David J. A. Clines’s three-volume Word Biblical Commentary on Job is one of the monumental achievements of modern Job scholarship. Spanning Job 1–20, Job 21–37 and Job 38–42, it combines detailed Hebrew philology, textual criticism, literary analysis, history of interpretation and sustained argument about the meaning of the book.
It is also far larger than most readers need to read straight through.
Clines is often most rewarding not when one follows every textual note but when one knows where his interpretive imagination is operating at full strength. His best discussions repeatedly expose assumptions that other commentaries leave unexamined: whether Job is really about suffering or about the moral order of the world; how the three friends differ from one another; how Job’s theology changes as he argues; what his demand for an arbiter actually means; whether the “redeemer” of Job 19 is a heavenly figure at all; how Job 28 belongs in the book; what Elihu contributes; why the wild animals dominate God’s speeches; what Behemoth and Leviathan are doing there; and what Job actually says in the notoriously difficult final response of 42:6.
Not all of Clines’s answers are equally convincing. Some of his most distinctive proposals are also among his most debatable. But that is part of his value. At his best, Clines makes familiar passages difficult again—and then forces the reader to think more carefully about why a preferred interpretation should be accepted.
Here is the most efficient way to use the three volumes.
First: Do Not Read the Technical Notes as Your Main Text
The Word Biblical Commentary format can make Clines look more forbidding than he needs to be.
For each passage, the commentary separates discussion into elements such as Translation, Notes, Form/Structure/Setting, Comment and Explanation. The Notes can become extremely technical because Job’s Hebrew is exceptionally difficult. Clines may spend considerable space evaluating a rare word, an ancient version, a proposed emendation or the structure of a poetic line.
That material is valuable when you need it. It is not where most readers should begin.
A much better approach is:
Translation → Form/Structure/Setting → Comment → Explanation
Then return to the Notes when a particular translation or textual problem affects the interpretation.
The Explanation sections are especially important. This is often where Clines steps back from individual Hebrew words and asks what the passage is doing in the argument of Job. Readers interested principally in interpretation and theology can gain a remarkably large proportion of the commentary’s value without working through every technical note.
The same principle applies to his enormous bibliographies: they make the commentary an excellent research tool, but they need not control one’s first reading.
1. Begin With the Introduction in Volume 1
If you read only one extended section before consulting Clines passage by passage, read the “Orientation to the Book of Job” in Job 1–20.
This is where Clines provides the conceptual map for everything that follows.
One of his most useful moves is to ask whether Job is fundamentally about the problem of suffering or the moral order of the world. Those questions overlap, but they are not identical. Asking only “Why does Job suffer?” can make the book seem to be waiting for an explanation of pain. Asking how the world is morally governed brings Job’s disputes about righteousness, wickedness, prosperity, punishment and divine justice into much sharper focus.
Clines is particularly good at treating the speakers as actual participants in an argument rather than as containers for static theological positions. Job changes. His thoughts are experimental, sometimes inconsistent and frequently driven forward by the failure of an earlier position. The friends are not simply three repetitions of one bad theology. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar defend the moral order differently.
This makes the dialogue much more interesting.
Another valuable distinction appears in Clines’s treatment of Job as both patient and protester. The Job of the prologue accepts catastrophe with extraordinary composure. The Job of the poetry complains bitterly and accuses God. Clines refuses to solve the tension by simply choosing one Job as exemplary and dismissing the other. The protester continues directing his anguish toward God. Job’s refusal to suppress his complaint becomes part of his continuing engagement with God rather than straightforward apostasy.
Even readers who later disagree strongly with Clines should read this introduction. It supplies a framework against which almost every subsequent interpretation can be tested.
Priority: Essential.
2. Read Job 9–10 for Clines on the Lawsuit and the Missing Arbiter
Clines is exceptionally strong wherever Job uses legal language.
Job increasingly imagines his conflict with God as a lawsuit. The problem, of course, is that the two parties cannot meet as equals before an independent court. God is both the opponent and the overwhelmingly stronger party.
That makes Job 9:33 especially important.
Job longs for an arbiter who might stand between them. Clines carefully reconstructs the legal imagery and the impossibility built into Job’s wish. The arbiter would somehow need authority over both parties and would need to remove the terror produced by God’s overwhelming power so that Job could speak freely.
Clines does not turn this immediately into Christian typology. He first asks what Job himself is imagining within the dramatic world of the book.
That restraint is useful even for readers who ultimately see a larger canonical trajectory toward mediation. Job has reached a profound theological problem before he has reached its solution: How can a human being bring a case before the God with whom the case itself must be settled?
Job 9–10 is therefore one of the places where Clines’s combination of philology, literary analysis and theological imagination works especially well.
Priority: Very high.
3. Read Job 16–19 for His Provocative Treatment of Witness, Advocate and Redeemer
This is one of the most distinctive parts of Clines’s commentary—and one where he should be read critically rather than simply followed.
Across these chapters Job’s language appears to move toward some form of witness, advocate or redeemer. Job 19:25 has consequently accumulated an enormous Christian history of interpretation.
Clines resists identifying Job’s “redeemer” with God, an angelic advocate or a direct anticipation of Christ. His interpretation is much more radical: what will survive Job is essentially his own protestation of innocence. His claim will stand as his advocate even if he himself dies.
Whether that succeeds exegetically is another question. Other major commentators offer substantial reasons for understanding the passage differently.
But Clines is very much worth reading here because he prevents an easy leap from the word “redeemer” to a fully developed later theological concept. He makes the reader ask exactly what Job needs vindication from, whom he imagines doing the vindicating, whether the figure is personal or rhetorical, and how Job 19 develops the legal imagery already present in chapters 9 and 16.
This is an excellent example of how to use Clines: not necessarily as the final judgment, but as the commentator who makes a difficult interpretation earn its conclusions.
Priority: Very high, especially Job 19.
4. In Volume 2, Go Straight to Job 21
Job 21 contains one of Clines’s clearest accounts of what happens when the doctrine of retribution meets recalcitrant experience.
Earlier Job has already established one side of the problem:
a righteous person can suffer.
Now he turns to the other:
wicked people can prosper.
That matters enormously. If the righteous can suffer and the wicked can flourish, circumstances cannot safely be read backwards as evidence of moral character.
Clines follows Job’s argument carefully as it attacks the friends’ system from this second direction. Prosperity, children, security, peaceful death and even honourable burial can belong to people who reject God. Death eventually erases many of the distinctions that a mechanical doctrine of retribution expects history to display.
The result is one of Clines’s strongest treatments of the moral logic of Job.
It also helps explain why the friends become increasingly desperate. Job is no longer merely saying, “Your doctrine does not explain me.” He is arguing, “Your doctrine does not explain the world.”
Priority: Essential.
5. Read the Third Cycle if You Want to See Clines the Textual Detective
Job 22–27 is where the commentary becomes especially interesting for readers concerned with composition and textual reconstruction.
The third cycle appears damaged or incomplete. Bildad’s contribution becomes extremely short; Zophar seems to disappear; material does not always sit comfortably with its assigned speaker.
Clines responds boldly. He redistributes parts of the text in an attempt to reconstruct a complete third cycle and preserve distinctive arguments for the individual friends.
You do not need to accept the reconstruction to profit from it.
Its real value is that it demonstrates how seriously Clines takes the individuality of the speakers. He does not regard Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar as a generic chorus saying “suffering proves sin.” He asks what each man’s particular logic would permit him to say.
His discussion of Eliphaz in Job 22 is particularly illuminating. Instead of simply concluding that Eliphaz has suddenly degenerated into making random accusations, Clines tries to show how those accusations emerge from Eliphaz’s underlying theological logic: if God is just, if great suffering must have a cause, and if Job’s great sins cannot be observed, then they must have been hidden.
That is exactly the kind of interpretive argument for which Clines is valuable.
Priority: High for scholars; optional for readers primarily interested in theology.
6. Do Not Skip Elihu—Clines Is Especially Interesting Here
Many readers hurry through Job 32–37 because they are impatient for God to speak.
Clines gives good reasons not to.
He thinks the common contempt for Elihu is greatly overdone. Elihu may be verbose and self-confident, but Clines asks the more important question: What does he actually add to the argument?
One significant development is that suffering need not operate merely as retrospective punishment. It may be one means through which God communicates, warns or instructs. That does not solve Job’s case, but it moves beyond the simpler retributive schemes of the earlier friends.
Clines also makes a striking compositional proposal: he argues that the Elihu speeches originally belonged after chapter 27, followed by the poem on wisdom in chapter 28, before Job’s final speech in chapters 29–31. This would allow Job’s final demand for an answer in 31:35 to be followed immediately by Yahweh’s response in chapter 38.
Even more controversially, Clines assigns Job 28 to Elihu, treating it as the conclusion of Elihu’s fourth speech.
That is far from the only persuasive reading of Job 28. Other commentators locate the poem very differently within the book’s architecture. But precisely because Job 28 is so important, Clines’s proposal deserves engagement.
Read this section when you want to understand not merely what Job 28 says but who is saying it, why it stands where it does, and what changes if its literary location is reconstructed differently.
Priority: High, but read comparatively.
7. Job 29–31 Is One of the Richest Sections in All Three Volumes
This may be the most rewarding sustained section of Volume 2.
Clines sees Job’s final speech as a carefully developing movement rather than three loosely related chapters.
Job 29 looks backward. Job remembers the days of divine friendship, prosperity, public honour and social usefulness. Clines is alert to the element of nostalgia here: Job’s remembered past is not merely an objective résumé but the idealised world against which his present degradation is felt.
Job 30 reverses the picture. Honour becomes mockery, security becomes assault, divine friendship becomes apparent divine hostility.
Then Job 31 transforms the whole speech.
The suffering victim becomes a man constructing a formal defence. Job’s famous catalogue of innocence is not simply an inspiring ethical checklist. Clines reads it as an elaborated oath of clearance, culminating in something like a signed legal deposition. Job has reviewed the possible charges and publicly invoked judgment upon himself if they are true.
Then comes the climax:
God should answer.
This is why the transition from Job 31 to Job 38 matters so much. Job has not merely asked an abstract theological question. He has completed his case and formally called upon his opponent to respond.
And God does.
For Clines, that legal movement is indispensable for understanding why the whirlwind speeches take the form they do.
Priority: Essential.
8. In Volume 3, Read Job 38–39 Slowly
Volume 3 is where Clines’s interpretation becomes most provocative.
The divine speeches are commonly summarized as teaching Job that God is powerful, Job is small, and therefore Job should trust what he cannot understand.
Clines finds much more going on.
He notices how much of God’s speech concerns a world that does not revolve around human usefulness. There are wild animals, inaccessible places and forms of life that humans neither control nor need. The wild ass refuses domestication. The wild ox will not work for human agriculture. Rain falls where no human being lives.
This matters because Job and the friends have largely evaluated the world through a human moral question:
Does God govern human life according to justice?
The divine speeches enlarge the field of vision dramatically. Creation contains purposes that cannot simply be inferred from their usefulness to humanity.
Clines then makes his characteristically bold move: the puzzling natural order becomes analogous to the puzzling moral order. If large portions of creation do not submit themselves to human explanation, perhaps Job should not expect the whole government of God to do so either.
This is one of Clines’s most memorable insights.
It is also a point at which readers should distinguish his close observations from some of his larger theological conclusions. Clines goes further than many interpreters in arguing that retribution and justice are effectively displaced from the organising principles of the divine speeches.
Whether one accepts that conclusion or not, his reading of the wildness, non-human-centredness and sheer excess of creation is exceptionally stimulating.
Priority: Essential.
9. Read Behemoth and Leviathan Because Clines Refuses the Expected Symbolism
Job 40–41 is another place where Clines becomes especially distinctive.
Many interpretations associate Behemoth and Leviathan strongly with chaos, evil or cosmic opposition. Clines resists giving them fundamentally negative significance. He understands the descriptions as celebrations of magnificent wild creatures within God’s creation.
That changes the tone of the second divine speech.
Its beginning is harsh. God confronts Job over his attempt to justify himself by indicting divine justice and sarcastically invites him to govern the wicked himself.
But then the mood changes.
God appears almost delighted by Behemoth and Leviathan.
Clines sees the invitation to “consider” Behemoth as central. Job is being asked to contemplate a form of created existence that is powerful, untameable, largely useless to humans and nevertheless valued by its Creator.
Again, the strength of Clines lies partly in the questions he forces upon the reader. Are these creatures enemies God must defeat? Creatures God controls? Symbols of chaos? Ordinary animals rendered poetically extraordinary? Or examples of a creation whose value cannot be measured by human utility?
Clines’s answer is not the only plausible one, but these chapters are among the places where his commentary most clearly makes the familiar text look unfamiliar.
Priority: Very high.
10. Job 42:1–6 Is a Must-Read, Even if You Reject Clines’s Conclusion
Few verses in Job are more consequential than 42:6, and Clines devotes precisely the kind of attention to it for which a massive technical commentary becomes worthwhile.
The familiar interpretation has Job despising himself and repenting in dust and ashes.
Clines argues for something substantially different.
His translation understands Job as submitting and accepting consolation concerning his dust and ashes. In Clines’s reading, Job abandons his lawsuit against God and ends his period of mourning. This is not the same as confessing that the friends were right or admitting that hidden wickedness caused his suffering.
Clines’s detailed discussion is valuable even if one ultimately prefers another translation. He lays out the lexical and grammatical difficulties that English translations can conceal. What is the object of the verb commonly rendered “despise”? Does Job despise himself, reject his words, withdraw his case or simply yield? Does the second verb mean repent, relent, change one’s mind or accept consolation? How does “dust and ashes” relate grammatically to the sentence?
This is exactly the sort of passage where the Notes should not be skipped.
Clines’s eventual interpretation is more sceptical about Job’s transformation than many readers will find persuasive. He thinks Job submits without necessarily accepting a newly satisfying theology of divine justice.
But after reading Clines, it becomes much harder to treat “Job repented in dust and ashes” as though the Hebrew allowed only one straightforward interpretation.
Priority: Essential, including the technical Notes.
11. Finish With Job 42:7–17—One of Clines’s Finest Pieces of Literary Observation
The epilogue is easy to read quickly because the great theological debate appears to be over.
Do not read it quickly in Clines.
He notices several details that dramatically change the scene.
God tells the friends to go to Job. That means the men who have spent chapter after chapter instructing Job must now approach him knowing that God has judged their speech deficient.
More strikingly, Job has not yet been restored.
When the friends come asking for his intercession, Job is still the suffering man they have accused. He does not yet know that prosperity is about to return. The men who treated him as spiritually suspect must depend upon his prayer while he still visibly resembles the man they condemned.
And Job must pray for them before receiving any assurance that his own life will improve.
Clines therefore detects a final reversal of roles. The accused becomes intercessor; the instructors become petitioners; the supposedly dangerous sufferer is called God’s servant.
He also pays careful attention to the timing of Job’s restoration. Rather than imagining livestock and children appearing instantaneously as soon as Job finishes praying, Clines reads the final verses as describing the restoration of a life over time.
These observations are excellent examples of Clines at his best: the Hebrew matters, but the payoff is literary and theological.
His larger claim that the prosperous ending partly re-establishes the principle of retribution is more debatable. Yet even where his conclusion can be challenged, his analysis makes the ending harder—and richer—than the familiar “God gave Job everything back twice over.”
Priority: Essential.
If You Have Time for Only Six Selections
For a reader who owns all three volumes but does not intend to read thousands of pages consecutively, I would begin here:
- Volume 1: Introduction — “Orientation to the Book of Job”
For Clines’s overall understanding of suffering, retribution, the characters and the argument of the book. - Volume 1: Job 9–10 and 19
For the lawsuit, arbiter, witness and redeemer—and some of Clines’s most distinctive, debatable exegesis. - Volume 2: Job 21
For the collapse of simplistic retribution when the prosperity of the wicked is taken seriously. - Volume 2: Job 29–31
For Job’s remembered past, present humiliation, oath of innocence and final legal challenge to God. - Volume 3: Job 38–42:6
For the divine speeches, wild creation, Behemoth and Leviathan, and Job’s extraordinarily difficult final response. - Volume 3: Job 42:7–17
For the reversal between Job and the friends, Job’s intercession and the subtleties of restoration.
After those six, I would return to Elihu and Job 28 as the next priority.
What Clines Contributes That Shorter Commentaries Usually Cannot
Clines’s greatest value is not simply comprehensiveness.
It is the combination of several habits of reading.
He takes individual Hebrew words seriously enough to discover when familiar English translations conceal genuine ambiguity. He treats speeches as rhetoric, asking what each character is trying to accomplish rather than merely extracting propositions. He follows Job’s thinking dynamically rather than expecting perfect consistency from a sufferer conducting an argument in real time. He notices legal metaphors that bind distant chapters together. He refuses to make the friends interchangeable. And he is willing to propose large structural reconstructions when he thinks the received arrangement does not adequately explain the text.
Those strengths also generate his weaknesses.
Clines can reconstruct too confidently. Some literary proposals require more textual rearrangement than many readers will accept. His interpretation of Job 19 is unusually restrictive. His location of Job 28 with Elihu is highly contestable. His reading of the divine speeches can marginalize divine justice more strongly than the whole book seems to warrant. His interpretation of Job 42:6 is possible and important but hardly certain. And his assessment of the epilogue can make the final restoration appear more at odds with the preceding theology than other readings require.
None of that reduces his importance.
A commentary can be profoundly useful without being a commentary one follows at every decisive point.
Indeed, this is where Clines belongs near the top tier of Job scholarship. He repeatedly makes the reader stop at precisely the places where a familiar interpretation had begun to feel obvious.
The Best Way to Use Clines
Do not approach these three volumes asking:
Can I finish them?
Ask instead:
Where does Clines see something I am unlikely to see without him?
Begin with his large-scale argument. Read his Explanation sections. Follow him closely through the legal imagery, Job’s changing attack on retribution, the third-cycle problems, Job’s final oath, the divine speeches and the epilogue. Enter the technical Notes when the interpretation genuinely depends on Hebrew or textual criticism.
And disagree when the evidence warrants it.
Clines’s three volumes are not the easiest way to learn what the book of Job says. There are shorter commentaries better suited to that task.
Their special value is different.
They are among the best places to discover how much more there is to argue about after you thought you already understood Job.
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