BILDAD THE SAGE

The first speech of Bildad is given in the eighth chapter of Job. It opens with a rebuke of the sufferer's stormy words (ver. 2), and proceeds at once to affirm the rectitude of all God's judgments (ver. 3). Bildad is harsh, cruelly harsh, from the outset He tells the bereaved father, in round, set terms, that his dead children deserved their fate (ver. 4); and after such an opening it is in vain that he exhorts Job to penitence and prayer (ver. 5). Yet in the spirit of many an unconvincing, unpersuasive preacher who thinks to scold a congregation into well-doing, Bildad holds his course. He claims the authority of the ages for his view. These are early days for an appeal to "the general consent of mankind," but we find it here, or at least, to the general consent of the wise and the learned of other generations. Verse 9 must not be quoted as a description of the awful brevity of our life upon the earth:

"For we are but of yesterday and know nothing,

And our days upon the earth are as a shadow."

Bildad means that it might be permissible for Job to consider his wisdom and the wisdom of the other two friends as of small account; that if it stood alone it would be of little worth, for they are children of their day and hour, living their little life and passing out of the sun. But the word which they speak is not theirs. It represents the garnered wisdom of ages — and of ages again. It is not the wisdom only of their fathers, but of their fathers' fathers (ver. 8), and it rests upon the experiences of uncounted centuries.

Bildad's Second Speech.

Bildad's second speech (chapter xviii) seems to possess no single redeeming quality. The first does make an attempt — a poor attempt, but still an honest one — to strike a note of hope:

"Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man,

Neither will He uphold the evil-doers.

He will yet fill thy mouth with laughter,

And thy lips with shouting" —

if, it is understood, thou dost turn to Him and repent and acknowledge thy wickedness before Him. But now Bildad is incapable of even such poor preaching as this. With him, as with Eliphaz, personal resentment has bred bitterness of spirit, and Job's theological transgressions have assumed the dimensions of a huge moral wrong. Chapter xviii is a masterpiece in its way, and it is a pity that we are not free to admire its literary art and power. We feel with Job as well as for him, and like him we are angry that Bildad should say such things as these. But how well he says them! How finely he demands whether the eternal order shall be shaken to its depths to meet Job's necessities:

"Thou that tea rest thyself in thine anger,

Shall the earth be forsaken for thee?

Or the rock be removed out of its place?"

And his picture of the unrighteous man alone with his unrighteousness in the darkness of the night:

"Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out,

And the spark of his fire shall not shine.

The light shall be dark in his tent,

And his lamp above him shall be put out."

With what art he accumulates synonyms for "net" in the famous passage which has driven one expositor to call this the "Net" speech:

"For he is cast into a net by his own feet,

And he walketh upon the toils.

A gin shall take him by the heel,

And a snare shall lay hold on him.

A noose is hid for him in the ground,

And a trap for him in the way."

And the climax to which he mounts, the underlining of his emphasis, so to speak:

"Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous,

And this is the place of him that knoweth not God."

He has cast very wide the net, the toils, the gin, the snare, the noose, and the trap of his rhetoric, and Job is finely caught within it!

The Third Speech or Bildad.

There is nothing in Bildad's last word (chapter xxv). He stands amazed at the sight of Job's unsubduable irreverence. He gasps out a repetition of the Eliphaz contempt for human nature, protests that in the presence of the Ineffable there is no brightness in the moon and that the stars forget their shining; and so measuring the immeasurable distances between the holiness of God and the meanness of man "that is a worm" (ver. 6), turns away in shocked and stunned and solemn silence.

Defences of Clay.

So, then, Bildad, the sage, adds nothing to the case presented by Eliphaz, the seer. His argument is the same: God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous; Job is being punished for his wickedness; and it is impious to rebel against God. The falsity of the statement about Job and the fallacy of the argument are alike clear to us. And it would be a weariness to the flesh to analyse Bildad's speeches and point out their failures of logic and of humanity. When we seriously consider the paucity of the argument, the monotonous iteration and reiteration of the single, unsustained ' or badly sustained thesis, we are driven to the conclusion that so supreme an artist as the author of Job meant us to become intolerant, even a little disdainful, of their "memorable sayings" which Job denounced as "proverbs of ashes," and their dialectical defences which he scorned as "defences of clay."1 In the case of Bildad, indeed, there is no claim to originality. Eliphaz appeals to visions of the night, Bildad only to the wisdom, of ages dead and gone. He is of the type of the scribe with whom study of the New Testament has made us familiar. His strength is grounded in precedent, authority, and antiquity. Men have always believed that God's judgments are such as he, Bildad, declares them to be; and who is Job that he should doubt it?

The Appeal to Antiquity.

Herein this ancient document is painfully modern. The mind that seeks strength and wisdom in the past, that contemns the present, and fears the future, is found in our day as in every day of which the record remains. "Conservative" and "Radical" are not theological terms, or words borrowed from party politics, nor even descriptions of antagonistic temperaments. They are terms of biology, and they go back to characteristics which were functional in protoplasm! The deadly offence of Socrates is that he does not "believe in the gods of the city," and that he "introduces new divinities." Aristophanes hates with a perfect hatred the "modernity" of the fifth century before Christ. The Clouds is his protest against the immorality of modern thought. His spirit is stirred within him when he contrasts the degeneracy of manners in his day with the simplicity and strength of life in the good old times of the Persian wars! The American housewife who complains of her "hired girl," and the English-woman who laments the eccentricities of her "maid," are not any more modern than that unpleasant Old Testament person who gave his opinion of "servants nowadays."2 When Gladstone was a candidate for Newark — a young man of twenty-three — he was asked to explain what he meant by a sentence in his address about a "return to sounder general principles," and he replied that he had in mind "the manly and God-fearing principles of two hundred years before." The definiteness of his reply was unfortunate, for a mocking voice rang out, "when they burned witches!" Yet to minds so constituted as those of Aristophanes, Nabal, and Gladstone — and it would not be possible to name in one breath three individuals more widely separated by oceans of spiritual and temperamental differences — an appeal to the judgment of past times will always seem right and wise.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, with malice aforethought, puts the objection to this appeal in its crudest form. When Calvin and his associates made themselves a party to the burning of Servetus, the "Professor" declares that they were "in a state of religious barbarism"; and he goes on, "the dogmas of such people about the Father of mankind and His creatures are of no more account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs. If a man picks your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative opinion on matters of ethics? If a man hangs my ancient female relative for sorcery, as they did in this neighbourhood a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any other barbarian."3

Between these two methods of regarding life the student of the Book of Job will hardly be called upon to choose. The choice has long ago been made, largely for him, partly by him. He will esteem the appeal to the past as of great or little worth according as his temperamental inclination is, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes again, "toward God in us or God in our masters." But the age we live in, with its crying needs, bids the preacher believe that God is not a God of the dead but of the living, and demands of him whether he has not received the Holy Ghost since he believed. And Dr. Faunce, in his noble Yale lectures of 1908, goes so far as to assert that the whole discussion of the minister's mediating work may be summed up by saying that "he is to keep alive man's faith in an ever present God." He quotes the title of a story by Rudyard Kipling, The Man who was, and he says, "there are sincerely devout men who seem to believe in a God who was. He was with Moses, they say, opening up streams in the flinty rock; but now men must dig wells or build aqueducts if they want water. He was with Israel, granting the people bread from heaven; but now if a man wants bread, let him work for it. He was with David and anointed him to the kingship; but now he anoints nobody, and those who want high office must secure the votes. About the year 100 A.D. all inspiration ceased, and about 200 A.D. all miracles ceased, and now in a world bereft of divine voices we stumble and grope till the end. O young prophets of the truth, such an idea is the master falsehood of humanity! It is the one fundamental untruth which will put unreality into every sermon and impiety into every prayer. Our God was, and is, and is to come."4

1 Job xiii. 12.

2 1 Samuel xxv. 10.

3 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table.

4 William H. P. Faunce, The Educational Ideal in the Ministry.