How Some Commentators View Job 42:11

David Clines (Job 38-42, WBC): The little phrase of the narrator’s, “for all the misfortune that Yahweh had brought on him,” lets slip the fact that neither Job nor his friends ever get to know anything of the events in heaven that precipitated his woes, or anything of the role played by the Satan. On the other hand, if they had known what readers know about the origins of Job’s sufferings, they may still have been inclined to refer to them as “the misfortune that Yahweh had brought on him,” since it was Yahweh who had no doubt been morally responsible for all that had transpired—despite the fact that the Satan was their immediate cause.

John Hartley (The Book of Job, page 541): Like the dialogue, this scene attributes the cause of Job's misfortune to Yahweh. There is no discussion of intermediate causes, for it was believed that Yahweh was the cause of all that takes place.

Norman Habel (The Book of Job, OTL, page 585): Job is now approachable like other mortals; he is no longer the isolated hero challenging heaven with his lawsuits. The misfortunes which Job experienced are here identified as "all the evil" (ra'a) inflicted by Yahweh. The agency of the Satan is now irrelevant. The "evil" Job experienced is indeed the "evil" he acknowledged from Yahweh's hands (2:10; cf. 30:26). God does indeed cause the innocent to suffer evil; such things are part of his cosmic "design."

Robert Fyall (Now My Eyes Have Seen You): Two important expressions crystallize the events as they have unfolded and are yet to happen. Verse 11 speaks of ‘all the trouble the LORD had brought upon him’, and verse 12 says that ‘The LORD blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first.’ The Lord is the sole cause of all that has happened and will happen. Verses 11–12 raise a number of questions that bear especially on the relationship of God and evil.

Robert Alden (Job, NAC): The first to welcome Job to his restored state were his siblings and friends, presumably the ones who shunned him during the height of his trial (19:13-15). They did what the friends had originally come to do, “comfort and console/sympathize with him” (2:11). “Trouble” is rendered “evil” in the older translations, but the Hebrew word is also the opposite of “prosperity/peace/well-being” as Isa 45:7 indicates.

Greg Welty (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-problem-of-evil/): It is one thing to acknowledge God’s sovereign and purposeful providence over the moral and natural evils mentioned in the Job, Joseph, and Jesus narratives. It is quite another to claim that God is sovereign over all moral and natural evils. But this is what the Bible repeatedly teaches. This takes us a considerable way towards licensing the GGT [greater good theodicy] as a general approach to the problem of evil. The Bible presents multitudes of examples of God intentionally bringing about natural evils – famine, drought, rampaging wild animals, disease, birth defects such as blindness and deafness, and even death itself – rather than being someone who merely permits nature to ‘do its thing’ on its own.