Job's Three Friends and Their Failure

Today's Reading

Read Job 1:13-22 — the messengers arriving in succession, each before the last has finished. Sabeans, fire from heaven, Chaldeans, and finally a wind from across the wilderness that collapses the house on his ten children. Job tears his robe, shaves his head, falls on the ground, and worships: "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

Read Job 2:11-13 — the arrival of his three friends. "When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great."

Read Job 3 — Job's first words after the silence. He curses the day he was born.

Read Job 4:7-8 — Eliphaz's opening move: "Remember: who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same."

Read Job 5:17-18 — Eliphaz pivots to encouragement: "Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves; therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he shatters, but his hands heal."

Then jump ahead to Job 42:7 — God's verdict on the friends after thirty-eight chapters of speeches: "My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has."

Reflection

The book of Job is a book about suffering. It is also, almost as much, a book about what people say to sufferers. The two cannot be separated.

Job loses everything. Not most things — everything. His livestock, his servants, his ten children, and finally his health. Sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. He sits on an ash heap scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery while his wife tells him to curse God and die.

And then his three friends arrive. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite. They have heard the news. They have come from a distance, each from his own place, and they have agreed to meet so that they can go to comfort him. Note that. The friends come for the right reason. They are not strangers. They are not lurkers. They are the three closest men in his life, and they have dropped everything to be with him.

When they see him, they do not recognize him. The disfigurement is that complete. They weep. They tear their robes. They sprinkle dust on their own heads. And then — this is the line — they sit with him on the ground, in the dirt, for seven days and seven nights, and not one of them says a word.

This is the only thing the three friends do right in the entire book. And it is staggering that they do it. Seven days is a week. They put their lives on hold and sit, in silence, in the dust, with a man whose pain they cannot fix. The Talmud later derives from this passage the practice of shiva — the seven days of silent presence the bereaved are owed by their community. The instinct is right: when the suffering is past words, presence is the gift, and explanation is an interruption.

Then Job opens his mouth. Chapter 3 is one of the bleakest passages in Scripture. He does not curse God — but he curses the day of his own birth. "Let the day perish on which I was born." It goes on for twenty-six verses. It is the cry of a man whose grief has finally found language and is using it as a weapon against his own existence.

And here is where the friends fail. They cannot bear it. The silence has been holy; the speech is unbearable. So Eliphaz, the eldest, opens his mouth, and from chapter 4 onward they will not stop talking until God himself shuts them up.

Eliphaz's first speech is, on its surface, gentle. He praises Job for having strengthened weak hands in the past. He suggests, carefully, that perhaps Job has missed something. "Remember: who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?" The implication is unmistakable. Innocent people do not suffer like this. Therefore Job is not innocent. There is sin somewhere; he must look for it.

This is the formula the three friends will repeat, in escalating registers, for thirty-five chapters. The world is morally legible. Suffering is the consequence of sin. If you are suffering, you have sinned. If you will repent, the suffering will be lifted. They are not making this up. This is the broad shape of Old Testament wisdom — Proverbs is full of it. And it is what Job's friends, like every well-meaning Christian since, reach for first when the suffering in front of them is unbearable.

The problem is that it is not true of Job. The reader knows what the friends do not: that Job is, by God's own assessment, "blameless and upright." The framing of the entire book is that the friends are wrong about why Job is suffering and Job is right that there is no proportion between his sin and his pain. When God finally speaks at the end of the book, his verdict is unsparing. "My anger burns against you and against your two friends," he says to Eliphaz, "for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has."

This is one of the most underread sentences in the Bible. The man who has cursed his birth, accused God of cruelty, demanded an audience, and refused to repent of sins he never committed — he has spoken rightly. The men who quoted orthodox theology at him for thirty-five chapters have not.

What did the friends do wrong? They were not wrong to come. They were not wrong to weep. They were not wrong to sit in silence. They were wrong the moment they decided that what Job needed from them was an explanation. As soon as the sufferer's pain became, for them, a theological problem to be solved rather than a person to be loved, they had crossed the line. C.S. Lewis, after his wife died, named the same thing from the inside: "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

He is exactly describing Eliphaz. Eliphaz is a consoler with a formula. He is reaching for Job 5:17 — "blessed is the one whom God reproves" — as a way to make the suffering meaningful so that he, Eliphaz, will not have to sit with it as suffering. Tim Keller put it almost a generation later: "Sufferers often become unhappy with those who are trying to comfort them. That is because, in many cases, the comfort is essentially the application of a moral formula." It does not matter that the formula is true in some cases. Applied to this case, in this hour, to this person, it is what the book of Job calls miserable comfort.

Lewis adds another observation that anyone who has ever lost someone will recognize: "An odd by-product of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet... I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don't." The pressure to say something is the pressure that destroys Job's friends. They cannot bear the embarrassment of having no answer. So they generate one.

If you are around someone in the middle of suffering this week, the book of Job is asking you to do a hard thing. You may not be able to fix it. You may not be able to explain it. You may not even be able to find words at all. The friends, before they spoke, were doing the most pastoral thing in the entire book of Job. The moment they opened their mouths, they began the long work of making it worse.

Going Deeper

If you can, read all of Job 4-5 (Eliphaz's first speech) at one sitting. Notice how reasonable it sounds. Notice how much of it is technically true. Notice that it is also, in this situation, a knife. Then ask yourself: when has well-meant Christian counsel functioned in your life like Eliphaz? When have you been Eliphaz to someone else?