This continues my series on the book of Job.
The middle section of Job includes Job’s dialogues with his friends Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu. We will see that Job’s friends make some unhelpful suggestions, including blaming Job’s troubles on some hidden sin that Job did not commit. We can be hard on Job’s friends, but at the end of the folk tale narrative in Chapter 2, we find three of them (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) sitting “down on the ground” with Job “for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” (Job. 2:13).
The “ground” on which they were seated was the trash heap outside the city, where they found Job scraping his sores with broken pottery (Job. 2:7-8). The period during which they remained silent was the prescribed period of mourning for the dead. (Chase, p. 25; 1 Sam. 31:13).
This episode, shows the importance and value of lament. The first right response to suffering is lament, grieving together. How seldom we take time to lament! We are quick to make the mistakes Job’s friends will soon make: assigning blame and offering plans for recovery based on that misplaced blame. We want to make things better, and that is good. But first we need to sit on the trash heap in silence for a while.
If sitting in mourning with Job was a good first response, why did Job’s friends so quickly go awry? Did they so easily forget the lessons of the trash heap? Did they never really let the trash heap get under their skins?