Bible Person
Meaning: old friendship · Male · 5 cross references
Bildad the Shuhite is one of Job's friends and one of the major voices in the debate over suffering. He represents a stern form of traditional wisdom that assumes moral order is always directly visible in human outcomes. First appears in Job 2:11.1
AI summary: Bildad matters because the cross references present him as one of the persistent defenders of conventional retribution theology in the book of Job. His speeches are sharp, often severe, and increasingly unable to account for Job's actual condition. Yet his presence is necessary because the drama of the book requires these inherited answers to be tested and exposed. Taken together, the material presents Bildad as a serious but limited interpreter of suffering whose arguments intensify Job's crisis.1
Central Figure
Bildad
Meaning: old friendship
Son of contention, one of Job’s friends.
Son of contention, one of Job’s friends. He is called “the Shuhite,” probably as belonging to Shuah, a district in Arabia, in which Shuah, the sixth son of Abraham by Keturah, settled (Gen. 25:2). He took part in each of the three controversies into which Job’s friends entered with him (Job 8:1; 18:1; 25:1), and delivered three speeches, very severe and stern in their tone, although less violent than those of Zophar, but more so than those of Eliphaz. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, person metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.