욥기 38:1의 주석

from the tempest Heb. מן הסערה. Count your hairs and I will give you as many answers. From the tempest with which you reproached Me (above 9:17), “He Who would crush me with a tempest,” I will answer you, as you will hear at the end of the chapter (verse 25), “Who has separated a place for the hair?” a shaft for every hair. Another explanation: With a tempest He afflicted him, and with a tempest He healed him, as is explained in Sifrei(?).

1. God’s Providence extends over mankind severally, in as much as He had listened attentively (Psalms 116:2) to everything Job had said and had now come to argue with him and teach him some sense (Ecclesiastes 12:9). This testifies to the existence of individual Providence over all the steps a man takes (Psalms 37:23, Proverbs 20:24). Thus, Job’s thesis that God does not administer the world is refuted.

2. Man’s soul is divine¹בת אלוהים - a daughter of God. and immortal, alive and protean. For the only way we can conceive of God speaking with man is by virtue of his soul being a part of Him. And when the soul sheds its bodily coat, it perceives with that Divine Perception which is an integral part of the Selfhood of the Blessed One.²The actuality of the Revelation is more significant than its content: the medium is indeed the message. The metaphysical is made physical through revelation. Instead of the Neoplatonist postulate of a Logos, viz. a transcendental intellect standing between God and man to whom knowledge and Providence is ascribed rather than to God himself, Malbim postulates that man's soul is a 'piece of God'. When God speaks to man He is in fact speaking to his soul - to the 'piece of God' that is clothed in man. The soul's divinity is only manifest when it is separated from the body, i.e., during a prophetic experience or in the Hereafter. Thus, all the doubts Job had expressed concerning the immortality of the soul and the concept of redress in the world to come are shown to be unfounded. For he now has a living experience of how the soul separates from the body during a vision or an encounter with God and of the spiritual bliss it enjoys from glimpses of His Holiness.

With this, God directly answers all the questions Job had asked concerning the suffering of the righteous. For it makes him realize that man’s essence is his soul. which is distinct from the body and cleaves to God; to gaze upon the pleasure of the Lord (Psalms 27:4) and to hear His voice from the fire (Deuteronomy 5:20); And this is the essential reward that awaits the righteous after the wasting of the body, when the spirit returns to the Lord who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7).

God addresses him at length on this point, elaborating on how His Providence extends severally over everything He created; over the totality of existence as well as each individual creature. How He concerns Himself with the needs of each creature, availing it of food and shelter, and providing for the survival of its species, both in the matter of its birth and the sustenance of its offspring; and all the more must this Providence extend over man, the chosen-one of the creatures.

After explaining all of this, God goes on to deliver a second lecture to Job, in which He replies to the question he had asked concerning the prosperity of the wicked, namely, why God does not wipe out the wicked who ravage civilization like beasts of prey. In His response, God points out that a similar question can also be asked concerning the animal world: why He created both weak and strong animals that live alongside one another, the strong preying on the weak. According to Job, He should only have created weak and powerless creepy-things! But that would not have befitted the greatness of the Creator. His stature requires that He create awesome and terrifying creatures whilst providing, through His Providence, for the weaker species to survive, thereby demonstrating that from on most high, a guardian, (Ecclesiastes 5:7) a Single One, rules over all of them. Likewise, there are fierce, tyrannical and powerful individuals amongst mankind, but He has nevertheless provided, through His Providence, for the survival of humanity by making it societal by nature, endowing it with the power to do justice and act with probity (Proverbs 1:3, 2:9) as Elihu has already clarified in Chapter 35.³It might well be asked why God did not take the opportunity of revealing to Job the simple truth, that we the readers have known all along, namely, that his suffering and the loss of his family and all his possessions occurred within the setting of a contest between God and Satan as to whose evaluation of his integrity was correct. That God does not do so is perhaps of no lesser significance; there are some things that a person just does not have to know.

At this point, Job confesses that he had not spoken sense (Job 34:35) in all his arguments. He reveals that throughout the entire debate his mind had not been at one (2Kings 5:26) with the words in his mouth (Psalms 36:4). For in truth, in his heart, he had believed all along in Providence and the immortality of the soul. His whole polemic was just an attempt to find a way to this end through the medium of study and thought: it was all by way of being a search. As the master of the prophets [Moses] had said, Show me Thy Glory. (Exodus 33:18) He too had first investigated this subject by the use of reason and had worked on composing the Book of Job, in which he recorded all his investigations and insights in these matters. But when he saw that no solution could be found by the use of reason, he had asked that God Himself make the glory of His judgments and Governance known to him, as He had to Job,⁴Carried away by his faithfulness to the rabbinical tradition, namely, that Moses was the author of Job, Malbim is driven into contradiction. If Moses wrote the Book of Job before the Exodus, as Malbim postulates, he must have known the truth concerning the workings of Providence that Job is about to learn from God before the revelation at Mount Sinai and the sin of the golden-calf. Consistency requires that Moses must have been asking for something else when, following these events, he asks of God: 'Show me Thy Glory'.
Alternatively, perhaps Malbim is suggesting that Job and Moses are one, and God's lectures here in the Book of Job were His reply to the request made by Moses, and He showed him... and told him; (Deuteronomy 34:1) and he was then comforted for being dust and ashes (Job 42:6).