Day 5 · Job 5–9
A Brook in the Heat
Eliphaz and Bildad explain Job’s suffering, Job finds his friends as dry as a summer stream, and he wishes for someone to stand between him and God.
Day 5 of 365Job
Today’s reading · about 11 minutes
Job 5–9
Eliphaz finishes, Job answers, Bildad speaks, Job again
No psalm today. The daily psalms come back on Day 6, with Psalm 4. Psalm 3, whose heading ties it to David’s flight from Absalom, waits for that story, on Day 130.
Themes and asks
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The voice of experience
Eliphaz closes his first speech with confidence: “We have studied life and found all this to be true” (5:27, NLT). Much of it sounds like Proverbs, such as his counsel not to despise the Almighty’s discipline (5:17; compare Proverbs 3:11). Bildad goes further and implies that Job’s children died for their own sins (8:4). Job asks for one thing: “Show me what I have done wrong” (6:24, NLT).
- When has something true been the wrong thing to say to you?
- What would you need to know before telling someone why they are suffering?
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A brook in the heat
Job says his friends have proved as unreliable as a seasonal brook: full in spring with melting snow, gone when the hot weather comes, so that caravans from Tema and Sheba arrive counting on it and find nothing (6:15–20). Just before, he says what he had hoped for: “One should be kind to a fainting friend” (6:14, NLT).
- Who has been there for you when everything else dried up?
- Who might be counting on you right now?
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What are people?
Job’s words in 7:17–18 echo Psalm 8 and turn it around. The psalmist marvels that God pays attention to mere mortals and crowns them with glory. Job finds the same attention unbearable: God examines him every morning and will not leave him alone long enough to swallow (7:18–19). The psalm ends in praise; Job’s complaint ends in the dust (7:21). Commentators almost all read the echo as deliberate, Job twisting a psalm his hearers knew; that reading assumes the poem was written after Psalm 8, as most scholars date it.
- When has God’s nearness felt more like a weight than a gift?
- What do you do with prayers that come out bitter?
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Someone to stand between
Job grants that his friends are right in principle, but asks how anyone could be declared innocent before God, or win a case against him (9:2–3). “If only there were a mediator between us, someone who could bring us together” (9:33, NLT). Christian readers have long heard in this a longing answered in Christ, the one mediator (1 Timothy 2:5); many scholars read it as Job’s wish for an umpire in a lawsuit he cannot win.
- Where do you feel you can’t get a fair hearing?
- Who has stood beside you when something was too big to face alone?
Behind the words
Eliphaz, quoted by Paul
The New Testament quotes the book of Job outright only once, perhaps twice, and the clearest case comes from Eliphaz. “He traps the wise in their own cleverness” (5:13, NLT) is the line Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 3:19, introducing it as Scripture, to show that this world’s wisdom is foolishness to God. The possible second is Job 41:11, behind Romans 11:35.
That has puzzled readers, because at the end of the book God tells Eliphaz that he and his two friends have not spoken accurately about him, as Job has (42:7). Traditional readers and many commentators answer that the friends say much that is true in general and wrong about Job: the fault is in how they apply it. Paul, for his part, uses the line as a general truth about God and human cleverness.
Eliphaz came from Teman (2:11), in Edom, and Edom had a name for wisdom: Jeremiah asks whether there is no wisdom left in Teman (Jeremiah 49:7). Genesis gives the name Eliphaz to Esau’s eldest son and Teman to Eliphaz’s son (Genesis 36:10–11, 15). The closing note of the Greek Job draws the line straight, calling Eliphaz one of Esau’s descendants and king of the Temanites. Bildad is “the Shuhite” (8:1); where Shuah was is not known.
The caravans in Job’s picture were real. Tema is the oasis of Tayma in northwest Arabia, a stop on the incense routes that ran from Sheba, in southern Arabia, north to the Mediterranean. A Saudi–German team began excavating it in 2004. In the 500s BC the Babylonian king Nabonidus lived there for about ten years.
Psalm 8 and Job 7, side by side
Translated word for word from the Hebrew. Both use the same verb, pāqad, “attend to” (Psalm 8:4; Job 7:18). English verse numbers; the Hebrew numbers Psalm 8 one verse higher.
You are here
Day 5 of 365, the second of nine days in Job. The friends are in their first round of speeches, each in turn with Job answering; it ends tomorrow, with Zophar and Job’s reply.
My notes · Day 5
Sources
- Job 5–9, Holy Bible, New Living Translation · BibleGateway
- Will Kynes, “‘My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping’: The Dialogical Intertextuality of Allusions to the Psalms in Job” (thesis summary). Tyndale Bulletin 63, no. 2 (2012) · Tyndale Bulletin (PDF)
- Will Kynes, My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping: Job’s Dialogue with the Psalms. BZAW 437. De Gruyter, 2012.
- Lancelot C. L. Brenton, translator, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, 1844. Job 42:17 · Brenton’s translation
- German Archaeological Institute, Taymāʾ: Multidisciplinary Series on the Results of the Saudi-German Archaeological Project. Archaeopress, 2018– · DAI Publications
- Andrew Lawler, “Where the Wells Never Go Dry.” Archaeology, November/December 2015 · andrewlawler.com
Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know
From Dust to Glory reads the whole Bible in the order its story happened, one day at a time, at your own pace. Each day gives questions to sit with, the history behind the words, and where it sits in the story. The plan lists all 365 days.