The Lord said to Satan, "Have
you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a
blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still
persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him
for no reason." (Job 2:3 NRSV)
YHWH’s statement that the Accuser ‘incited’
him ‘to destroy Job without reason’ can be troubling: Is God admitting that he
was manipulated into making a mistake? Two considerations suggest otherwise.
First, the verb ‘incited’ (sût) can be used for enticing someone to do
something wrote or unwise (e.g. Deut. 13:7; 2 Kgs 18:32; Jer. 43:3), but is
also used more neutrally for urging someone towards some action (Josh.
15:18/Judg. 1:14) and once for enticing someone away from sin (Job 36:16). As a
result, translating the verb as ‘urge’ is exegetically justifiable and avoids
any sense of God’s being tricked or manipulated. Second, the different senses
of the adverb ‘without reason’ (ḥinnām, repeated from 1:9) suggest a
more positive intention behind God’s statement in this verse. The word can mean
‘without compensation( e.g. Num. 11:5), ‘in vain’ (Prov. 1:17) or ‘without
cause, undeservedly’ (Ps. 35:7, 19; see HALOT 334). Its use in 1:9 falls
within the first definition, while the adverb’s use in 2:3 falls in the third.
YHWH is, in other words, defending his servant as being entirely innocent of
Satan’s accusation – it was completely undeserved. God is also stating that it
is his wish to bless his servants, not destroy them and that the test, from
Satan’s perspective, failed because Job did not curse God. ‘[T]he test proved
that the Satan’s accusations against Job were “without cause” and had no
inherent worth, and that Job feared God “without cause” – Job trusted God with
a pure heart filled with the love of God, not for the benefits God had bestowed
upon him.’ But this need not imply that Job’s suffering happens for no reason
in an absolute sense – Satan’s accusation was without value, but there are deeper
reasons why God allowed it. The last word of v. 3 thus has an ironic twist. (Eric
Ortlund, Piercing Leviathan: God’s Defeat of Evil in the Book of Job [New
Studies in Biblical Theology 56; Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2021], 19
n. 22)
