Job 11 Bible study: Can you fathom the mystery of God?

Every word of this chapter after its first verse is Zophar's: "Then Zophar, the Naamathite, answered" (11:1). He is the third of "Job’s three friends" (2:11) to speak: Eliphaz spoke first (chapters 4-5), then Bildad (chapter 8), and Job answered each of them (chapters 6-7 and 9-10). Zophar opens by speaking of Job's words: "Shouldn’t the multitude of words be answered? Should a man full of talk be justified?" (11:2) (tap justified), and "For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure. I am clean in your eyes.’" (11:4) (tap doctrine, pure). Keep in mind whose words these are. At the end of the book the LORD says to Eliphaz, "My wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7), and Zophar is named among those who then "did what the LORD commanded them" (42:9). The book doesn't say which of Zophar's words the LORD has in view, so these notes never treat what Zophar says as the book's own verdict. They don't throw out every word either: other Scripture also speaks of God's depths, and the honest questions below set 11:6 and 11:7 beside it.

Job 11:8→leads toEphesians 3:18-19

Zophar asks Job, "Can you fathom the mystery of God?" (11:7), and goes on, "They are high as heaven. What can you do? They are deeper than Sheol. What can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea" (11:8-9). Paul prays that believers "may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:18-19). Paul doesn't name Job or Zophar, and no link between the Hebrew and Greek words is claimed, so setting them side by side is a reading. It rests on a shared subject, not only on a picture of height and depth: a measure past what a person can know. Zophar gives four measures, high, deep, long and broad, and asks, "What can you know?" (11:8); Paul names the same four and speaks of a love that "surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19). Some read the two together for that subject: Zophar asks what a person can know of heights and depths like these, and Paul prays that believers would know Christ's love, which goes past knowing. Others read each in its own setting: Paul is praying for those he writes to, "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith" (Ephesians 3:17), while Zophar's words come between "God exacts of you less than your iniquity deserves" (11:6) and "If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away" (11:14), and the LORD's word on the friends is 42:7. Neither reading makes Paul's prayer an answer to Zophar or a verdict on him.

חֵקֶרcheqersay KHE-ker

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "searching, thing (to be) searched out". "Can you fathom the mystery of God?" (11:7): the WEB's mystery is this word, and fathom is another verb, the one the WEB gives as probe in the same verse. It comes twelve times in the Hebrew Bible, seven of them in Job. Eliphaz had it ("great things that can’t be fathomed", 5:9), Bildad ("the learning of their fathers", 8:8) and Job ("great things past finding out", 9:10). Elihu will have it twice (34:24, 36:26). And the last time it comes in Job, the LORD has it when he asks Job, "Or have you walked in the recesses of the deep?" (38:16), where recesses is this word.