1 Then Bildad the Shuhite an swered:
2 His is dominion and awesome power,
he who establishes peace in the heavens.
3 Can his armies be numbered?
Upon whom does his light not rise?
4 How can man be righteous before God?
How can one born of woman be pure?
5 Even the moon is not bright
nor are the stars pure in his sight –
6 how much less man – this insect,
the human – a worm?
Bildad offers a new presentation of the splendor of the world. The people of that time still had very primitive ideas about the origin of the world. They accepted the legends of neighboring people, the Canaanites and the Chaldeans, that presented the universe as organized by the gods after they had destroyed the monsters of chaos. For centuries, the Jews kept these images; they were satisfied to remove from the legends the references to pagan gods and spoke of a first victory of Yahweh at the beginning of the world. See also Isaiah 51:9.
The first chapter of Genesis was written after these poems. There the notion of God-Creator is purified: God created everything from the beginning and he did so by his word alone.
