Job 34
The three friends have fallen silent - they ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes (Job 32:1) - and into that silence steps the youngest voice in the book. Elihu has been listening all along, holding his peace out of deference to his elders, and now he can hold it no longer. In this, his second speech, he turns from Job to the bystanders and calls them together as a court: Hear my words, O ye wise men; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge… Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is good. He wants the matter weighed openly, as the ear tries words the way the mouth tastes meat. Before we listen, though, one thing must be said that the rest of the chapter depends on. Elihu is not simply another of the failed comforters. When the book reaches its end and the LORD renders judgment on the speakers, He names Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar - and rebukes them - but He does not name Elihu (Job 42:7). So the young man's words about the justice of God deserve a fairer hearing than the friends' arguments earned.3
And what Elihu defends, above everything, is the perfect righteousness of God. He has heard Job say, in the depths of his agony, that it profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God - that goodness brings no reward, that the books do not balance. To Elihu this is intolerable, and he answers it with one of the great confessions of God's justice in all of Scripture: far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity. For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to his ways. Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment. These are not the missteps the LORD will rebuke; they are true and weighty words. God does not do wrong. He is no respecter of persons - He accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more than the poor; for they all are the work of his hands. His sight reaches everywhere: his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings; there is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves. Hold these as true. The flawless righteousness of God is not a thing the book overturns; it is bedrock the whole book stands on.
But a true confession of God's justice is not the same thing as a true verdict on a suffering man, and here Elihu begins to overreach. From the rightness of God he presses to the wrongness of Job, and the pressing grows sharp: Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words were without wisdom… he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth his hands among us, and multiplieth his words against God. He even wishes Job tried unto the end for answering as wicked men do. This is the place to be careful. Elihu is right that God will not pervert judgment; he is not therefore right that Job's anguish is the wage of rebellion. The book will not settle that question by any human speech - not the friends', and not Elihu's. The answer, when it finally comes, comes from God Himself, who will speak to Job out of the whirlwind in the chapters just ahead, address the man directly, and never once endorse Elihu's charge against him. So the study before you does two things at once: it lets Elihu's true words about the righteousness of God stand as true, and it refuses to let his verdict on Job stand as the book's. The last word in the matter is not the wisest human argument. It is the voice of God.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Job 34:1-9Hear My Words, Ye Wise
1Furthermore Elihu answered and said, 2Hear my words, O ye wise men; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge. 3For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat. 4Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is good. 5For Job hath said, I am righteous: and God hath taken away my judgment. 6Should I lie against my right? my wound is incurable without transgression. 7What man is like Job, who drinketh up scorning like water? 8Which goeth in company with the workers of iniquity, and walketh with wicked men. 9For he hath said, It profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God.
Elihu opens not by speaking to Job but by turning to the listeners and convening them as a court: Hear my words, O ye wise men; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge.3 He appeals to their discernment with a fine image: the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat. Just as the tongue can tell good food from spoiled, the trained ear can tell true speech from false - and Elihu invites the wise to taste Job's words and judge them. There is something genuinely worthy in the appeal. He does not ask to be believed on his own authority; he asks that the matter be weighed, tested, sifted by people capable of telling the difference. The instinct is sound - truth should be able to bear examination, and a claim about God ought to be tried, not merely asserted. The reader can affirm the method even while watching where the argument will lead. Elihu wants the case heard in the open, and that is no fault in him.
He states the court's task plainly: Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is good. The word for judgment here is the great legal word of the Hebrew Bible - the same root that will anchor his whole defense - and to choose judgment is to set out deliberately to discern what is just and right. Elihu casts himself and the wise as a jury seeking the true verdict together. So far the posture is admirable; this is how a hard question ought to be approached. But notice the turn that comes immediately, for it reveals the shape of the whole speech. The very first thing Elihu submits to this court is not God's case but Job's words: For Job hath said, I am righteous: and God hath taken away my judgment. The trial is opened, and the man in the dock is the sufferer. Elihu means to defend the justice of God, and that is a good aim; but he pursues it by prosecuting Job - and that is where the listener must begin to watch carefully, holding the true thing he will say about God apart from the harsh thing he will say about the man.
Elihu summarizes the charge against Job in a single quoted line, and it is worth weighing whether the quotation is fair. For he hath said, It profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God.1 Job, in his anguish, has indeed cried out that the righteous and the wicked seem to meet the same end, that his integrity has won him only ashes - the raw, honest protest of a man whose world has collapsed. Elihu hears in this the claim that godliness pays no dividend, that there is no gain in delighting oneself with God, and against that claim he is about to rise with everything he has. And here we must be even-handed. The thing Job is groping toward in his pain - that he has not earned this, that his suffering is not the wage of sin - is something the reader knows to be true. But the flattened version Elihu hears, that serving God is simply worthless, is one no believer should let stand; the wider ancient world wrestled with the same hard question of whether faithfulness goes unrewarded.4 Elihu is not wrong to defend the worth of delighting in God. The trouble is only that he aims his defense at a grieving man as if Job were its enemy, when Job is in fact its most desperate witness - a man who loved God for nothing, and is being crushed, and still will not curse Him.
Job 34:10-30God Will Not Pervert Judgment
10Therefore hearken unto me, ye men of understanding: far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity. 11For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to his ways. 12Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment. 13Who hath given him a charge over the earth? or who hath disposed the whole world? 14If he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; 15All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust.
Now Elihu rises to the heart of his speech, and here he speaks a word as true as any in the book: far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity. This is not the error the LORD will rebuke at the end. It is bedrock. God does not do wrong; there is no wickedness in Him, no crookedness in His dealings, no iniquity that the Almighty could ever commit. Elihu states it as something beyond argument, and he is right to. The whole of Scripture stands with him: he is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment… just and right is he (Deut. 32:4). A faith that lets go of this has lost something it cannot do without - the certainty that the One who governs all things is good, and that whatever He does, He cannot do evil. So receive this sentence plainly and gratefully. It is the true word at the center of the chapter, and the reader is meant to say amen to it. The care comes only later, in what Elihu will do with it; the word itself is gold.
Elihu draws the first inference from God's righteousness: For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to his ways.2 Because God is just, He renders to each according to what he has done - the deed comes home to the doer. This too is a real principle of Scripture; the Psalmist says the same of God: thou renderest to every man according to his work (Ps. 62:12), and the New Testament will echo it. As a statement about the moral seriousness of the universe, it is true and bracing: our choices matter, our works are not lost, God is not indifferent to how we live. The difficulty - the one the whole book of Job exists to probe - is the unspoken assumption Elihu rides in on: that this rendering is always visible, always settled within the span of a single life, so that a man's present suffering can be read straight back as the measure of his deeds. The principle is sound. The assumption that you can therefore reverse-engineer a sufferer's guilt from his pain is exactly what the book will not allow. God does render to every man according to his ways - but the ledger is not always open to our reading, and Job is living proof that present anguish is no reliable index of hidden sin.
Elihu states the truth again, sharpened to its point: Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment.3 Hear it as the firm and faithful confession it is. God will not pervert judgment - will not twist the verdict, bend the scales, hand down a crooked ruling. There is no miscarriage of justice in His courts, no innocent finally lost through a slip of the divine hand. It is striking that this is nearly the very question Bildad had pressed earlier - doth God pervert judgment? (Job 8:3) - and the answer was true then and is true now: He does not. The principle stands on its own, regardless of who speaks it. Where Bildad bent it into a weapon against Job's dead children, Elihu states it more carefully and is not rebuked for it. So let the confession stand unqualified: the Almighty does not pervert judgment. The reader is not being set up to doubt God's justice; the reader is being asked to hold it fast. The only question the book keeps open is not whether God is just, but how His perfect justice can be trusted when, for now, we cannot trace it.
Elihu reaches for the ground beneath God's justice - His sovereignty: Who hath given him a charge over the earth? or who hath disposed the whole world? The questions answer themselves. No one appointed God to His office; no one handed Him the world to manage on another's behalf; there is no higher authority who delegated the universe to His care and might call Him to account. He holds all things by His own right. And Elihu presses the point to its sobering edge: if he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust. Every living thing holds its breath at God's pleasure; were He merely to withdraw the spirit He gives, all flesh would return at once to the dust from which it came. There is genuine truth here, and it is meant to humble: the Maker of all is answerable to none, and our very life is on loan from Him. This is real reverence, and the reader can share it. The point Elihu builds toward - that the One who owes the universe nothing cannot be charged with injustice by the creatures who owe Him everything - is weighty and largely right. The book's caution is only this: God's freedom from any higher court does not, by itself, settle the case against any particular sufferer. That God cannot be unjust is certain. That this man's pain is therefore deserved does not follow.
16If now thou hast understanding, hear this: hearken to the voice of my words. 17Shall even he that hateth right govern? and wilt thou condemn him that is most just? 18Is it fit to say to a king, Thou art wicked? and to princes, Ye are ungodly? 19How much less to him that accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more than the poor? for they all are the work of his hands. 20In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at midnight, and pass away: and the mighty shall be taken away without hand. 21For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings. 22There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.
Elihu drives toward the listener with a question meant to stop the breath: Shall even he that hateth right govern? and wilt thou condemn him that is most just?1 The logic is hard to fault. A ruler who hated justice could not hold the world together at all; the very fact that the universe is governed argues for a Governor who loves right, not one who despises it. And then the unanswerable thrust: how dare a creature condemn as unjust the One who is justice itself - the most just, the standard against which all justice is measured? To put God in the dock is to set the lesser over the greater, the derived over the source. Elihu is largely right here, and his reverence is real: God is the most just, and no charge of wickedness can finally land against Him. The reader can stand with him in this. The single caution is the one that runs through the whole chapter - Elihu hears in Job's lament a flat condemning of God, when much of what Job has cried is the bewildered protest of a faithful man who cannot square his pain with the God he still will not let go of. To question in agony is not the same as to condemn in malice. But the truth Elihu defends - that the One who is most just cannot be justly accused - stands firm.
Elihu turns to a glory of God's justice that is pure comfort: His complete impartiality. Is it fit to say to a king, Thou art wicked? and to princes, Ye are ungodly? How much less to him that accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more than the poor? for they all are the work of his hands. Earthly courts bend toward the powerful; a king is flattered, a prince is feared, the rich man's case is heard before the poor man's. Not so with God. He accepteth not the persons of the great - their rank buys them nothing at His bar - and He does not regard the rich above the poor, for prince and pauper alike are simply the work of his hands. Before their Maker, every human distinction we count so dear collapses to nothing. This is wholly true and wholly good news, and the reader should feel its weight. In a moment shall they die… and the mighty shall be taken away without hand - the most powerful are removed as easily as the least, by no human force, when God so wills. There is great comfort here for the lowly and the wronged: the God who judges cannot be bought, cannot be intimidated, cannot be impressed by the very things that tilt every human scale. He sides with no one's wealth and fears no one's crown. Elihu speaks truly, and he speaks beautifully.
And Elihu names the ground of God's perfect justice - His perfect sight: For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings. There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves. God can judge rightly because He misses nothing. Every path a man walks, every step he takes, lies open before those eyes; and there is no shadow deep enough, no darkness thick enough, for the worker of iniquity to slip out of sight. This is true, and it cuts two ways at once. To the oppressed it is sweetest comfort: their suffering is seen, their cause is known, the wrong done to them in secret is not hidden from Heaven. To the wicked it is terror: there is no escaping the gaze of God. Elihu intends it both ways, and rightly. But hold the verse a moment against Job, for it has a tenderness Elihu does not draw out. If God's eyes are upon all the ways of man, then they are upon Job's ways too - and what those eyes have seen is not hidden guilt but a perfect and upright man (Job 1:8). The all-seeing gaze that Elihu wields as a warning is, for the innocent sufferer, the deepest assurance: the God who sees all has already seen that Job is righteous. Nothing is hidden - including his integrity.
23For he will not lay upon man more than right; that he should enter into judgment with God. 24He shall break in pieces mighty men without number, and set others in their stead. 25Therefore he knoweth their works, and he overturneth them in the night, so that they are destroyed. 26He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others; 27Because they turned back from him, and would not consider any of his ways: 28So that they cause the cry of the poor to come unto him, and he heareth the cry of the afflicted. 29When he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? and when he hideth his face, who then can behold him? whether it be done against a nation, or against a man only: 30That the hypocrite reign not, lest the people be ensnared.
Elihu makes a claim that, taken as a statement about God, is gentle and true: For he will not lay upon man more than right.3 God does not pile on; He does not deal with anyone beyond what is just; there is no cruelty of excess in Him. This is a real mercy at the core of God's justice - that the Judge of all measures exactly, never tipping the scale against a man past what is right. Yet notice the cutting edge this carries when aimed at Job, even if Elihu does not press it openly: if God never lays on more than is right, and Job is being crushed, then the crushing must be no more than Job deserves. The premise is true; the unspoken application would be false, and the reader must hold them apart. Elihu then turns to how God deals with the powerful wicked: He shall break in pieces mighty men without number, and set others in their stead… he overturneth them in the night, so that they are destroyed. God needs no trial to convict the tyrant, no long process to bring him down; He knoweth their works already, and overturns them in a night. The reason follows: because they turned back from him, and would not consider any of his ways - and especially because they made the poor cry out, so that… he heareth the cry of the afflicted. Here is something deeply true and worth lingering on: God topples the mighty because the cry of the poor reaches Him. His justice is not cold arithmetic; it moves toward the oppressed. He hears the afflicted, and He acts.
Elihu lifts the matter to God's unanswerable freedom: When he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? and when he hideth his face, who then can behold him? whether it be done against a nation, or against a man only. When God grants peace, no power can disturb it; and when God withdraws - when He hideth his face - no one can compel Him to show it again, whether the dealing be with a whole nation or with a single man. Elihu means this as one more proof that God is sovereign and beyond our managing, and as such it is true. But pause on that phrase, when he hideth his face, for Elihu uses it more lightly than Scripture often does. The hidden face of God is the very thing the sufferers of the Bible cry out under - how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (Ps. 13:1) - and it is, in a sense, Job's whole torment: a man who once walked in the light of God's countenance now meeting only silence. Elihu names the hidden face as a fact of God's freedom; he does not seem to feel it as the wound it is. And this exposes, gently, the limit of his counsel. He can state truly that God may hide His face from a man - against a man only - but he cannot enter into what that hiding costs the man it falls on. The God who hides His face is righteous in doing so; but the answer to the one left in the dark will not be Elihu's explanation. It will be the face itself, turned back at last toward the sufferer.
Job 34:31-37Should It Be According to Thy Mind?
31Surely it is meet to be said unto God, I have borne chastisement, I will not offend any more: 32That which I see not teach thou me: if I have done iniquity, I will do no more. 33Should it be according to thy mind? he will recompense it, whether thou refuse, or whether thou choose; and not I: therefore speak what thou knowest.
Elihu sets out what he takes to be the right words for a sufferer to say, and on their own they are humble and good: Surely it is meet to be said unto God, I have borne chastisement, I will not offend any more: that which I see not teach thou me: if I have done iniquity, I will do no more.1 Taken simply as a prayer, this is beautiful - a soul bowing before God, owning correction, asking to be taught what it cannot see, resolving to turn from any wrong once shown it. That which I see not teach thou me is a prayer any believer might pray every day and be the better for it. There is real wisdom in the posture of teachableness Elihu commends; the open, correctable heart is precisely the heart God can lead. The trouble is not the words but the assumption folded into them when handed to Job: that Job has refused this posture, that he is the unbowed sinner who will not say teach thou me. Yet the reader has heard Job cry out for exactly such teaching - make me to know my transgression and my sin (Job 13:23). Elihu prescribes a prayer Job has, in his own anguished way, already prayed. The prescription is good medicine; it is simply being offered to a man who is not suffering from the disease Elihu diagnoses.
Now Elihu sharpens to a pointed challenge: Should it be according to thy mind? he will recompense it, whether thou refuse, or whether thou choose; and not I: therefore speak what thou knowest.3 The thrust is this: should God run His justice by Job's terms, recompensing the world according to what Job thinks fair? God will do as He sees right - whether thou refuse, or whether thou choose - and Job's approval is not required for God to be just. There is a real and humbling truth in this. None of us is the measure of divine justice; God does not submit His verdicts to our ratification, and the demand that He should is a kind of pride. As a rebuke of the impulse to make ourselves the standard, Elihu's point is sound. And yet there is something the challenge misses, and it matters. Job has not, at bottom, been demanding that God conform to his mind; Job has been pleading to understand a God who has gone silent - longing to lay his case before Him and be answered (Job 23:3-5). The cry to understand is not the same as the demand to dictate. Elihu hears the second; the book knows it is mostly the first. And tellingly, Elihu ends by inviting Job to speak what thou knowest - as if the matter could still be settled by who argues best. The book is about to show that it cannot.
34Let men of understanding tell me, and let a wise man hearken unto me. 35Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words were without wisdom. 36My desire is that Job may be tried unto the end because of his answers for wicked men. 37For he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth his hands among us, and multiplieth his words against God.
Elihu calls his jury back and pronounces his verdict on Job: Let men of understanding tell me, and let a wise man hearken unto me. Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words were without wisdom.3 We must weigh this carefully, for there is a sliver of truth in it that the book itself will confirm - and a great deal that the book will not. The sliver: Job has spoken some things beyond his knowledge, and God Himself will later open His answer with almost these very words, who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? (Job 38:2). To that small extent Elihu anticipates a true note. But hear the difference. When God says it, it is to a man He is about to draw near to, answer, and finally vindicate - a humbling that ends in restoration. When Elihu says it, it is the closing of a case against a man he has convicted. And Elihu goes far past anything God will say, into territory the book flatly contradicts. He pronounces Job's words simply without wisdom, writes off the whole of that anguished, faithful, God-clinging lament as worthless - when the LORD will declare that Job, unlike the friends, has spoken of Him the thing that is right (Job 42:7). A grain of Elihu's verdict will be echoed by God; the harvest of it will be overturned.
And here Elihu goes furthest of all, into a charge the reader must firmly refuse: My desire is that Job may be tried unto the end because of his answers for wicked men. For he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth his hands among us, and multiplieth his words against God.3 This is hard and wrong. Elihu wishes Job tried unto the end - pressed and tested without relief until he breaks - and accuses him of adding rebellion to sin, of clapping his hands in scorn and heaping up words against God like a defiant rebel. We should not soften how far this goes. It assumes the very thing in question - that Job is a guilty man whose protest is rebellion - and it wishes harder suffering on a man already stripped of everything. This is the place where Elihu, true as he was about God, is most clearly not the voice of the book. The reader has stood in the council of heaven and knows Job's calamity is no wage of sin; the reader will hear God call Job His servant four times over at the end (Job 42:7-8) and command the others to bring sacrifice that Job might pray for them. Elihu's charge of rebellion is exactly the verdict God never ratifies. Hold the line clearly: the young man's confession of God's righteousness was true and may be kept; his condemnation of Job was false and must be let go. And the reason the book can hold both is that it does not leave the matter to any human speaker. The answer is coming - not from Elihu's argument, however forceful, but from God Himself, who will speak out of the whirlwind and never once say what Elihu has just said.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Job 34 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for tsaddiq behind “most just” in verse 17, for the legal force of mishpat (“judgment”) that runs through verses 4, 5, and 12, and for the long debate over whether Elihu's defense of God's justice rightly applies to Job's case.
- Job 34 ↔ Genesis 18 · Psalm 62 · Acts 10 · Romans 3 · Hebrews 4Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Elihu's God will not… pervert judgment (v. 12) to shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Gen. 18:25), his render… according to his ways (v. 11) to thou renderest to every man according to his work (Ps. 62:12), his impartial God (v. 19) to God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and his all-seeing eyes (v. 21) to all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him (Heb. 4:13).
- Job 34 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Job 34 - the courtroom summons of verses 2-4, the force of Job's quoted complaint that godliness profiteth a man nothing (v. 9), the emphatic denial that God could pervert judgment (v. 12), and the difficult final verses where Elihu wishes Job tried unto the end (vv. 36-37).
- Ludlul bel nemeqi · the “Babylonian Job”The British MuseumCuneiform tablets of a Babylonian poem about a righteous man bewildered that suffering has overtaken him though he kept faith with his god - the wider ancient world pressing the same question Elihu presses here: whether a just heaven could ever leave a good man's goodness unrewarded.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Hear My Words, Ye Wise
- Job 32:1So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.The silence Elihu steps into - the young fourth speaker who rises after the friends fall quiet.
- Job 7:16I would not live alway: let me alone; for my days are vanity.The kind of anguished overstatement (cf. v. 9) Elihu hears from Job - the raw protest of a crushed man.
- 1 Thessalonians 5:21Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.The sound instinct behind Elihu’s “the ear trieth words” (v. 3) - truth should bear testing.
God Will Not Pervert Judgment
- Psalm 62:12Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.The true principle of v. 11 - God renders to each according to his work, joined here to His mercy.
- Genesis 18:25Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?The bedrock under v. 12 - God will not pervert judgment; the very ground of the gospel.
- Acts 10:34Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.Elihu’s impartial God (v. 19) confessed at the threshold of the gospel going to all nations.
- Hebrews 4:13All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.The all-seeing eyes of v. 21 - the gaze from which nothing hides, which in Christ becomes a throne of grace.
Should It Be According to Thy Mind?
- Job 13:23How many are mine iniquities and sins? make me to know my transgression and my sin.Job already praying the prayer Elihu prescribes (vv. 31-32) - the teachable cry Elihu assumes he refuses.
- Job 38:2Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?God’s own near-echo of v. 35 - but spoken to a man He will draw near to, answer, and vindicate.
- Job 42:7Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.The verdict that overturns Elihu’s charge of rebellion (v. 37) - and names only the three friends, not Elihu.
- Romans 3:26That he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.The thing Elihu’s justice could not imagine - God fully just and yet the justifier of the guilty.