God’s Appearance and Examination of Job

Excursus:  It should be clear from the outset that the fact God that appears in response to Job’s plea for a meeting immediately puts the lie to any claims to the contrary that Elihu and the other friends have made. God does appear in response to Job. His very appearance, therefore, proves Elihu’s earlier claim false—that God will not respond to Job because he has already spoken his final word of judgment in Job’s suffering.

Deciding how to characterize this divine appearance is a difficult matter that has occupied interpreters of the book since the beginning. Most interpreters consider God’s rather bombastic confrontation of Job to be, in some way, a rebuke of Job’s inappropriate stance over against God—a position or attitude from which Job must “repe…