Job 25

Job 22–27 forms the third cycle of debate between Job and his friends. In chapter 25, Bildad responds to Job's words in Job 24, where Job laments that God seems not to judge the wicked promptly. Job replies again in the following chapter, Job 26.

Outline

• Verse 1: Bildad the Shuhite answers.
• Verses 2–3: God, who possesses dominion and majesty, makes peace in His high places. His armies are without number, and there is no one upon whom His light does not arise.
• Verses 4–6: Therefore no man can be justified before God, and no one born of a woman can be clean. Even the moon and the stars are not pure in His sight; how much less a human being, who is like a worm and a maggot.

Key Verses

• Job 25:4 "How then can man be justified with God?" This question concisely expresses an issue that runs through the entire Book of Job: whether a human being can be righteous before God.
• Job 25:6 "How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?" This verse uses an extreme image to express the distance between God and humanity.

People and Places

• Bildad: One of Job's three friends who came to visit him. He spoke previously in chapters 8 and 18.
• Shuah: The name of Bildad's place of origin or tribe. Some connect it with the descendants of Shuah, the son born to Abraham and Keturah (Genesis 25:2).
• Job: In this chapter he appears only as the one listening to Bildad.

Points for Reflection

• In the third cycle, Bildad's speech is unusually short, and Zophar gives no third speech at all. Some interpreters read this as a deliberate literary arrangement showing that the friends' arguments have run out. Other scholars, by contrast, regard the text as having become disarranged and reassign part of chapter 26 to Bildad.
• The question in verse 4 is nearly identical to what Eliphaz had already said (Job 4:17; 15:14–16), and Job himself had said something similar (Job 9:2). Although the statement itself sounds like a general truth, Bildad makes it on the premise that Job's suffering is the result of sin. At the end of the book, God judges that the friends had not spoken rightly (Job 42:7–10). For this reason, many interpreters, when citing this verse, also consider who said it and in what context.
• The idea that human beings cannot be righteous on their own resonates with Romans 3:10–12 in the New Testament. Paul goes further, speaking of "him that justifieth the ungodly" (Romans 4:5). The Protestant tradition reads this in connection with the doctrine of justification.
• The comparison of a human being to a "worm" also appears in Psalm 22:6: "But I am a worm, and no man."