Job 16
Butler28. Ready to become heaps. This is an emphatic description of the condition of many sites of ancient renown which we have examined in the East, and which are literally heaps—nothing but heaps—covered with soil, and appearing like natural hillocks, but which are known to cover blocks of ancient building. The houses mentioned here are “houses of clay,” or of sun-dried brick, and such are the houses which are especially liable to become heaps. The recent descriptions of such mounds or heaps at Nineveh, by Layard and others, and the discoveries which their exploration has afforded, have rendered this condition of ancient cities—so different from that of stony ruins in various lands—familiar to the minds of our readers. It is to such kinds of “heaps” that we apprehend Eliphaz to refer to as the ultimate condition of “desolate cities.” We shall not readily forget the surprise, nearly akin to disappointment, with which we regarded the first ancient site of this sort that came under our personal notice—when, instead of broken walls, and towers, and columns of stone, nothing appeared but a confused wilderness of rounded “heaps”—a sea of solid billows. This happened to be Seleucia, on the Tigris, sometimes called Babylon. Kitto.
29. Many that get much by fraud and injustice, yet do not grow rich; it goes as it comes; it is got by one sin, and spent upon another. He is in care to keep what he has got, but in vain, his substance shall not continue; it will dwindle and come to nothing, God blasts it, and what came up in a night perishes in a night. Wealth gotten by vanity will certainly be diminished. H.
33. The grape in its first stage is peculiarly tender and liable to disease, and the flowers of the olive are shaken off by the least gust of wind.
34. Two charges are insinuated: hypocrisy, with reference to Job’s former reputation for piety, and bribery, with reference to his character as a judge; both words imply secret and unsuspected guilt, discovered only by the punishment. Thus Eliphaz answers Job’s protestations of innocence. Cook.
35. Finally Eliphaz condenses into an expressive figure the general doctrine both of this and his former discourse—namely, that suffering and disaster follow, as by a law of nature, doing evil and wrong A. B. D.—However wide of the mark these words may be as applied to Job, we cannot be blind to the power and truthfulness of this description of the terrors which sometimes beset the wicked. While many a wicked man goes through life in prosperity and apparently without fear, yet in the experience of one and another the retributions of the future are foreshadowed in this world. And no more terrible and graphic picture of a sinner thus pursued and foredoomed can be found than in these old Arabian sayings of Eliphaz. Vincent.
1. THEN Job answered and said,
2. I have heard many such things: Miserable comforters are ye all.
3. Shall vain words have an end? Or what provoketh thee that thou answerest?
4. I also could speak as ye do; If your soul were in my soul’s stead, I could join words together against you, And shake mine head at you.
5. But I would strengthen you with my mouth, And the solace of my lips should assuage your grief.
6. Though I speak, my grief is not assuaged: And though I forbear, what am I eased?
7. But now he hath me weary: Thou hast made desolate all my company.
8. And thou hast laid fast hold on me, which is a witness against me:
And my leanness riseth up against me, it testifieth to my face.
9. He hath torn me in his wrath, and persecuted me;
He hath gnashed upon me with his teeth:
Mine adversary sharpeneth his eyes upon me.
10. They have gaped upon me with their mouth; They have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully:
They gather themselves together against me.
11. God delivereth me to the ungodly, And casteth me into the hands of the wicked.
12. I was at ease, and he brake me asunder;
Yea, he hath taken me by the neck, and dashed me to pieces:
He hath also set me up for his mark.
13. His archers compass me round about, He cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare;
He poureth out my gall upon the ground.
14. He breaketh me with breach upon breach; He runneth upon me like a giant.
15. I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, And have laid my horn in the dust.
16. My face is foul with weeping, And on my eyelids is the shadow of death;
JOB’S second answer occupies two chapters. 1-5: He rejects the statements of Eliphaz as commonplace, such as he might have himself used with equal ease had the positions of the speakers been reversed. 6-16: He draws out all the circumstances of his misery in order to justify the extremity of his anguish, and after an asseveration of innocence (v. 17) he appeals to earth and heaven, and to God Himself (v. 20). In 17: 1-10 he continues the appeal, and grounds it on the scorn, contumely (v. 2), igno- rance (v. 4), and dishonesty (v. 5) of his friends. He then (vs. 11-16) concludes with an expression of utter hopelessness, so far as life is concerned; if there be hope it has no visible grounds, it has its only home in death. Cook.
Chap. 16. God’s turning away from Job causes men to avert their faces too. His isola- tion is complete. And to him who had once stood so high in the estimation of men, and as a man of deep human feelings yearned for men’s sympathy, the thought comes home with a crushing effect. This is the new thought in Job’s mind, and it is this thought that gives such a tragic pathos to his speeches in the second cycle of debate. In the first circle of speeches it is God’s enmity alone of which Job complains, but now there is added to this the universal alienation and abhorrence of mankind. This feeling gives tone to all his speeches, and in chap. 19, which forms the climax of this di- vision, finds its fullest expression in the words, Pity me, pity me, O ye my friends, why do ye persecute me like God? And this overmaster- ing feeling forces its way to expression almost in spite of him (v. 6) in the first part of the pres- ent speech (vs. 7-17). Nothing now remains to him but his own sense of his innocence; and to this he clings all the more tenaciously. He shall never be acknowledged in this life: he shall die under God’s hand and go down to the
17. Although there is no violence in mine hands, And my prayer is pure.
18. O earth, cover not thou my blood, And let my cry have no resting place.
19. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And he that voucheth for me is on high.
20. My friends scorn me: But mine eye poureth out tears unto God;
21. That he would plead for a man with God, And as a son of man for his neighbour!
22. For when a few years are come, I shall go the way whence I shall not re- turn.
grave numbered with the transgressors, for the hopes which the friends held out of restoration were but the veriest folly. But it is a martyr’s death that he shall die. And so strong is his sense of his innocence that he rises to the assur- ance that it cannot remain unrecognized forever. His innocent blood will appeal unto heaven with an unceasing cry till it finds a response (v. 18). And even now he has a Witness who will testify for him, even God as He is in Him- self in heaven. And to this Witness he makes his appeal. Men mock him, but he lifts his tear- ful face (v. 20) to God, God as He is in truth and as He must reveal himself in the future, begging that He would uphold his right with God, who now is unjustly bringing him to death, and do justice between him and his fel- lows, whose suspicions so cruelly wrong him (v. 21). And if he may not ask or expect that God would appear for him in this life, yet he will beseech God to give him some pledge even here that afterward, when he shall have gone the way whence he shall not return, He will make his innocence to appear (v. 22). A. B. D.
2. Many such things. Such wise saws as identify guilt with suffering. “Miserable comforters,” or “comforters of trouble,” who bring nothing but trouble. The same word is used here which in the last verse of the preced- ing chapter is rendered “mischief.” Job thus retorts, the conception of mischief or trouble applies more directly to those whose duty it was to console the afflicted. Cook.—Eliphaz has just blamed Job (chap. 15) for despising the “consolations of God.” Job retorts that the friends are administering just the reverse of consolation; they are tormenting comforters. J. F. G.
4. In my soul’s stead. In the same state, like mine, wretched and desolate. Heap up words; the original phrase implies artificial combinations of words, as though it were all mere rhetorical declamation. Cook.
6-17. Leaving here what Eliphaz has said, Job returns to his own line of thinking, which he laid down at the end of chap. 14 with the unsolved problem of death. It is the thought of his suffering that he now takes up, and especially with reference to the author of it. J. F. G.
He hardly knows whether he shall speak or be silent, so overcome is he and so unavailing to help him or make men judge truly of him are both speech and silence—if I speak my grief is not assuaged, and if I forbear what am I eased? (v. 6). Yet this new condition in which he realizes that he is, which makes speech useless, forces him to speak, and he sets before himself in an excited soliloquy the combined enmity to him of men and God. First (vs. 7-11), he realizes to himself the complete estrangement from him of all familiar friends; God’s enmity to him has turned men also into foes (vs. 7, 8). This combined enmity of God and men is represented under what seems the figure of a creature hunted by one great, lion-like assailant, leading on a host of minor, ignobler foes. The chief adversary is first described, his rending anger, and gnashing teeth, and flashing eyes (v. 9); and then the pell-mell rout of baser foes that howled behind him, their open mouth and shameless gestures, and full cry after the prey, which is flung over into their hands (vs. 10, 11). Second (vs. 12-17), the hostility of God Himself is particularly dwelt upon in graphic figures, which express its unexpected suddenness, its violence and destructiveness. One figure is that of a man suddenly grasped by another of overwhelming strength and tossed about and dashed to pieces (v. 12). Then the figure changes, and this shattered frame is set up as a mark, and God’s arrows hiss around him and split his reins and pour out his life to the ground (v. 13). Again the figure changes, and this body seems some fair edifice or fort which God dismantles by breach upon breach till it lies a sorrowful ruin (v. 14). And finally is described the condition of humiliation to which the sufferer is brought, and all this befell him, though he had done no wrong (vs. 15-17). A. B. D.
7. The notable thing of this whole passage is that Job hardly knows how to identify the author of his misery. He speaks here of “He,” without naming God; in the next breath he turns directly to God and says, “Thou;” again it is “His anger” (v. 9), as if Job were reluctant to tax God directly with it; then it is “mine enemy,” as if it were some fell power whom he dared not name. Anon it is “they” (v. 10), as if it were an army of foes, or as if his friends were combined with the unseen powers.
Clearly. Job is hesitating to ascribe to God such hatred as he must recognize in his punishment; he is groping after the God of love, and unwittingly drawing near to Him. J. F. G.
7-9. No solacing word shall come to him. He means to say that he stands entirely alone, and neither sees nor hears anything consolatory. He is therefore completely shut up to himself; and this suffering form to which God has reduced him is become an evidence, an accusation, which puts him down as a sinner, although his self-consciousness testifies the opposite to him. It was the wrath of God which tore him so and pursued him hostilely. God has gnashed against him with His teeth, and sharpened His eyes, like swords, to pierce him through. His present suffering is only the continuation of the decree of wrath which is gone forth concerning him. Delitzsch.—It is Job’s deep-rooted conviction of the goodness of God which embitters him and stimulates accusation; for why, being so good a being, should He treat him thus? Under the complaints of Job there is perceptible the feeling of the peculiar hardship of suffering under a good Being whom he was bound to honor and reverence. He shows the inconsistency of perplexed love, keenly alive to the goodness of its object, and quickly susceptible on that very account of anger toward it. Mozley.
11. The contumely to which Job is exposed is attributed to God’s will; the heaviest affliction of all was, that he should be delivered up to men whose want of honesty, truthfulness, and love evinced their wickedness. Cook.
12-14. The imagery shows the sufferer, first, as one assailed from without, seized by the neck, and again made a mark to be shot at; next, we see his very vitals torn within him; and last, he is likened to a fortress broken by successive assaults of an irresistible antagonist. In all this God Himself is the efficient cause and agent. Curry.
15. Laid my horn in the dust. Generally the horn appears in the Bible as a symbol of strength and power. The figure is undoubtedly taken from horned animals, whose power in attack or defence rests in their horns; and hence the word came to be used to denote the qualities which confer greatness on man—his honor, dignity, and strength. At length the horn itself, commuted eventually for a representation of it, came to be worn as a sign of power; and as such it appears in the most ancient figures of gods and spiritual existences, and was also worn by princes and leaders of men. Of this there is now no question, for the representation of two, and often four horns, two on each side, enfold the turbans or crowns of the most exalted beings represented in the sculptures of Nineveh. Kitto.—To exalt the horn—an expression often occurring in the poetic and prophetic parts of the Bible—means to advance in power, honor, and dominion. To defile it in the dust is a figure drawn from the condition of a dying ox or stag, who literally defiles his horn in dust mingled with his own blood. It is painfully significant of defeat, disgrace, and death, and for a prince like Job it was to be dishonored and utterly overthrown. W. M. Thomson.
17. Job’s condition was very deplorable; but had he nothing to support him, nothing to comfort him? Yes; he had the testimony of his conscience that he had walked uprightly, and had never allowed himself in any gross sin. None was ever more ready than he to acknowledge his sins of infirmity; but he could not charge himself with any enormous crime, for which he should be made more miserable than other men. “Not for any injustice in my hands, any wealth that I have unjustly got or kept.” Eliphaz had represented him as a tyrant and an oppressor. “No,” says he, “I never did any wrong to any man, but always despised the gain of oppression.” Eliphaz had charged him with hypocrisy in religion, but he specifies prayer, the great act of religion, and professes that in that he was pure, though not from all infirmity, yet from reigning and allowed guile. H.
Not for any injustice. In the original exactly the same words are used which are applied to Christ by Isaiah (53:9): “Because he had done no violence,” or, “not that he had done any violence.” In this passage the meaning is given more accurately. Job directly meets the two charges of injustice toward man and hypocrisy toward God.
18. Cover not Thou my blood. In this sublime outcry Job alludes to the old belief that the blood of one unjustly slain remains on the earth. The earth cannot absorb it, it cries aloud for vengeance. (See Isa. 26:21; Ezek. 24:7,8, and Gen 4:10.) It is the strongest assertion of his innocence; he dies guiltless; his blood, like that of Abel, cries to God; that cry can have “no place,” no rest until it is answered. Thus while in form appealing to earth, Job in fact appeals to God Himself. Cook.
“I must die, but it is unrighteous murder. Let the earth refuse to drink in my blood thus unjustly shed, so that it may remain forever exposed, a constant witness to the terrible wrong perpetrated upon me; and let my death-cry never be hushed to silence, but resound forever in testimony of the cruel violence under which I suffer. I die, unable longer to sustain these dreadful inflictions which God is bringing upon me; but I die protesting against the injustice and the outrage.” Has Satan, then, gained his end, and has Job at length fallen into the snare? In the frightful darkness which has, to outward view, obscured the evidence of God’s rectitude, has Job given up his sense of that rectitude? Is his confidence in God’s eternal justice gone? Then has he indeed been driven to that renunciation of God’s service to which Satan has been relentlessly endeavoring to force him. No! In all this agony and darkness and inexplicable mystery Job cannot let go his ineradicable trust in God. Brought, as it might seem, almost to the point of abandoning it, the strength of that trust only becomes more conspicuous from the strain to which it has been subjected. By its powerful recoil it carries him suddenly back from the verge of the abyss to the immovable foundation. The faith that seemed to be vanishing, if it had not already vanished, rises unexpectedly superior over all the tumult of his soul, and all depressing circumstances. From his frantic outcry against the injustice that is slaying him he passes to the instant expression of his unabated trust in God in vs. 19, 20. W. H. G.
19. In the next breath Job turns for vindication to the very quarter whence he has supposed the injustice comes. In his thought he seems to divide the God who oppresses him from a God who loves him and represents his cause; at least he commits himself by a mighty reach of faith to an Advocate on high, though he does not clearly identify such an Advocate fully with God. Job evidently thinks of the Advocate as the Daysman whom he so longed for; and we see the advance he has made in faith by the fact that the being whose existence he despairingly denied then he now acknowledges with passionate assertion. J. F. G.
19. Even now, in the very midst of my desolation, when I seem to be wholly without a supporter. In this verse Job prepares us for the great declaration (19:25). Up to this time he reaches, but does not go beyond the expression of his certainty that his righteousness is known; his one desire is that God will vindicate it; but he cannot rest there; the certainty and the desire combined cannot but issue in the sure hope of a future manifestation. God Himself is Job’s witness, he has no other, all his trust is in Him who afflicts him. Cook.—As if Job had said, I fear no evidence that can be brought against me on earth, and I rejoice in the witness which I have in heaven: though I have none to testify for me here, yet I have One who will testify for me above; “my Witness is in heaven, and my record is on high.” A good man dares appeal to God, and commit his cause to Him, deriving joy and comfort from the reflection that there is a God in heaven who knows his heart, and is the witness of all his ways. Caryl.
Already in chap. 10 Job had drawn a distinction between God of the present, who persecuted him as guilty though he was innocent, and God of the past, whose gracious care of him had been wonderful; though there he grasped at a frightful reconciliation of the contradiction: God of the present, who destroyed him, seemed the real God, and His past mercies were no true expression of His nature. In chap. 14 Job reached out his hand into the darkness and clutched at another idea, a distinction between God of the present, who would pursue him unto death, and God of the future—God when His anger should be overpast and He would yearn again toward His creature, the work of His hands. This God of the future was God as He is in truth, true to His own past dealing and to man’s conceptions of Him. It is on this line of thought that the present passage moves. A. B. D.
Job says: “God has done me apparent wrong. I am innocent and He has smitten me. It seems unjust, but there is right somewhere at the bottom of this mystery. God can vindicate Himself and right me. God can reconcile the three facts of my integrity, His justice, and my suffering. To God, and to none other, will I appeal. I am sure that He will hear this plea against Himself, and vindicate both Himself and me.” This is a most wonderful utterance in its boldness and faith. It is worthy of the highest Christian character—this faith which, with so little to hang upon, with so much arrayed to shake it, struggles up through desertion by God and man to the love in God’s heart which will not suffer Him finally to abandon His children; a faith which fights down the hideous phantom of God raised by disease and an imperfect knowledge, and presses past it to the true God. Even with our Christian training, with our knowledge of the Divine, loving intent of chastening, do we not sometimes suffer our disappointment and our grief to frame for us a phantom God, with a frowning face behind the frowning Providence? V.
20. Scorn me. Literally, are my scorners, or mockers, instead of being my witnesses. Because his friends mock him, and no sympathy or insight is to be looked for from them, his eye droppeth—he appeals with tears to God (cf. Isa. 38:14). What Job desires of his Witness is that He would see right done him both with God and with men—with God, who wrongly held him guilty, and against men, his fellows, who, founding on God’s dealing with him, held him guilty also and were his mockers. A. B. D.—My scorners are my friends; they who scorn me are those who ought to befriend me; they have nothing but taunts and gibes to give me in place of comfort. The appeal to God proves how intimately Job is penetrated with the feeling of His real tenderness and love. “Poureth out tears,” literally, streams; the eye melts away, so to speak, in a flood of tears.
21. The meaning of this verse is, Oh, that He (that is, God Himself) would plead for a man (i.e., for me) with God. Job appeals from God to God; as He is at once Accuser and Judge, so he prays that He would be also at once Advocate and Judge. Each aspiration becomes clearer and draws nearer to the unrevealed truth; no “daysman” who is not, like the Judge Himself, all-knowing and Almighty, will suffice. As a man pleadeth for his neighbor. Either, “and as a son of man for his fellow,” or, as Dillm. prefers, and for the son of man (i.e., Job) against his neighbor—i.e., that God would plead Job’s cause, first, before Himself as Judge; secondly, against Job’s fellow-men. The designation which Job here applies to himself, son of man, is remarkable; he feels that he really represents the cause of suffering humanity. We know of whom in this he was a true type. Cook.
Yet here his idea of the Advocate stops; it must take another surge of faith before he connects his immortality therewith. J. F. G.
22. Go the way I shall not return. Without raiment, without money, we, our very selves, must pass the river. No sound from the street or market-place; no news of the day; no literature in any form to pass the time; no amusement to distract; no society to float us on from hour to hour; no excitement to color the paleness of the landscape. All disguises stripped off; all prejudices annihilated; all errors refuted. However much luggage we may have accumulated by the way, all is taken from us at the station, which is the starting-point from whence we must walk toward the city of the great King, crowned with light, or that other city, whose streets are full of misery. Bishop W. A.
The hand of God was in these dreadful sorrows. Why had He sent them, or permitted them? Job was in utter darkness and perplexity, and the only solution which offered itself, and toward which he was persistently driven by antagonism to the inadmissible position urged upon him by his friends, was not reconcilable with the goodness or justice of God. Hence the tumult of his soul and the tempest of conflicting emotions which rages within him. Reason and sense urge him in one direction, and the strong recoil of faith drives him back in the other; and thus he is swayed perpetually to and fro, still hoping against hope, ever afresh seeking unto God who had cast him off, unable to escape from conclusions to which the logic of his sufferings seemed to constrain him, or to banish the forbidding spectre of an angry God which they perpetually raise before him, and yet holding fast to his inmost convictions, in spite of all that seems to contradict them. This inward struggle of Job is vividly depicted in his successive speeches in reply to his friends. These lay bare all the workings of his soul, and the fearful agitation which was going on within him. They disclose the terrible conflict through which he was passing, in its various phases, until out of the depths of despair he fought his way to solid peace. They show what gloom and darkness had settled upon his path; to what spiritual straits he was reduced; but how in spite of all he never abandoned his faith in God. He staggered and tottered under the tremendous blows which were given him, and it seemed at times as though he could not recover himself and must fall. But somehow he always regained his footing, and never lost his balance entirely. The adversary was foiled, and the piety of Job, which he sought to undermine or to destroy, sustained the test and triumphed in the encounter. W. H. G.