each other (v. 8).  This is pretty clearly putting things into the social justice framework, because it envisions both good and evil as the description of our conduct towards one another; evil is exploiting other men, and good is blessing them.

This all cuts to a second question of motivation: what is God’s motivation?  In chapters 33-34, Elihu framed God as the judge of all men, blessing the righteous and punishing the wicked.  However, if good and evil do not affect God, then why would God desire to enforce this heavenly justice system?  Elihu’s argument is that God is somehow disinterested in our behavior, affected neither positively or negatively.  Why then would he reward and punish for our behavior if he is not concerned by it?  These are not questions that Elihu concretely addresses.

Instead, starting in verse 9 Elihu seems to change tracks, once again addressing Job and his claim of injustice at the hands of God.  It’s similar to what he said in the previous chapter, that Job was rebelling against God by complaining of unfairness and refusing to submit to God’s punishment.  Elihu says that Job “must wait for him”, waiting for God’s vindication if he is indeed innocent like he claims.  Since Job is not waiting for God’s true judgment and restoration, Job is guilty of “multiplying words without knowledge”.

What can we learn from this chapter?  Like I mentioned earlier, this chapter is centered around the question of motivation, both human motivation and God’s motivation.  The central question is why we should live righteously if God does not reward us for doing so.

The reward-punish paradigm is a moral framework based on self-interest.  If we do good, we are rewarded, if we do evil, we are punished, so “if you know what’s good for you”, then you will do good because any deeply self-interested actor will seek rewards over punishment when given the choice.  Of course, it is exactly this self-interested motivation that Satan was attacking in chapter 1, claiming that Job’s righteousness was only in pursuit of God’s blessing and that if God breaks the connection between the two (by withholding his blessing), then Job would cease to live righteously.

Job has refused to “curse God and die” (Job 2:9), so I think it’s fair to say that Job has not yet actually sinned, but he has definitely questioned whether there is any point to being righteous if the wicked prosper, and Elihu picks up on that in his response.

When responding to Job, the three friends insist that God does, in fact, bless the righteous and curse the wicked, the reward-punish paradigm is in effect, and Job has simply fallen to the wrong side of the line.  Elihu, on the other hand, argues that Job is talking like a wicked person for even bringing it up.

From a philosophical point of view, this is a really deep topic and I don’t think I’ll be able to really go into all the details.  Self-interest is a motivation that pretty much everyone understands.  What makes it challenging is that most people don’t accept self-interested righteousness as being “the real thing”, either here in the bible or in normal life.  If I own a restaurant and I permit poor people to come and buy food at standard prices, it might not have been evil but it certainly wouldn’t be considered a righteous or noble thing.  On the other hand, nearly everyone would agree that giving poor people food at a discounted rate or for free is an honorable thing.  It’s the same action, but only the second one is charity; the first one is just running a business.  Running a business is not a bad thing or evil, but it’s hardly what most people would call “righteous”.  In Job, both God and Satan agree that self-interested righteousness is not true righteousness at all, so Job is in agreement with conventional morality as it’s commonly employed in society.

In Job, self-interested righteousness breaks down; what motivation can fill its place?  More generally, if we imagined a world with neither heaven nor hell (or perhaps, an afterlife that was completely identical to everyone with no regard for their conduct on earth), with no reward, no punishment and no judgment at all, then why should people even bother following righteousness if we can do all kinds of evil things and God will never call us to account? Even if we don’t care for doing evil, why bother making sacrifices or charity or helping others, if the good we do is not returned to us in some way by God?

This is where Elihu’s response comes in.  Elihu basically says that nothing we do, whether good or evil, is done to God.  Rather, the good and evil that we do is done to other people (v. 6-8), and that is what he presents as our motivation.  Elihu is basically saying that we should do good and avoid evil not because of our own self-interest, but for advancing the interests of others.  We could maybe call this other-interest, to place it in opposition to self-interest.  Both self-interest and other-interest are what we may call axiomatic principles.  You cannot “prove” that one or the other is the right way to live, any more than you could prove that one plus one equals two.  It is a foundational principle that can be used to prove other things, but cannot be proven itself.

For instance, if we operate out of self-interest, then reward-punish moral frameworks give us good reason to do good and receive the promised reward.  However, the existence of a reward-punish moral framework does not prove that we should seek rewards and avoid punishment.  That is a question of personal values, whether I should seek my own well-being, that cannot be answered without making a fundamental assumption that my own well-being is something worth advancing.  If I decide that I don’t care about my own well-being, then there is no threat or promise anyone could possibly bring that could possibly change my behavior so long as those threats or promises don’t affect anything that I do care about.

If I am living based on other-interest, and not self-interest, then you could threaten my family or friends but not me.  You could promise to reward my family or friends, and I would listen, but I would be indifferent to a similar promise made to me.  This is exactly the impulse that Elihu is appealing to, telling Job that he ought to pursue righteousness because doing good to other people is a moral value in itself that he should desire even if it does not earn him any rewards at all.  It is other-interest, not self-interest, that should guide Job’s behavior.

In the next chapter, Elihu asserts that God indeed blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.