Job 18
Butler1. THEN answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 2 How long will ye lay snares for words? Consider, and afterwards we will speak. 3 Wherefore are we counted as beasts, And are become unclean in your sight? 4 Thou that tearest thyself in thine anger, Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? Or shall the rock be removed out of its place? 5 Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, And the spark of his fire shall not shine. 6 The light shall be dark in his tent, And his lamp above him shall be put out. 7 The steps of his strength shall be straitened, And his own counsel shall cast him down. 8 For he is cast into a net by his own feet, And he walketh upon the toils. 9 A gin shall take him by the heel, And a snare shall lay hold on him. 10 A noose is hid for him in the ground, And a trap for him in the way. 11 Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, And shall chase him at his heels. 12 His strength shall be hungerbitten, And calamity shall be ready at his side.
In this angry and intemperate speech of Bildad it is difficult to discern any advance, or even variety of argument. It consists of vituperations, in which the words used by Job to describe his misery are taken as applicable, universally and exclusively, to the calamities which befall the wicked. There is no suggestion of hope, no admonition even which would indicate the possibility of amendment. Job is to Bildad henceforth simply as one that “knoweth not God” (v. 21). In the discourses of Job there is a steady onward progress; the distinction between the appearance and the reality continually becomes clearer; his aspirations assume a more definite form, gradually approaching the confines of hope; and the consciousness of inward integrity, with a full perception of man’s natural and inherent sinfulness, and his own participation in it through the passions of youth and the infirmity at all seasons of life, finds ever a more forcible and evangelical expression. But in direct contrast with this, in the speeches of each and all the interlocutors, the change is altogether from better to worse, from sympathy to alienation, from well ordered reasoning to senseless and cruel upbraidings, from vindica-
13. It shall devour the members of his body, Yea, the firstborn of death shall devour his members. 14 He shall be rooted out of his tent wherein he trusteth; And he shall be brought to the king of terrors. 15 There shall dwell in his tent that which is none of his: Brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation. 16 His roots shall be dried up beneath, And above shall his branch be cut off. 17 His remembrance shall perish from the earth, And he shall have no name in the street. 18 He shall be driven from light into darkness, And chased out of the world. 19 He shall have neither son nor son’s son among his people, Nor any remaining where he sojourned. 20 They that come after shall be astonied at his day, As they that went before were affrighted. 21 Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, And this is the place of him that knoweth not God.
tion of God’s justice to uncandid and violent representations of the effects of His vengeance. In the following speech, and in the answer of Job, we find the central crisis of the discussion. On the one hand, the fury of the incensed friends is well-nigh exhausted; on the other, the hope of a perfect vindication (inseparably bound up with an instinctive, though undeveloped and half-conscious belief in a future resurrection), for the first time takes the form, which has been recognized by believers in all ages as the sublimest utterance of a devout and heaven-taught spirit, brooding on the mystery of life and anticipating its true solution.
1-4. Job is blamed for idle words, contempt of his friends, vain and desperate struggles, and useless aspirations. Cook.—Bildad here shoots his arrows, even bitter words, against poor Job, little thinking that in this instance he was serving Satan’s design, in adding to Job’s affliction. He charges him with idle, endless talk, as Eliphaz had done; with a disregard of what was said to him (v. 2); with a haughty contempt of his friends (v. 3); with outrageous passion and an arrogant desire to give law even to Providence itself (v. 4). H.
5-21. The disastrous end of the wicked, in the
moral order of the world, is certain. The idea is set out in a great variety of graphic figures, and the speech is studded with sententious and proverbial sayings in the manner of the speaker’s first discourse (chap. 8). The history of the wicked man’s downfall is followed through all its stages: 5-7. The principle—the sinner’s light goes out. 8-11. The progress of his downfall. 12-14. The final scenes. 15-17. The extinction of his race and name. 18-21. Men’s horror of his fate and memory. A. B. D.
The ruin and misery of the wicked, the destruction of his race, the extinction of his very name, are described with much force and variety of imagery, but without any new thought. As in his former speech, Bildad rests altogether on the recorded facts and sayings of the past. Cook.—The description is terribly brilliant, solemn, and pathetic, as becomes the stern preacher of repentance with haughty mien and pharisaic self-confidence; it is none the less beautiful, and, considered in itself, also true—a masterpiece of skill in idealizing. Delitzsch.
7. The cunning of a wicked man often defeats itself. A man’s sin will not only be found out, but will find him out. It is only another form of expressing Paul’s words, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Bildad gives us this truth when he says of the wicked, “His own counsel shall cast him down.” The inevitable, natural, only outcome of evil is entanglement, stumbling, confusion, ruin to the evil-doer. V.
11. Terrors on every side.** A striking personification; the inward terrors take a bodily form, are realized, and beset him without intermission; the very symptoms which Job had described so vividly, in the vain hope of exciting compassion (3 : 25 and 7 : 14). Cook.
14,15. Death itself is called “the king of terrors” in distinction from the terrible disease which is called its “firstborn.” Death is also personified by Isaiah (28 : 15), and in the Psalms (49 : 15) as a ruler in Hades, as in the Indian mythology the name of the infernal King Jamas signifies the tyrant or tamer. The biblical representation does not recognize a king of Hades; but the judicial power of death is allotted to angels, of whom one, the angel of the abyss, is called Abaddon (Rev. 9 : 11); and the chief possessor of this judicial power—he having the power of death (Heb. 2 : 14)—the angel prince who according to the prologue of our book has also brought a fatal disease upon Job, without, however, in this instance, being able to go further than to bring him to the brink of the grave. But since Job himself and the friends trace back directly to God that mysterious affliction which forms the dramatic knot, we may understand by the king of terrors death itself. After the evildoer is tormented for awhile and made tender, and reduced to ripeness for death by the firstborn of death, he falls into the possession of the king of terrors himself; slowly and solemnly, but surely and inevitably (like the march of a criminal to the place of execution) he is led to this king by an unseen arm. The description next advances another step into the calamity of the evildoer’s habitation; “brimstone” is strewed over it, to mark it as suffering the fulfilment of the curse, and not again to be rebuilt or inhabited. Delitzsch.
16-20. His roots shall be dried up.** The figure is changed, but the thought is the same—the complete overthrow and destruction of the evildoer; as a tree “his roots shall be dried up,” and his branches cut off; as a man among men his name shall perish, the execrations of men shall chase him out of the world; as a father he shall leave behind him neither son nor son’s son, and if remembered at all after his death it shall be only as a spectacle of retribution for sin. Curry.
21. That knoweth not God.** The climax of all charges is a direct denial of Job’s most solemn protestations. Cook.—Bildad wrote under the picture which he had drawn, these are the habitations of the wicked, and held it up before Job. It was meant for him, for all that is specific in it is borrowed from the circumstances of his case. The terrible distemper, the “firstborn of death,” that consumes the sinner’s limbs, is too plain an allusion to his leprosy to be misunderstood by him (v. 13). The brimstone that burns up the sinner’s habitation (v. 15), though there may lie in it a distant reference to the cities of the plain, is also the fire of God that fell on Job’s cattle and their keepers (1 : 16). The tree dried up at the roots and withered in the branches (v. 16) reminds Job easily enough of his own wasted state and of the sad calamities that had blighted his home. The horror and detestation of men (v. 20) is but a picture of what was passing before the eyes of the disputants, and is a touch of ruthless severity, which brings Job utterly to the dust; for while in his former speech (chaps. 16, 17) he is able in the strong sense of his innocence to resent the treatment of men, he is here wholly broken by it (19 : 21). Every sentence of Bildad’s speech carries with it the charge, Thou art the man. A. B. D.