The Book of Job & the Tetragrammaton /Το Βιβλίο του Ιώβ & το Τετραγράμματο

Job is confounded not by a vain and arrogant inventory of created items but by his own shortsightedness in blaming a god he believed omnipotent and whim sical. Job realizes that Yhwh is fully involved in his creatures' suffering and struggle. This is precisely why the text has shifted from the use of divine nonpersonal designations such as El, Elohim, Eloah, El Shadday, to the proper name, Yhwh. Yhwh himself stresses the meaning of the shift in 40:2: "Shall a faultfinder contend with Shadday? Anyone who argues with Eloah must respond." As we have seen, God challenges Job. He is telling Job that as long as he engages him as omnipotent Elohim, he, Job, is insignificant and his suffering is lost in the void. The dialogue becomes meaningful when God is the personal respondent that the name Yhwh signifies. Yhwh stresses the inanity of disputing with Eloah or Shadday and the necessity for him to reveal himself as the human's intimate engaged in the fight against evil. Job's reply is the dawning of an insight: "I have uttered what I did not understand" (42:3). Indeed, as long as he tried to contend with the distant deity, he elicited no answer, made no progress, and ended up as a "faultfinder."

* André Lacocque,
“The Deconstruction of Job's Fundamentalism,”
Journal of Biblical Literature,
Vol./Τόμ. 126, No./Αρ. 1 (Spring/Άνοιξη, 2007),
The Society of Biblical Literature,
p. 91 [pp. 83-97].