It is last batter of the last inning (there are only three) of speeches meanmouthing Job. Bildad’s up. After that, Elihu enters as sort of a self-appointed ref. Then—gasp!—an unexpected appearance from the Great Ref follows.

What’s with Bildad? Cat got his tongue? His speech is by far the shortest. Let us analyze:

“Rulership and fearsome might are [God’s]; He establishes peace in heaven. Can his troops be numbered? Upon whom does his light not rise?” (Job 25:2-3)

Synopsis: Lofty praise of God—his power and place! What pious fellow would not swell to have uttered such remarks himself? Now—what comes next?

“So how can mortal man be righteous before God, Or how can one born of a woman be innocent?  Even the moon is not bright And the stars are not pure in his eyes, How much less so mortal man, who is a maggot, And a son of man, who is a worm!” (3-5)

Translation: He treats us like dirt but we’re used to it.

Sheesh! Who is this character, spouting his mangy ‘theology’ as though it were good news gospel? It is so lacking that Job all but says, ‘Where did you get this crap?’ “Who inspired you to say such things?” is what he does say. (26:4)

‘You’re going to teach me about God? I’ll teach you about God!’ Job retorts, (27:11) and then, even half-dead as he is, he bests Bildad’s praise of God, such as it is, by a factor of ten. It is like one brother I knew who, if you said to him something witty, he instantly came back with something ten times as witty. I was almost afraid of him, though he gave no reason to be other than breathtaking proficiency—instantly mastering anything he set his mind on.

Some of Job’s remarks blow one away, being far ahead of their time. If you want to back your claim that you think the Bible is inspired, you head directly to 26:7-10:

“He stretches out the northern sky over empty space, Suspending the earth upon nothing; . . . He marks out the horizon on the surface of the waters; He makes a boundary between light and darkness.”

He suspends it on nothing? It’s not exactly ‘turtles all the way down,’ is it? Similarly, it is hardly to reconcile a boundary between light and darkness as revealing anything other than knowing how the spinning planet works. We are not speaking of Columbus’s men here, ever fearful that they might sail off the edge of the earth.

“Look! These are just the fringes of his ways,” he says, to round out the chapter. (vs 14) Little did he know then that there would emerge future wise men who would explore the fringes and find them so weird as to break from the pattern of Galileo, of Newton, of Kepler, and others. These ones took for granted that to discern laws of physics was to understand and thereby give praise to God for his handiwork, but they would give way to a later generation of science who would bizzarely concoct the view that the fringes are so hard for them to understand—and their goal is to understand everything—that there must not be a God.

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