Job 25: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Bildad the Shuhite gives a short reply to Job. He says that God rules with power and awe, keeps order in the heights above, has countless forces, and gives light to everyone. He then asks how any human being, born of a woman, could be counted right or clean before God, when even the moon and stars are not bright or pure in God's sight.

Claim by Claim

1. 25:1
   • Bildad the Shuhite responded.
   • Bildad the Shuhite spoke the words that follow.
2. 25:2
   • Dominion belongs to God.
   • Dread belongs to God.
   • God makes peace in his heights.
3. 25:3
   • Bildad asks whether God's troops can be numbered.
   • Bildad asks upon whom God's light does not rise.
4. 25:4
   • Bildad asks how a mortal can be righteous before God.
   • Bildad asks how one born of a woman can be pure.
5. 25:5
   • Even the moon is not bright.
   • The stars are not pure in God's sight.
6. 25:6
   • Bildad says how much less pure is a mortal, who is a maggot.
   • Bildad says how much less pure is a son of man, who is a worm.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

25:1

Bildad is the second of Job's three friends, and this is the third and last time he speaks. Shuah was probably a region east of Israel; the friends are all foreigners, not Israelites. This speech is unusually short, only five verses, and Bildad never speaks again.

25:2

"His high places" means the heights of the sky, God's own domain. The phrase translated "makes peace" carries the sense of imposing order or settling conflict, and ancient readers would have heard it against the background of stories in which the heavens themselves contain restless powers that must be kept in their place.

25:3

"His armies" translates a word for organized troops. In Hebrew the sky's contents (stars, and the heavenly beings imagined alongside them) are regularly described as God's army or host, which is why the same phrase can be translated "the hosts of heaven."

25:4

"Justified" is courtroom language, not moral language: it means to be declared in the right when a case is decided, to win the argument. Bildad is answering Job's repeated demand for a hearing before God. "Born of a woman" is a standard Hebrew way of saying "human being," with the added sense of being frail and short-lived.

25:5

The point is comparison, not astronomy: set beside God, even the brightest things in the night sky count as dim and unclean. "Pure" and "clean" here belong to the vocabulary of ritual purity (fit to come near what is holy), rather than to the modern idea of being morally good.

25:6

The two words are different in Hebrew. The first is the maggot that breeds in decaying flesh; the second is a worm or grub, also the word for the creature crushed to make crimson dye. Both are images of something small, soft and disposable. "Son of man" is the ordinary Hebrew phrase for a human being, literally "child of Adam," and "adam" is also the word for humankind and echoes the word for the ground a person is made from.