Job 18King James Version

Bildad speaks for the second time. He is contemptuous of Job's long speeches. He launches into a sustained description of the fate of the wicked: their light goes out, their steps are snared, their roots dry up, their memory perishes. The Firstborn of Death devours their strength. The audience will be horrified at what has happened to them. This description is unmistakably aimed at Job.

Bildad has abandoned any pretense of comfort. He is delivering a sermon on the wicked that is a detailed portrait of everything happening to Job, presented as God's righteous judgment.

5: "Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine." The friends have moved from urging repentance to describing the doom of the wicked, with Job as the obvious referent. The diagnosis has hardened into a verdict.

The Firstborn of Death, the King of Terrors: these are likely references to ancient mythological figures of destruction known in the surrounding cultures. Bildad reaches into the larger Near Eastern world of divine and semi-divine powers to describe the full terror of what Job is experiencing. This is the darkest imagery the friends use.

Bildad speaks in his second address. His rhetoric is impersonal but pointed: he describes the wicked man in third person throughout, but the connection to Job's situation is unmistakable. Job receives this speech in silence.

The catalog of disasters Bildad describes, disease, darkness, children lost, name forgotten, is a precise match for Job's actual experience. Bildad is using Job's suffering as evidence for his own theology and calling it a sermon on the wicked. This is probably the most unfair speech in the book.

To have your suffering described in detail as the fate of the wicked, by someone you once called a friend, is a specific kind of cruelty. Bildad does not name Job. He does not need to.