God's answer to Job and his restoration

After thirty-five chapters of argument the answer arrives out of a storm, and it does not answer the question. Job has demanded a hearing and a charge sheet. What he gets is an interrogation.

The questions run for four chapters and number around seventy. Where were you when the earth's foundation was laid? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst out from the womb? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loosen Orion's belt? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom?

Almost every one concerns something outside human management, and a striking proportion concerns creatures and places of no use to anyone at all: rain falling on empty desert where nobody lives, the wild donkey that laughs at the driver's shout, the ostrich that treats her young harshly and has been denied good sense. What is being described is a world that is not organised around human beings and is not diminished by that.

Two creatures get extended treatment at the end, Behemoth and Leviathan, described at greater length than anything else in the speech. Identifying them is disputed, with the hippopotamus and the crocodile the commonest proposals, and the descriptions run well past what either animal does.

Job's reply contains the line the book turns on: my ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Report has been replaced by encounter. The sentence immediately after it is one of the hardest in the Hebrew scriptures to translate. The familiar rendering has him despising himself and repenting in dust and ashes, but the verb has no stated object, and it can equally mean that he withdraws his case, while the last phrase can mean being comforted concerning dust and ashes rather than repenting in them. English versions differ substantially, and the choice decides whether he ends the book condemning himself or dropping a complaint.

What comes next is unexpected and usually skipped. Eliphaz is told that God is angry with the three friends, because they have not spoken the truth about him as Job has. The friends defended God's justice with a theory and were wrong. Job accused God of injustice to his face and was right, at least in the sense that his refusal to lie about his own situation is what gets endorsed. They are told to bring seven bulls and seven rams, and to have Job pray for them.

The restoration is reported briefly: twice as much livestock as before, and ten more children. The daughters are named, which is unusual, and stranger still, they are given an inheritance alongside their brothers, which was not the ordinary practice anywhere in that world.

One thing is withheld to the end. Job is never told about the conversation in the opening scene. He never learns why any of it happened, and the return of his herds is not offered as an explanation. Ezekiel later names Noah, Daniel and Job together as men whose righteousness had become proverbial, which shows how widely the story was known long before it reached its final form.