This is the last day of Job. Four weeks of readings have taken us from the wager in the heavenly court, through the friends' correctness and Job's refusal to accept it, to the whirlwind. Today he answers the whirlwind, and then the book does something that has bothered readers for two thousand years: it gives him everything back.
What happens
"I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes." Then the epilogue: "Yahweh blessed the latter days of Job more than his earlier ones… And he had seven sons and three daughters, of whom he called the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Kerenhappuch. In all the land no other women were as beautiful as the daughters of Job; and their father gave them an inheritance among their brethren. After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years… Then Job died, old and full of years."
What to notice
Job 42:5 is the sentence the whole book was built to reach: l'shema ozen shema'tikha, v'attah eini ra'atkha — "by the hearing of the ear I had heard of you; but now my eye has seen you." He is not saying he has learned something; the mode of knowing has changed. Everything the friends had was hearsay — orthodox, defensible, secondhand — and Job now has something that is not that, obtained by a route the friends would never have taken. Job 42:6 is one of the most disputed verses in the Hebrew Bible. The verb em'as is transitive but has no object — "therefore I reject…" and the sentence never says what; translators supply what I have said or myself, and older Bibles italicize the insertion honestly. Then v'nichamti al-afar va-efer: nacham means to repent, to change one's mind, or to be comforted — it is the word in Isaiah 40:1, comfort my people. So the line reads "I repent in dust and ashes," or "I am consoled concerning dust and ashes," or "I change my mind about dust and ashes."The third is a serious proposal: a man who has sat on an ash-heap since Job 2:8 announcing that he is getting up. Then the epilogue, where the arithmetic is exact — sheep, camels, oxen and she-asses all doubled, and everything doubled except the children. Seven sons and three daughters, the same ten as Job 1:2. You can restore livestock at double. You cannot double children, and the book does not pretend otherwise. And the strangest detail: the sons are not named. The daughters are — Jemimah (dove, or daylight), Keziah (cassia), Keren-happuch (horn of kohl) — and Job 42:15 gives them "an inheritance among their brothers," which under Israelite law daughters received only when there were no sons. Job has seven sons and does it anyway.
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible — an alphabetic acrostic of twenty-two eight-verse stanzas, every verse but one naming the torah under one of eight synonyms. It is the most architecturally controlled poem in the Psalter, and the lectionary has pulled six verses from it that all bear on Job.
Psalm 119:71 is a sentence the book of Job spends thirty-eight chapters refusing to let anyone say cheaply. Tov li khi-unnēti — "it is good for me that I was afflicted." In the friends' mouths this is exactly the doctrine Job fought, and the epilogue says the friends were wrong. The difference is who is speaking. The psalmist says it about himself, in the first person, after the fact; the friends said it about somebody else, to his face, while it was happening. The same proposition is true as a testimony and false as a diagnosis.Psalm 119:75 is more pointed still: b'emunah innitani, "in faithfulness you afflicted me" — not despite faithfulness. The psalmist does not resolve the tension; he states both terms and leaves them standing, which is what Job does. And Psalm 119:130 is the day's third statement about seeing: petach devarekha ya'ir, "the opening of your words gives light."Petach is a doorway, the act of unsealing — a door opened and light coming through — and what it lights is petayim, the simple, the untrained, people with no credentials. That word is the psalm's version of the nēpioi in today's Gospel.
The seventy-two who left on Thursday with no purse and no sandals come back. They are elated, and Jesus's response is to redirect their joy twice — first away from what they did, then upward to what he saw while they were gone.
What happens
"The seventy-two returned rejoicing, and said, 'Master, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.' Jesus said, 'I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky… Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.' At that very moment he rejoiced in the HolyBreath and said, 'I give you praise, Father, master of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike…' Turning to the disciples in private he said, 'Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.'"
What to notice
Start with the lectionary's timing, because it is deliberate and easy to miss. Today is the last day of Job. The book opened with ha-satan — the accuser, with the definite article, an office rather than a name — standing in the heavenly council and being granted permission to test a man. And on the day the book closes, the Gospel says: etheōroun ton Satanan hōs astrapēn ek tou ouranou pesonta, "I watched the accuser fall from heaven like lightning." Four weeks of Job's ordeal end, and the same morning the prosecutor is reported out of the building. The redirection is the heart of the passage. They report power; he does not deny it and in fact escalates it — serpents and scorpions, which is Psalm 91:13 and Deuteronomy 8:15, wilderness language. And then: don't rejoice about that.Ta onomata hymōn engegraptai en tois ouranois — your names have been written in heaven, a perfect passive: already written, by someone else, and standing written. Set that beside Thursday, where Job wanted his words cut in the rock forever. The seventy-two are told they already have the inscription, and that it is the only thing worth being glad about. Then Luke does something he does nowhere else: ēgalliasato en tō pneumati tō hagiō, he exulted in the Holy Breath — the same strong verb Mary uses in the Magnificat. This is the one place in the Synoptics where we are told Jesus was delighted, and it is provoked by a report from seventy-two nobodies. The content of the delight is a reversal: hidden from the wise and the intelligent, revealed nēpiois, to infants — the word for a child too young to speak, from nē-epos, "not-word." The people who did not have the vocabulary got the thing itself. And the last line is the day's convergence: "blessed are the eyes that see what you see." Prophets and kings wanted it and did not get it. Job said now my eye has seen you.
How They Fit Together
Hearing about it, and seeing it — the frame of Job closes
Blessed are the eyes that see what you see — what prophets and kings wanted
The whole day is about the difference between hearing about something and seeing it, and the lectionary has arranged three texts that make the distinction in three different registers.
Job's version is the sharpest because it costs the most. L'shema ozen shema'tikha — I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear. That is not false modesty about his earlier piety; Job 1:1 says he was blameless and upright, and he was. It is a report about what that piety was made of: inherited, correct, secondhand. The friends still have it, in its most polished form, and they are the ones the epilogue rebukes. What Job has now was obtained by losing everything, arguing for thirty chapters, refusing every orthodox consolation offered him, and being answered out of a storm by someone who did not address a single one of his questions. There is no shortcut in the book to what Job ends up with, and it is worth being honest that the route is not one anybody would choose.
The psalm says the thing Job's friends said, and says it truly, and the difference is entirely positional. It is good for me that I was afflicted.In the first person, after the fact, that is testimony. In the second person, during, it is what Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar spent three cycles of speeches doing, and Job 42:7 says Yahweh's anger burned against them for it. The proposition never changed. What changed is whether the speaker had standing to say it — and putting Psalm 119:71 next to the last day of Job is either very fine editing or a very lucky accident.
Then Luke, where the whole thing turns outward and becomes cheerful. The seventy-two come back thrilled about their own power, and are told to be thrilled about something they did not do — your names have been written, perfect passive, already finished. Then the accuser falls, which closes the frame the book of Job opened: the office of the prosecutor, which had standing in the heavenly court in Job 1, is reported vacated in Luke 10. And then the delight, the only time in the Synoptics we are told he had any, and it is about the wrong people knowing.
The last sentence gathers it. Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. Not blessed are the eyes that understand it, or can defend it, or can teach it — the infants can do none of those things, which is what nēpios means. Blessed are the eyes that see. Job, at the end of everything, said now my eye has seen you, and then got up and named his daughters after light, spice, and eye-paint, and gave them land. That is not a book that ends in resignation.
A Question to Sit With
Job says he had heard of Theos by hearsay and now his eye has seen — and everything he had before that sentence was true, correct, and inherited. I have a great deal of inherited material: things I can defend, and would defend, and did not arrive at. I am not sure how much of it I have seen. If someone asked me which parts I hold by the hearing of the ear and which parts my own eye has seen, could I tell them apart — and would I want to know the answer?