Caleb Asked Whether Job's Children Did Something Wrong

Bildad gets one sentence in Job 8 that I'd like every parent to read slowly before the next hard question comes. He's talking to a man whose ten children have just been killed when a house fell on them, and he says, "If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression."

He doesn't say it cruelly, or at least he doesn't think he does. He says it the way you'd walk someone through a math problem, and that has stayed with me all week as we've worked through the Come, Follow Me reading for August 10 to 16, "Yet Will I Trust in Him."

What Job's friends got wrong

The friends don't start out wrong, and Job 2:13 says they sat on the ground with him "seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great." If they'd stopped there we'd remember them as the best friends in scripture.

Then Job opens his mouth in chapter 3 and says "Let the day perish wherein I was born," and the friends can't stand it, so Eliphaz goes first with a question that sounds like a proverb: "Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?" (Job 4:7). Bildad follows with the line about the children, and Zophar piles on a few chapters after that.

What the three of them share is a belief that the world is fair in a way you can check. If it's fair, then a man who lost everything must have earned it, and the only open question is what Job did. They aren't lying to hurt him. They need him to be guilty because the alternative is that it could happen to them.

Job 1:5 complicates this, because before any of it Job used to get up early and offer sacrifices for each of his children after their feasting, because "It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." Job himself started out inside the same arithmetic. He's the one who has to climb out of it, and he does it mostly by shouting.

But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value.

Job 13:4

What I said when Caleb asked

I read Job 1 out loud at dinner on Tuesday, all of it, including the part with the wind. Lily put her fork down at verse 19.

Caleb waited until I'd finished.

"So what did the kids do?"

He wasn't being flip, since he's eleven and was doing what Job's friends did, which is to go looking for the cause, ten kids and one house and a bad wind and somebody must have done something. I could see him running down the list of things a person could do.

My first answer was terrible, because I said, "Nothing, honey, it doesn't work like that," which is true and also the sort of sentence that ends a conversation. He nodded and picked up his roll, and I could tell the question had just gone back inside where I couldn't reach it. I'd silenced it.

Bildad would have been proud.

Later that night, with the dishes done, I found him upstairs and said what I should have said at the table: that I don't know why the wind came. that Job didn't know either and spent most of the book asking, and that his question was the right one to ask, since it's the one Job's friends began with before they stopped asking and started answering. He said, "That's kind of a dumb answer," and I said it was, and he seemed oddly satisfied.

Why kids reach for the punishment answer

I taught third grade for five years and I can tell you that eight-year-olds are fierce about fairness. They will argue for days over who got the red marker, so when something bad happens to a person, a child goes straight to the ledger.

I remember a boy named Owen whose bike was stolen from the rack outside our school. Within ten minutes of lunch recess the class had decided he'd forgotten to lock it, which he hadn't, since the thieves cut the cable and Owen carried the two ends down to the office to prove it. The kids still needed him to have been careless, because if it was Owen's fault then their own bikes were safe, and I think about that every time I read Eliphaz.

So when a child asks why a good person got hurt, I try to hear two questions. One is the one they asked. The other is, am I safe, because I'm good too? Telling them the person must have done something answers the second question falsely and the first one cruelly.

What helps is smaller than an explanation. You say the person didn't deserve it, and you say you don't know why it happened, and you stay in the room. Job's friends got the staying right for a week.

What God said to the friends

I'd forgotten how the book ends, which is that after all the speeches, after the whirlwind in chapters 38 through 41 where God asks Job where he was when the earth's foundations were laid, the Lord turns to Eliphaz and says this:

My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.

Job 42:7

Look at who is being compared.

Job had cursed the day he was born and called his friends liars and demanded an audience with God. The friends had given tidy, orthodox, defensible talks about divine justice. And the Lord says Job spoke rightly and they didn't.

I can't tell you exactly what that means, but I know what it does to my instinct as a mother, which is to smooth a child's hard question into something I can say in one breath. If Job's raw, repeated, unresolved asking counts as speaking rightly, then maybe a child who keeps asking "but why" is closer to right than I am with my answer ready.

God never explains the wind, either. Job gets seven sons and three daughters again (Job 42:13), and I've had readers tell me that's supposed to settle it. It doesn't settle anything for me, because new children aren't the old ones. I wouldn't say that to Lily over breakfast, but I'd say it to a grown woman, and I'd rather not wrap the ending in a bow.

If you want to see what trust looks like when no answer arrives, I wrote about Jehoshaphat's prayer a while back. And if you're picking something to read aloud to kids of different ages, what to read aloud when your kids are eleven, eight and two is where I'd start, though Job 1 is for the older two only.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it okay to tell a child "I don't know why"?

Yes, and sooner than I did, since kids can tell when you're reaching and the answer you make up is the one they remember. Follow it with something you do know, like that God isn't punishing the person, and that you'll sit with them in the not knowing.

Did Job's friends do anything right?

They came and they wept and they sat down for a week without speaking, which is more than most of us manage. The trouble began when they opened their mouths to explain, so if you're ever visiting someone in the worst week of their life, take the first part and leave the second.

What do I do when my child blames the person who suffered?

Slow down before you correct. Usually the child is scared, and the blame is a way to feel safe. I'd say something like, "It's easy to wonder if they did something, and they didn't, and sometimes hard things just happen," and then give the fear a minute before you add anything.

Should I read the whole book of Job with young children?

Not the whole thing. Chapters 1 and 2 are heavy and the middle is long poetry arguments that lose adults, never mind second graders, so I'd pick Job 2:13, Job 13:15 and the end of chapter 42, and talk through those.

I haven't touched the garden since we got home Monday, and tonight when I went out to pick basil there was a zucchini under the leaves the length of my forearm. Penny and Waffle had gotten into two of the tomatoes and eaten the bottoms right out of them.

with love, Melissa