Job 9 Bible study: How can man be just with God?

"Then Job answered" (9:1). Bildad has finished (chapter 8), and every word from 9:2 to the end of chapter 10 is Job's; the next heading is "Then Zophar, the Naamathite, answered" (11:1). Job opens, "Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God?" (9:2) (tap just, man). Eliphaz had told of a voice he heard in the night, asking, "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" (4:17), and in Hebrew man and be just are the same words in both verses. Job's question comes wrapped in the words of a dispute. "If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand" (9:3) (tap contend, answer). "Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn’t answer him. I would make supplication to my judge" (9:15) (tap judge). "If of justice, ‘Who,’ says he, ‘will summon me?’" (9:19) (tap justice). And near the end: "For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment" (9:32).

Job 9:22→leads toMatthew 5:45

Job says, "It is all the same. Therefore I say he destroys the blameless and the wicked" (9:22). Jesus said, "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44), "that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Jesus doesn't name Job, so setting the two side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: what God sends coming on both alike, "the blameless and the wicked" (9:22), "the evil and the good, and … the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). The points differ. Some read the two together for that subject: both speak of what God sends coming on the just and the unjust alike, though Job speaks of destruction and Jesus of sun and rain. Others read each in its own setting: Jesus speaks of the Father's sun and rain as the reason his hearers are to love their enemies (Matthew 5:44-45); Job speaks of destruction and of mocking "at the trial of the innocent" (9:23), in a speech the book sets beside the LORD's words at its end (38:2, 42:7). Neither reading makes Jesus' words an answer to Job's, or a verdict on them.

צָדַקtsadaqsay tsa-DAK

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "be just, righteous", and in the simple form "have a just cause, be in the right". Job asks, "how can man be just with God?" (9:2), and uses it twice more of himself: "Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn’t answer him" (9:15), and "Though I am righteous, my own mouth will condemn me" (9:20). The voice Eliphaz heard had asked, "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" (4:17), and Bildad asks Job's question again in the same Hebrew words: "How then can man be just with God?" (25:4). The LORD uses it too: "Will you condemn me, that you may be justified?" (40:8). The verb comes 41 times in the Hebrew Bible, 17 of them in Job.