Week 26 Job 32
I don’t know who wrote the book of Job but whoever it was didn’t get much opportunity for creative input. He was mostly a stenographer copying and recording the speeches of Job and Eliphaz Bildad Zophar (EBZ) & Elihu.
I wondered how much the editor actually said for himself so I went back and counted the verses. I found 47 descriptive verses plus another 23-verses of intros (Job said this. Eliphaz said that). There’s about 1069-verses in Job so that means that the editor only got to write his own comments in 6.5% of the book.
Anyway the point is that here in chapter 32 the writer is writing his own 6-verse introductory comments about Elihu and he summarized chapters 3-31 like this: EBZ stopped answering Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes. This was an interesting phrase to me: Job was righteous in his own eyes (another version says that Job kept insisting on his innocence).
So if someone asked me for a one-sentence synopsis of what Job thought about his situation it would be: “I am innocent”. And that was the whole reason for the conflict between Job & EBZ (and eventually Elihu).
Job: “I’m innocent”
EBZ&E: “You’re not innocent”
There’s not much room for negotiation there. There’s mostly room for debate.
Note: quote from Job 32:1 (NIV & NLT). The verse-number counts are approximate so don’t take them to the bank.