Bible Commentary - Job 40

In this chapter, God challenges Job to answer him.

This chapter begins with God asking for Job’s response.  After laying out the glory of creation, God’s role in making all of these things, and Job’s ignorance regarding creation, God now asks Job to “answer” his questions (v. 2).  Job’s response in verses 3-4 is that there is nothing he can say to answer God.  While God has seemingly already made his point, and Job acknowledges his rhetorical defeat, God decides to continue his rebuke.

In verse 6, we see that God continues to speak out of the storm, like the “whirlwind” of Job 38:1.  God also repeats the same challenge in verse 7 as what he said in Job 38:3.

Since God has established his wisdom and understanding of all things, and since Job has admitted defeat, God now speaks to the heart of Job’s criticism in verses 8-14.  Verse 8 captures the essence of Job’s criticism.  In arguing that he was innocent and God was punishing him unjustly, Job was “condemning” God as a natural consequence of his argument.  If God is punishing Job unfairly, it means that God is doing something wrong and Job was innocent.

This is very similar to what Job’s friends were arguing.  They believed that it was a zero-sum game between God and Job.  If Job was innocent, then God was treating him unfairly, while if Job was a sinner, then God was right to punish him.  Since they believed that God was always righteous, Job’s friends concluded that Job must have sinned.  I don’t think God is necessarily saying that their assumptions were right or that their arguments were correct, but rather that Job’s argument in fact laid the blame on God for what happened to him.

It is important to note that nowhere in this speech does God actually accuse Job of sinning or doing anything wrong.  The only criticism that God has for Job is how Job condemned God as a result of his self-proclaimed innocence.

God is not affirming their moral philosophy or assumptions.  If their philosophy were true, then the natural conclusion is that Job is a sinner and God likely would have said so.  Instead, God is challenging Job for “throwing him under the bus”, so to speak.  The firm belief in his own innocence, combined with a moral framework that places God as the punisher of iniquity, leads Job to condemn God.  God rebukes Job’s impious conclusion, and since God does not condemn Job in turn, he is implicitly questioning Job’s moral framework and assumptions.  It was the this oppositional moral framework, placing God and Job on opposite sides of the tables, that led Job to condemn God and Job’s friends to condemn Job.  Since God declares his own innocence, and refuses to condemn Job, the only natural conclusion is that the moral framework itself is flawed.

God is indeed the righteous judge, and God does punish the wicked, but it’s not in the simplified way presented by Job and his friends.  The true nature of God, and the nature of Job’s suffering, is left to us as a bit of a mystery even after God’s response.  God never fully clarifies these issues or the nature of Job’s theological error.  What we do see clearly is a statement of God’s supreme wisdom and authority in creation and by extension in human lives and morality.  We also see that the simplified moral philosophy of Job and his friends is deeply flawed.  A deeper understanding of the nature of God is largely outside the scope of this book, and it is left to us to pursue that understanding.  While that may seem daunting, we still have the rest of the bible to read to gain a better understanding of God’s nature.

Beginning in verse 15, God resumes his former discourse and challenges Job to demonstrate his mastery over “Behemoth”.  In case you are wondering, “Behemoth” is actually a literal transliteration of the Hebrew word, which was later adopted into English.  The exact identification of “Behemoth” has been the subject of some debate and controversy, but the general consensus now is that Behemoth is a hippopotamus.  The description certainly fits (with a bit of exaggeration) for a vegetarian, strong mammal that tends to live in watery environments like rivers or ponds.  They are also fearsome, aggressive animals that are endemic to the Middle East.  We can’t know for sure but it is a likely candidate.

God’s description of “Behemoth” is much longer than his description of specific animals from the previous chapter, but the overall intent is similar.  God is now laying out the “fearsome monsters” that he has created as further examples of his glory.  If creation is a reflection of God’s nature, in the way that God speaks through the thunderstorm, then the Behemoth is a reflection of God’s untameable power and wild ferocity.  In Elihu’s words, “God is great, and we have not known him” (Job 36:26).  The Behemoth shows us God’s power, and it is an untameable, uncontrollable power.  Otherwise, the rest of the description of Behemoth is largely poetic.

In the next chapter, describes a second “monster” from natural creation.