Job 32

The debate ends in a collapse. The three friends ceased to answer Job - and the narrator names the reason without flattering anyone: because he was righteous in his own eyes. They had no more arguments; he had no more doubt about his own innocence; the whole conversation had seized up. This is the natural end of a certain kind of argument, where each side has dug in so far that no one is really listening anymore.

The same impasse drives the ancient dialogue poems of the wider world - the Babylonian Theodicy, for one, sets a sufferer and a friend trading stanzas about divine justice until the exchange exhausts itself. Into that kind of dead air Elihu steps.

Four times in four verses the narrator strikes the same note: Elihu's wrath was kindled... was kindled... was kindled... was kindled. The repetition is deliberate; we are meant to feel the young man's heat building. But the object of his anger is carefully specified, and it is telling. His anger is about God's honor - that Job justified himself rather than God, and that the friends condemned Job while finding no answer. In Elihu's eyes, both sides have managed to put themselves in the right and leave God in the wrong: Job by clinging to his innocence, the friends by defending a theology the facts would not support.

Whatever we make of Elihu's self-assurance, the thing that angers him is not small.

Elihu begins with a courtesy that is also a complaint. I am young, and ye are very old - so he had held his peace, afraid to push his opinion forward, because he had been taught what everyone in that world was taught: Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom. The elders go first; the young wait. But then Elihu says the thing that turns the rule on its head. Age is not the same as wisdom.

Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment. There is a deeper source of understanding than the calendar - there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding. The claim is that wisdom comes from God's breath, and God is free to breathe it into whomever He pleases, regardless of how many years they have lived.

Elihu makes his case for the right to speak: he has earned it by listening. I waited for your words; I gave ear to your reasons - he heard the friends out completely, and the verdict of his attention is blunt: there was none of you that convinced Job, or that answered his words. Their arguments did not land. And he names the temptation the friends were under (v. 13) - the urge to congratulate themselves (We have found out wisdom) by concluding that only God, not any human argument, could ever humble a man like Job.

Elihu refuses that exit. He also refuses to recycle their failed material: neither will I answer him with your speeches. Whatever he is about to say, he insists it will be his own - fresh words for a conversation that the old words could not move.

Now the heat finds its image. Elihu says he is full of matter - packed with things to say - and that the spirit within me constraineth me, presses and pushes him to speak. Then comes one of the most physical descriptions of inner pressure in the Bible: my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. New wine still fermenting gives off gas; sealed in a skin with no outlet, it stretches the leather to the breaking point - the same image Jesus would use of new wine and old wineskins (Matt. 9:17).

That, Elihu says, is what holding his tongue has felt like: a young man bursting at the seams with words he believes God has put in him to say. Whether or not every word that follows lives up to the buildup, the picture of a conviction that cannot stay silent is one Scripture takes seriously.

Before he says a word of his argument, Elihu makes a vow about how he will speak: Let me not... accept any man's person, neither let me give flattering titles unto man. To accept a person is to play favorites - to weigh words differently depending on who is speaking them or who might be offended. Flattering titles are the honeyed words we hand the powerful to stay in their good graces. Elihu swears off both.

He will not soften the truth to spare Job's feelings or to keep the respect of the older men, and he gives a striking reason: if he started dealing in flattery, my maker would soon take me away - as though false speech before God were a kind of slow self-destruction. Whatever else we make of Elihu, this is a worthy resolve: to speak the truth as he sees it, plainly, to small and great alike.