Job 19

1. THEN Job answered and said

2. How long will ye vex my soul, And break me in pieces with words ?

3. These ten times have ye reproached me : Ye are not ashamed that ye deal hardly with me.

4. And be it indeed that I have erred, Mine error remaineth with myself.

5. If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, And plead against me my reproach :

6. Know now that God hath subverted me in my cause, And hath compassed me with his net.

7. Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard : I cry for help, but there is no judgment.

8. He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, And hath set darkness in my paths.

9. He hath stripped me of my glory, And taken the crown from my head.

10. He hath broken me down on every side, and I am gone : And mine hope hath he plucked up like a tree.

11. He hath also kindled his wrath against me, And he counteth me unto him as one of his adversaries.

12. His troops come on together, and cast up their way against me, And encamp round about my tent.

13. He hath put my brethren far from me, And mine acquaintance are wholly estranged from me.

14. My kinsfolk have failed, And my familiar friends have forgotten me.

15. They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger : I am an alien in their sight.

FROM the abyss of darkness and cheerless de- spondency Job struggles constantly upward toward the light. In each successive speech there is some fresh reaching out toward help or hope. Every address made by his friends shows him more and more plainly that nothing is to be looked for or expected from them ; they still persist in refusing to him even that meas- ure of relief or consolation which human sym- pathy might supply. Cut off from all earthly assistance or even pity, there is no one but God to whom he can have recourse. And here he is torn by conflicting feelings. God is persecut-

16. I call unto my servant, and he giveth me no answer, Though I intrcat him with my mouth.

17. My breath is strange to my wife, And my supplication to the children of my own mother.

18. Even young children despise me ; If I arise, they speak against me.

19. All my inward friends abhor me : And they whom I loved are turned against me.

20. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, And I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

21. Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends ; For the hand of God hath touched me.

22. Why do ye persecute me as God, And are not satisfied with my flesh ?

23. Oh that my words were now written ! Oh that they were inscribed in a book !

24. That with an iron pen and lead They were graven in the rock for ever !

25. But as for me, I know that my redeemer liveth, And at last he shall stand up upon the earth ;

26. And after my skin, even this body, is de- stroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God :

27. Whom I, even I, shall see on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My reins are consumed within me.

28. If ye say, How we will persecute him ! Seeing that the root of the matter is found in me ;

29. Be ye afraid of the sword : For wrath bringeth the punishments of the sword, That ye may know there is a judgment.

ing and afflicting him, and, to all outward ap- pearance, is treating him as an enemy. And still he cannot let go that inward persuasion, which manifests itself at first but dimly, and yet grows in clearness and strength as he recurs to it, that God will not altogether withhold His favor from him. Each time that he essays to speak, sense and faith stand in blank antagonism. His sufferings press overwhelmingly upon him with their apparent evidence that God is against him. But faith comes with its whispers, scarcely audible, and yet refusing to be stifled, that God must nevertheless be on his side. These suggestions of his unquenched confidence in God are only hypothetical at first. If such an obstacle were only removed, or if such a condition could only exist, then God would surely manifest Himself in his favor. But the obstacle remains; the condition is impossible to be realized; and so he sinks back each time into a state of unrelieved despondency and gloom. But his despair is no longer absolute and total. These suggestions of faith and hope gradually assume a more definite form, and take upon themselves more reality. They gain in strength, and come to a fuller utterance with each successive response he makes to his friends, until at last they grow into a clear and decided conviction, which vanquishes the temptation completely and forever by the language of triumphant assurance, “I know that my Redeemer liveth!” W. H. G.

Chap. 19. After a brief expostulation (vs. 2-4) Job declares, in the strongest possible language, his conviction that the calamities, which he enumerates with greater force and fulness than in any preceding discourse, are not reconcilable with any known principle of the Divine government; they come from God, and cannot be justified by such reasonings as those which he has repeatedly refuted (vs. 6-20); they ought to excite pity; man ought to sympathize with his fellow when he is smitten by God. This course of thought issues in a complete triumph of the inner principle. He calls attention to the words which he is about to speak, as the only ones which deserve a perpetual record, which sum up the whole of his convictions, and will endure forever. His cause, being the cause of righteousness, is secure; for God (who has hitherto but shown Himself in wrath, in terror, in accusations, as an object of mysterious awe and terror) is Himself his Redeemer, a Redeemer now living in heaven, hereafter to be manifested in earth; to be seen after the destruction of Job’s whole bodily frame by Job’s own eyes. He concludes with an emphatic warning, that they who judge harshly will be judged unsparingly. Cook.

Job realizes from Bildad’s words, more clearly than before, his dreary isolation, God and men being alike estranged from him, which he laments in most pathetic words. But so profound and unalterable is his consciousness of his innocence, that at the moment when he has entered step after step into the thickest darkness he makes a sudden leap out into the light, and rises by an inspiration to the assurance that his innocence shall yet be revealed, that God will yet publicly appear for him, and that he shall see God.

The order of thought is well marked: First (vs. 2-6), some preliminary words, as usual, of a personal kind, though these are here fewer, the speaker’s mind being filled with greater things. He gives brief expression to his impatience of his friends’ diatribes, and repudiates the inferences they drew from his calamities; his calamities were due to God, who had perverted his right. Second (vs. 7-27), this reference to God leads over to the theme of the whole chapter, which is nothing but God. The sufferer’s mind wrestles with his thought of God—the thought of Him as the Author of his present terrible fate, from which he rises by a sudden revulsion to the thought of Him as One who must yet appear as his vindicator and joy. This part has three steps: A dark picture of the desertion of God and His terrible hostility to him (vs. 7-12). Then even a more touching complaint of the alienation of men from him—which God has caused (vs. 13-22). Hopeless in the present, he turns his eye to the future. He desires that his protest of innocence might find indelible record in the rock, that the generations to come might read it. Yet how small a thing that would be to him, whose chief sorrow lay in the alienation of God from his spirit. He shall have more. He knows that God shall yet appear to vindicate him, and that he shall see Him with his eyes—in peace (vs. 23-27). Finally he adds a brief threat to his friends (vs. 28, 29). A. B. D.

2,3. Three points are urged: his friends’ cruelty, their pertinacity, and their injustice. Cook.

4-6. Let it be granted that I am in an error; if ye, upon that ground, “magnify yourselves against me, and plead against me my reproach,” then, “know that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with His net;” this answer may put you to silence. As if he had said, The hand of God is upon me; why do you lift up your heads against me? Caryl.—If they really maintain that he is suffering on account of flagrant sins, he meets them on the ground of this assumption with the assertion that God has wronged him and has cast His net over him, so that he is indeed obliged to endure punishment. In other words: If his suffering is really not to be understood otherwise than as the punishment of sin, as they would uncharitably and censoriously persuade him, it urges on his self-consciousness, which rebels against it, to the conclusion which he hurls into their face as one which they themselves have provoked. Delitzsch.

5,6. A direct statement that, if he be condemned on the ground that God has put him to shame, he is prepared to prove that the providential dispensation, as understood by his friends, is not just. The word is purposely strong, He hath overthrown, or rather perverted me, dealt with me unjustly. It must be borne in mind, that the object of the Divine dispensation was precisely the reverse of what Job’s friends had assumed it to be; that it was not intended to punish his guilt, but to test and prove his righteousness; interpreted as they interpreted it, it would have been a perversion of justice. Cook.

7. In the unshrinking truthfulness with which he utters his inmost feelings, we are startled by the boldness and seeming irreverence with which he arraigns the rectitude of the Divine proceedings. But it is not the daring recklessness of presumptuous speculation intruding on the unrevealed; nor is it the profane utterance of the impious transgressor blaspheming his Maker. It is the transparent sincerity of the tempted soul, driven almost to distraction by suggestions which are forced upon him and which he cannot shut out. In his conscious integrity he denies the righteousness of any infliction which charges that upon him of which he is not guilty; he denies the justice of executing sentence upon him for crimes of which he was free. If God, in sending these sufferings upon him, has marked him out as a criminal, as his friends allege, then He has perverted justice, He has done him wrong. W. H. G.

9-12. Which way soever Job looked, he thought he saw the tokens of God’s displeasure against him. Did he look back upon his former prosperity? He saw God’s hand putting an end to that (v. 9): “He has stripped me of my glory, my wealth, honor, power, and all the opportunity I had of doing good; my children were my glory, but I have lost them; and whatever was a crown to my head, He has taken it from me, and has laid all mine honor in the dust.” Did he look down upon his present troubles? He saw God giving them their commission, and their orders to attack him. They are His troops, that act by His direction, which encamp against me (v. 12). It did not so much trouble him that his miseries came upon him in troops, as that they were God’s troops, in whom it seemed as if God fought against him and intended his destruction. Time was when God’s hosts encamped round him for safety; Hast Thou not made a hedge about him? Now, on the contrary, they surrounded him to his terror, and destroyed him on every side (v. 10). Did he look forward for deliverance? He saw the hand of God cutting off all hopes of that; (v. 8) “He hath fenced up my way, that I cannot pass;” I have now no way left to help myself, either to extricate myself out of my troubles, or to ease myself under them. H.

11. The climax, God deals with him as an enemy. What makes this so appalling but Job’s own ineradicable love and faith? The complaint tells of natural weakness, but proves spiritual firmness: God may appear to forsake him, he will not renounce God.

12. His troops. All things that work together for man’s weal or woe are God’s apparitors, the executors of His will. Cook.

13-21. Job’s complaint now is even more touching than before; God not only afflicted him with trouble, but removed far from him all human sympathy. And there is something more breaking to the heart in the turning away of men from us than in the severest sufferings. It crushes us quite. We steel ourselves against it for a time and rise to it in bitterness and resentment, but gradually it breaks us, and we are crushed at last. And this seems the way, whether men frown on us with justice or no. And there came on Job when he contemplated his complete casting off by men, by his friends and his household and even by the little children, a complete break-down, and he cries, Pity me, O ye my friends. A. B. D.

20,21. Wasted away to a skeleton, and become both to sight and smell a loathsome object—such is the sufferer the friends have before them; one who is tortured, besides, by a dark conflict which they only make more severe; one who now implores them for pity, and because he has no pity to expect from man, presses forward to a hope which reaches beyond the grave. Delitzsch.—The last and strongest appeal to human pity, but made in vain; the hand of God had touched him, so they esteemed him “smitten of God and afflicted.” That was to them the very ground why they would not pity him. Cook.—Overcome by his sense of the terrible enmity of God, Job piteously cries out for the compassion of men. There is a strong antithesis between “ye my friends” and the “hand of God.” The whole speech, even when the enmity of men is referred to (v. 13, seq.), is occupied with the thought of God; he is regarded as the cause of man’s abhorrence. A. B. D.

22. “Why do ye persecute me as God?” Surely His rebukes are enough for one man to bear, you need not add your wormwood and gall to the cup of affliction He puts into my hand. If they did delight in his calamity, let them be satisfied with his flesh, which was wasted and gone, but let them not wound his spirit and ruin his good name. H.

23-29. The great declaration of the book introduced with words of unusual solemnity; whatever may become of other words, whether wrung from him by misery, or expressing yearnings, aspirations, or even hope, Job will have this recorded, for it speaks of a certainty. Cook.

23,24. Perceiving that he had made no impression upon them, the afflicted patriarch suddenly raises his voice and expresses his ardent desire that the words he had uttered in his own defence should be recorded in some enduring memorial. It is clear that the loss of character is involved in the imputations which the friends shower upon him. All other evils are in his view light to this; and what he desires is not so much deliverance from his misery, as the vindication of his integrity. And thus he practically refutes the, to him unknown, insinuations of Satan, that his piety was founded on selfish motives. Kitto.—That which Job here somewhat passionately wished for, God graciously granted him; his words are written, they are printed in God’s Book; so that wherever that Book is read there shall this be told for a memorial concerning Job, He believed, therefore he spake. H.

We give the translation which seems to us preferable:

“O that my words were now recorded!

O that they were engraven on a tablet!

With an iron grave, upon lead;

That they were graven in a rock forever.”

The careful reader will here find four ideas, rising to a climax in the grandest and most durable form of writing. Job first expresses a wish that his words were simply written down or recorded in the ordinary mode, without specifying any. He then goes on to engraving or writing on tablets, that may have been of wood, earthenware, or bone. Then he comes to the process of writing on tablets of soft metal, with a pen or stylus of harder metal, a pen of iron on tablets of lead. Lastly, he would have them “graven in the rock forever.” It was certainly a grand idea for man to think of committing to the living rock, and of thus giving a magnificent permanency to the record of his history and his thoughts. Many such monuments of the most ancient date have been found in various countries, but none more extensive or remarkable than those in the Written Mountains of Sinai. These inscriptions are found in the hills and valleys which run toward the northwest to the vicinity of the eastern shore of the Gulf of Suez. Kitto.

This desire to have his words inscribed upon the rock is not so much an introduction to what follows as the conclusion of what precedes. It represents not his rising consciousness of triumph, but rather his lowest depth of desolation and hopeless despair, joined with his inward consciousness of integrity, that demands some recognition. Bereft of every helper, human and Divine, crushed beneath an unrighteous sentence, his appeals to God unheard, and his friends joining in the merciless persecution, he asks that the rocks may take up his dying declaration, and that his words may be indelibly written there, so that the imperishable stone may speak his innocence of these false charges, and testify of the wrong that has been done him, after his own voice is hushed. And thus his appeal to the rocks to transmit his defence to all coming time will be parallel to his passionate apostrophe to the earth in his last preceding speech (16:18): “O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place.” It is the outcry of one hopelessly overwhelmed by unjust imputations and wrongful treatment, but to whom his integrity is dearer than his life, and who insists that what is true and right shall have the assertion to which it is entitled; and who cannot but believe after all that eternal justice shall find a response somewhere and at some time. W. H. G.

The desire suddenly seizes Job to make his appeal to posterity, to record in writing his protestation of his innocence, or to grave it in the rock, that when he is gone men might read it to all time. Yet this thought satisfies him but for a moment. Even if the generations to come should not only mitigate but reverse the judgment of his contemporaries, how small a thing that would be to him! And his mind rebounds from this thought forward to a greater—he knows that His redeemer liveth and shall appear for his vindication and peace. A. B. D.

In the very reaction from his despair of human help, he suddenly rises to the highest level which he attains in the book, “to a point where he catches a prophetic sight of a larger hope and utters the sublime words which more than any others have become associated with his name.” V.—All at once he breaks out into that avowal which for all the ages since has remained the supreme utterance of the Book of Job, which gathers into one mighty assurance the solution of all his problems, the final reach of his aspiring faith, revealing in one view the Advocate on high, the vindication beyond death, God his restored friend—and binding all together with the exultant word, I know. J. F. G.

Job has already expressed a wish that there might be an umpire between him and God; then he goes further and desires an advocate; then declares that he has a witness, One who exactly knows his rights, in heaven; then calls upon God Himself to be his advocate. He now takes a stronger position, and declares his certainty that there is One who adds to all these conditions that which gives them solidity, and assures his final triumph; there lives One who will vindicate his righteousness and clear his cause completely. Cook.

This passage forms the grand climax in the utterances of Job’s faith, to which he has from the first been slowly but steadily rising. It is the turning-point in his discussions with his friends, the culmination and the close of his sore inward conflict, the full and complete outcoming of a trust which has been gradually gathering strength in the face of the most formidable opposition, and struggling to find expression, and the crowning victory over Satan’s fiercest and most subtle temptation. It is faith planting itself firmly on the unseen, when not one single external ground of support remains. Who the Redeemer is in whom Job thus affirms his confidence cannot admit of a moment’s doubt. It is the same of whom he had declared in his preceding speech (16:19), “My Witness is in heaven, and my record is on high;” and whom he had supplicated to be his Surety (17:3) when all others refused to espouse his cause; and of whose sentence in his favor he had again and again expressed his strong assurance, if his cause could but be brought before Him so as to obtain His decision. Now all doubts have vanished; every condition that had previously clogged his hopes is removed. The Lord has undertaken for him. The Lord has engaged upon his side. The Lord will defend him against all injury and wrong. God, who seems to be persecuting him with such relentless hostility, is not his Enemy. The Witness to his integrity on high, to whom he had appealed to become his Surety, becomes his Redeemer, the Avenger of his innocent blood, vindicating him, appearing as his Champion, and on his behalf, and, as he in the verses next ensuing warns his friends, punishing them that have done him wrong. W. H. G.

The conception of an Invisible One who can “be wrought to sympathy” with human hopes and fears grows clearer with every utterance of the sufferer. At last there comes one of those flashes of inspiration by which from time to time God heralds His fuller revelation. Whatever be the literal meaning of this celebrated passage, from which to English ears thoughts of an incarnate Saviour and a resurrection from the dead can never be dissociated, it is certain that it leaps in its large aspiration far beyond the purest hopes that up to this time had stirred even Hebrew hearts. In the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, Job is made to cast one marvellous look through the mysterious darkness of death, and see God, his Avenger, stand, as it were, above his dust and vindicate his character upon his grave. In this great hope he is able himself to live again, and to appropriate the living Redeemer, and look upon Him when the skin is wasted from his bones and his body destroyed. Aglen.

Whatever may happen, he shall not perish; leprosy may eat up his flesh, and even consume his bones; his friends may bring against him the gravest charges, but what does it matter? It is to God alone that he will for the future carry his appeal. He is sure of God—yes, sure of Him even at the very time when this God seems to be doing everything to ruin him. Does he express in these words his hope of a mere cure, when it shall please God to suspend the ravages of leprosy, and to say to that incurable disease, “Thus far and no farther?” Or does he, despairing of all cure here below, cast himself upon the certainty of a resurrection, properly so called? Between these two interpretations which have divided commentators, would not Job perhaps have himself hesitated? Does he not feel his ignorance as to how God will dispose of this body, this living skeleton, in which he is still suffering and groaning? But what he does know for certain is that, whether by means of a cure, or else by means of a resurrection, live he shall—for his Redeemer lives. All the truths that Jesus draws (in Matt. 22:32) from the expression, “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” are comprehended in this cry of faith from the patriarch: “My Redeemer liveth!” Godet.

I know. It is a bold challenge made by a suffering man to the ages. The ring of conviction resounds in every line and fills the air with its thrilling music. Three distinct assertions follow this quickening preface. First, he declares that God is the Vindicator of right-seeking and right-doing men. Of the fact he is sure; of the how and when and where he says nothing; but an invincible faith that before the “last” moment in his history comes God will be his Redeemer from all the ills of which he is now the victim animates and sustains his suffering spirit. Job is sure that he himself, in his own conscious person, will be the rejoicing witness of that Divine vindication. The chief, the conquering, the most meritorious quality in Job’s mood of mind is his clear and steadfast recognition of the real but dimly revealed law that the suspension of the accepted and outward manifestations of the Divine care and regard is not the suspension of the Divine sympathy, nor the withdrawal of the Divine love and help. J. Clifford.

My Redeemer. With an intense significance the great word goel (“Redeemer” or “Vindicator”) is invested in virtue of its general use throughout the Old Testament. The goel was the near kinsman in Israel on whom the right and duty of redeeming were devolved. The goel brought back the forfeited inheritance; redeemed the slave; avenged the slain; perpetuated the family name and heirship among the families and estates in Israel. In fine, he was the redeeming, avenging, vindicating, perpetuating kinsman; whose name and deeds must have come to be embalmed in tearful, joyful family memories. And this is the word employed by Job when he passionately exclaims: “But I know that my Goel—my redeeming kinsman—liveth.” Anon.—The goel means any one who has the right and duty to vindicate one who has suffered wrong. Job certainly did not believe that any man was in that position; the only Goel he could possibly rely upon was the living God. Cook.

My Redeemer liveth. “Liveth” means more than is, exists. Job uses the word in opposition to himself—he dies, but his Redeemer lives after him. Job has in God a Goel who liveth. This Goel will vindicate his rights against the wrong both of men and God. At the same time, this vindication is regarded less as an avenging of him than as a manifestation of his innocence. This manifestation can only be made by God’s appearing and showing the true relation in which Job stands to Him, and by Job’s seeing God. For his distress lay in God’s hiding His face from him, and his redemption must come through his again beholding God in peace. Thus the ideas of Goel and Redeemer virtually coincide. A. B. D.

It may not be without its deeper significance and its divinely intended meaning that the term “Redeemer” had the association linked with it, both in patriarchal and Mosaic usage, of the next of kin. Is there not here possibly a shadowing forth of more than Job himself intended or imagined when he used the word? an index pointing to that Divine Redeemer, who is, withal, our nearest Kinsman, and who allied Himself to us in the bonds of our common humanity, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, that He might have a kinsman’s right to espouse our cause, to vindicate us from the accusations of the law, and free us from the sentence of death written in our members, and open to us life and immortality with the beatific vision of God. W. H. G.

26. The whole expression “after this my skin has been destroyed and without my flesh” means “when I have died under the ravages of my disease.” The words do not express in what condition precisely, but after what events Job shall see God. A. B. D.—Job certainly did not expect that the manifestation would be granted before death. Whether in the body or out of the body, he was sure that after the utter destruction of his frame—of the last fragment of his physical being, he would see God with his own eyes. Cook.

Job knows the just God too well not to be sure that his upright disposition toward God will come to light after death, if not before, and in such a way that he himself will be present in personal vitality. The certainty of a life after death is here born out of painful conflict. What in chap. 14:13 was mere longing desire, in chap. 16:18 took the shape of bold demand, and here has become joyous certainty—namely, that even death cannot bury the right. This Goel is none else than Eloah (16:19), his seeming opponent. He has a representative who is living, not subject to death. And the satisfaction which God grants him is that he will behold Him, after death, the God who now hides Himself from him. The dark riddle is solved and the ban broken. The greatest bliss a believer can conceive is this beholding of God. But grand as is this inward conquest of death through the certainty of righteousness in God’s sight and fellowship with Him, still the passage does not, as has been thought, contain a direct Messianic prophecy. Orelli.

I shall see God. The last words explain who Job’s Redeemer or Goel is, and who He is who remaineth or shall come after him—viz., God. After his skin is destroyed and without his flesh he shall see God. Before death he shall not see Him, for he shall die under His afflicting hand (cf. 23:14), but he shall yet behold Him. To see God is to see Him reconciled and in peace, for this is implied in seeing Him at all, because now He hides His face.

27. These words might mean merely, whom I myself shall see; or, for myself may mean, favorable to me, on my side and to my joy. A. B. D.

Away from his flesh he shall see God, his Vindicator, his Looser. The core of his trouble has been that God hid Himself; he could not see Him; he could not come into court with Him and plead his cause face to face. He shall see God at last, plead his cause and receive his vindication. For that face-to-face vision and vindication, for that, he says, “my reins are consumed within me.” V.—The latter words are an exclamation, meaning, I faint. The reins are the seat of the deepest feelings and experiences, especially of those toward God. Job began with expressing his assurance that he should see God, but as he proceeds, so vivid is his hope that it becomes almost reality, the intensity of his thought creates an ecstatic condition of mind in which the vision of God seems almost realized, and he faints in the presence of it. Everything here centres in the assurance that he shall see God; and this steady faith is expressed in each of the three verses, with only verbal variations. . . . The great idea of the passage is the manifestation of the Divine Deliverer, and that single idea is expressed first in direct and concise terms, and next with accompanying conditions. The main thought in Job’s mind is that God will appear to vindicate his innocence and that he shall see God to his joy; the question whether this shall be in this life or beyond it is of only secondary importance. Being himself conscious of his own rectitude, and believing that God also knew it, he fell back upon the assurance that in spite of the greatness and completeness of his present desolation, God would somehow become his Vindicator. There is an evident antithesis of thought between Job’s anticipated death and his hope of a living Redeemer. I shall return to the dust, but He shall stand over my dust. The vindication may not be now, in my flesh, but in the hereafter, without my flesh, so joining together the laying aside of the flesh and the putting on of immortality. A. B. D.

28,29. It is quite in accordance with Job’s custom elsewhere to follow one of his passages of deep and true insight by a note of warning in which the friends’ purblindness is recognized. This is the most solemn passage of the kind, as befits the lofty reach of faith that precedes it. J. F. G.—The probable rendering is this: “If ye shall say, ‘how shall we persecute him?’ and ’the root of the matter is found in me,’ then be ye afraid of the sword for yourselves, for scorn is one of the sins of the sword, so that ye will know that there is a judgment.” If this rendering be accepted, the former verse would describe the acts and words of Job’s persecutors, who cast about how they may heap indignities upon him, and attribute the root or cause of all that has happened to his own sin; the second verse (29) warns them of the sure penalty, the sword of Divine wrath will punish them deservedly; for such burning scorn is a capital offence, and they will learn by their own experience that there is a righteous Judge. Cook.

From this point onward Job no more struggles with the problem of death; a fact which indicates that the immortality here recognized is henceforth taken for granted. Nor is God any more regarded as an enemy. J. F. G.

The Christology of the Book is indirect. There are no express references to the Messiah, though several passages may seem unconscious prophecies of Him, as those that express Job’s desire to meet and see God as a man (9:32; 23:3). Job’s God or Redeemer is God. A distinction of persons in the Godhead was not present to his thoughts when he used this term; though the conception of God in the passage and many things said in it may find verification in God’s manifestation of Himself in His Son. The strange distinction which Job draws between God and God, God who persecutes him and God who is his Witness and Redeemer, is of course not a christological distinction, nor one that corresponds to any distinction in the Godhead made known to us by subsequent revelation. The distinction was one which Job’s ideas almost compelled him to draw. He believed that every event that occurred came immediately from God’s hand; and he believed that every event that befell a man reflected the disposition of God’s mind toward him; calamity indicated the anger and prosperity the favor of God. This second superstition is the source of all his perplexities; and the distinction which he draws between God and God is his effort to overcome it. God whom he appeals against is the rule and course of this world, the outer providence of God, to which Job can give no name but “God.” God to whom he appeals is the inner mind of God toward His servants, the moral ideal of the human heart. This is God his Witness and Redeemer. Job succeeded in drawing this distinction; but the reconciliation which the distinction demanded he was only partially successful in effecting. He could not reach the idea that God, the heart of God, might be toward him, while God—the outer course of the world—afflicted him. These two things could not be at the same time. But they might succeed one another. Hence his reconciliation is temporal; God will bring him unto death, but after his body is destroyed God shall appear to vindicate him and he shall see God. The doctrine of Immortality in the Book is the same as that of other parts of the Old Testament. Immortality is the corollary of Religion. If there be religion—that is, if God be, there is immortality, not of the soul but of the whole personal being of man. This teaching of the whole Old Testament is expressed by our Lord with a surprising incisiveness in two sentences—“I am the God of Abraham. God is not the God of the dead but of the living.” A. B. D.

We have in vs. 25-27 the undoubted utterance of the truth of the higher hope which looks joyfully beyond physical death into the immortality of the soul. It is true that this hope is as yet without any of the luxuriant developments of it which were often carried beyond all proportion in later times; we see it here quite in its first fresh germination as a new and certain view, just as it springs forth from an inward necessity. The view that Job expresses here an earthly hope, and does not at all speak of the time after death, is indeed totally false. It is opposed to the words themselves, to the connection of the thoughts, and sins against the meaning of the whole Book, and against the plain advance from 14:13-15; 16:18, seq., and finally to this passage. Ewald.—The Book of Job is throughout a very hymn of immortality. If this world were all, all was lost for Job; God was a terrible enigma; chance was God; providence was but a name. But Job, in the depth of his anguish, “knows that his Redeemer liveth, and that without his flesh he shall behold God.” H. P. L.

The doctrine of immortality comes in solely to still Job’s inward conflict, and bring him to a settled conviction that there is peace between his soul and God, which no outward and temporal troubles can destroy. This it effectually does. Job’s inward agitation ceases from this moment. He is no longer distracted by the sense of God’s hostility and wrath. His outward situation is unchanged, and the problem of his sufferings is as mysterious as ever; but he has attained to inward peace. He knows that his Redeemer liveth, and that after his worn and suffering body shall be resolved into dust the clouds shall break away which now obstruct his vision of the face of God. The lesson of immortality has accomplished its end. But in what relation, it may be further asked, does this passage stand to the doctrine of the Messiah and of a corporeal resurrection? Is Job’s Redeemer ours, and his faith the same in which the people of God now rejoice in the completed victory over death and the grave?

When Job appeals to his Redeemer, he does so without even remotely apprehending that He is the second person of the Godhead; for of the distinction of persons in the Diving Being, and of the doctrine of the Trinity as unfolded in the New Testament, he knew nothing. But he addresses Him in a character, and solicits the fulfilment of an office which distinctively belongs to God the Son. He is and has been in every age the Redeemer out of every distress, the Guardian and Protector of His people, and their Deliverer both from temporal distress and from that everlasting woe of which the former is the figure and the type. It is He to whom the saints of God are indebted for that joyful prospect of the vision of God beyond the grave, to which Job looked forward. So that the doctrine of Christ is here approached from its Divine side, not as the Son of Abraham, but as the Son of God. W. H. G.

Job here speaks out the conviction and the prophecy of a future retributive life; not of a bodily resuscitation from death, but of a future beholding of God in a spiritual state. His hope is the hope of immortality rather than of resurrection. But we need not break the bond which links this passage with the Christian truth of the Resurrection. We are not forbidden to read back to these passages in New Testament light and to make them expressions of New Testament truth. While there is no good reason for believing that Job in this sublime utterance saw what Paul did when he wrote 1 Cor. 15, we may still use these words to formulate our hope of the Resurrection. He who abolished death and brought immortality to light is in the grandest sense our Redeemer, our Goel, loosing for us the bonds of death, becoming our Surety with the God with whom He is one, thus fulfilling Job’s words that He will justify His own against Himself. This Redeemer liveth, ever liveth to make intercession for us. V.—God has given to us, for our faith to rest on, something more distinct and tangible than He gave to Job. There has been One on earth through whose lips God’s voice spoke, and from whose character was reflected the character of God. A living Person manifesting Deity. It is all this added meaning gained from Christ with which we use these words: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” F. W. R.

They that live the spiritual life have it from the Son of God, and by believing in Him: He rises from the dead and lives forever; therefore they also live immortally. These are the short, clear steps in that evangelic argument. But no line of reasoning establishes the conclusion.