Job 8
Bildad, the second friend, speaks, asserting that God does not reject the blameless and suggesting that Job's children may have sinned, thus bringing their own destruction upon themselves—a suggestion that compounds Job's grief by implying that they deserved their fate. Bildad appeals to ancient wisdom and experience, suggesting that the same principle governs all time and people: the wicked are destroyed while the righteous flourish, a doctrine that appears universal and immutable. He counsels Job to seek God earnestly and to purify his life, promising that if Job does so, God will restore him and his household, making his future greater than his past. Bildad's theology is deterministic and mechanical, assuming that righteousness and prosperity are so tightly linked that the appearance of prosperity or suffering in any life automatically reveals the moral status of that person. The suggestion that Job's children deserved their fate represents a new dimension of cruelty from the friends, extending their framework of moral cause and effect even to those who cannot respond or defend themselves. This chapter illustrates how the friends' theological system, when applied to concrete human suffering, becomes increasingly difficult to sustain and increasingly destructive to those who suffer. Bildad represents the perspective that appeals to tradition and universal experience, suggesting that Job is simply ignorant of what all wise people know, when in fact his suffering has exposed the inadequacy of what they claim all wise people know.