Job 8 explained: Bildad Says Job Must Deserve It

Bildad's sharp rebuke (vv. 1-3)

Bildad dismisses Job's anguished complaints as so much blustering wind. His question, does God twist justice, implies that Job is accusing God, and that if Job is suffering, Job must be the one in the wrong.

Job's children and a deal (vv. 4-7)

Bildad tells Job, whose children have all just died, that God handed them over to the results of their own sin, an assumption he draws only from how they died. He then promises that if Job is truly pure and pleads with God, God will restore him to a future far richer than his past.

Ask the ancestors (vv. 8-10)

Bildad appeals to the wisdom handed down from earlier generations, who were thought to live longer and so to have seen more. Our lives are as short as a shadow, he says, so trust what the ancients learned over Job's own complaints.

Papyrus and a spider's web (vv. 11-15)

Papyrus and reeds shoot up fast in marshes but wither quickly once the water is gone. Bildad says people who forget God are the same, and what they rely on is as flimsy as a spider's web that tears when you lean on it.

The uprooted plant (vv. 16-19)

A plant spreads lushly in the sun and wraps its roots around stones, but when it is torn out, even the ground acts as if it never knew it. Most read this as the sudden fall of the wicked, though scholars are unsure whether verse 19 is bitter irony or means that life simply carries on and others grow in its place.

Bildad's closing promise (vv. 20-22)

God never rejects the blameless or helps evildoers, Bildad says, so Job could still laugh again and see his enemies shamed. Yet the book's opening has already called Job blameless, a fact this rule does not account for.

Key verse: Job 8:3

Where Christians differ

Since God later says Job's friends did not speak rightly, Christians differ over whether Bildad's speech is true teaching wrongly applied to Job or a flawed view of God at its core.

Something to think about

When something terrible happens to someone, why do people so often look for a reason they must have deserved it?