Job 24

1. WHY are times not laid up by the Almighty? And why do not they which know him see his days? 2 There are that remove the landmarks; They violently take away flocks, and feed them. 3 They drive away the ass of the fatherless, They take the widow’s ox for a pledge. 4 They turn the needy out of the way: The poor of the earth hide themselves. 5 Behold, as wild asses in the desert

They go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat;

The wilderness yieldeth them food for their children.

6. They cut their provender in the field; And they glean the vintage of the wicked. 7 They lie all night naked without clothing, And have no covering in the cold. 8 They are wet with the showers of the mountains, And embrace the rock for want of a shelter.

9. There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, And take a pledge of the poor :

10. So that they go about naked without clothing, And being an hungered they carry the sheaves ;

11. They make oil within the walls of these men ; They tread their winepresses, and suffer thirst.

12. From out of the populous city men groan, And the soul of the wounded crieth out : Yet God regardeth not the folly.

13. These are of them that rebel against the light ; They know not the ways thereof, Nor abide in the paths thereof.

14. The murderer riseth with the light, he kill- eth the poor and needy ; And in the night he is as a thief.

15. The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight. Saying, No eye shall see me : And he disguiseth his face.

16. In the dark they dig through houses : They shut themselves up in the day-time ; They know not the light.

17. For the morning is to all of them as the shadow of death ;

Chap. 24. From his own mysterious affliction he now passes to the mystery of God’s permitting the evil of the world to go on unpunished. V.—Job begins by asking, Why are not times (of assize) appointed by the Almighty ? and, Why do they that know Him not see His days (of judgment) ? This is Job’s complaint, that God the judge and ruler of the world fails to judge and rule it in righteousness. Men do not behold Him appointing times and holding days for doing judgment on wrong, and righting the oppressed. On the contrary, the powerful tyrants oppress and the miserable poor are oppressed (vs. 3-11), and God regards not the wrong (v. 12). Besides these public wrongdoers, there are other transgressors who shun the light. The murderer, the adulterer, and the robber ply their unhallowed trade in the darkness (vs. 13-17). And all of them, instead of being visited by God with sudden judgments, as the Friends insisted and as the popular literature described (vs. 18-21), are upheld in power by God, made to dwell in safety, and at last brought in peace to a natural death “like all others” (vs. 22-24). A. B. D.

The whole speech is most painful ; but, bearing in mind the real scope and object of Job’s

For they know the terrors of the shadow of death.

18. He is swift upon the face of the waters ; Their portion is cursed in the earth ; He turneth not by the way of the vineyards.

19. Drought and heat consume the snow waters : So doth Sheol those which have sinned.

20. The womb shall forget him ; the worm shall feed sweetly on him ; He shall be no more remembered : And unrighteousness shall be broken as a tree.

21. He devoureth the barren that beareth not ; And doeth not good to the widow.

22. He draweth away the mighty also by his power : He riseth up, and no man is sure of life.

23. God giveth them to be in security, and they rest thereon ; And his eyes are upon their ways.

24. They are exalted ; yet a little while, and they are gone ; Yea, they are brought low, they are taken out of the way as all other, And are cut off as the tops of the ears of corn.

25. And if it be not so now, who will prove me a liar, And make my speech nothing worth ?

trials, we see that it still leaves the foundation untouched. Far from forsaking God, Job’s great misery is that he cannot find Him ; far from believing that the inexplicable indications of injustice prove that God in His essential attributes is unjust, Job is sure that when God does manifest Himself, the righteous cause must prosper ; believing most fully that his righteousness here will have no recompense, nor save him from the most cruel afflictions, “he holds fast to his integrity,” and finds, as heretofore, his only consolation in the consciousness that he has walked with God. He doubts not that God has His own appointed seasons and methods of judgment, though neither he nor his opponents can discern them. His despair is complete so far as regards this life, but it does not reach the centre of his being ; he still offers the sublimest of all spectacles ; not that of a good man struggling with adversity, but that of one who, though prostrated by it and relinquishing all struggles as utterly useless, still cleaves to goodness and to God. Cook.

2-4. Fearlessly and unpunished, the oppression of the helpless and defenceless, though deserving of a curse, rages in every form. They remove the landmarks; they steal flocks, the ass of the orphans (their only beast for labor) they carry away, and the ox of the widow; they turn the needy aside from the way, so that they wander hither and thither without home or right, and the poor of the land are obliged to hide themselves altogether. D.

5-8. A continuation of the thought of v. 4. “The poor” of the land are the persons spoken of, who, on account of the cruelty of their oppressors are compelled to go forth, like “the wild asses” of the desert, seeking a scanty subsistence in the open rocky pastures. They are also compelled to perform hard service, gathering fodder in the field and gleaning the vintage for the wicked who oppress them. By night they are unprotected from the cold and rain, and are driven to hide themselves among the rocks, or in caves, for shelter. The imagery is peculiarly Arabic, that of the open desert, or outlying pastures. The whole is designed to show how the ungodly oppress the poor, and yet go unpunished. Curry.—We have thus before us a graphic portraiture of savage hordes, who, when displaced by a more civilized and powerful race, prowl in the desert, at once desperate and pitiless. It is evident that the writer describes occurrences of his own time and country.

13-17. These verses go farther still; they describe a class of still more desperate offenders; the oppressors and usurers previously described had a semblance of right, and may have kept within the limits of hard law, as yet unmitigated by the Mosaic code; those who now come before us sin against light. Cook.—They are murderers, thieves, adulterers, and burglars, and the methods by which they ply their evil arts are here indicated. They are night prowlers for plunder, but do not scruple to carry out their designs by murder itself. The adulterer also seeks the aid of darkness, and of a disguised habit, that he may not be detected, while others dig through houses for purposes of plunder. To all such light is unwelcome, because it stops their pursuits and exposes them to detection. Thus by their skill and contrivance they escape danger, and Divine justice allows them to remain undiscovered and unpunished.

21-24. Still another class of evil-doers is now introduced—men of position and political power, who, like the unjust judge of the parable, disregard the claims of right and justice, and have no pity on the poor and helpless. They surround themselves with confederates in oppression, and spoil and murder to promote their iniquitous purposes; and they often prosper for a season, or to life’s end, when, as is the common lot of men, they are gathered to the grave by the great harvester, Death. All this, it is assumed, is patent to every one who will consider the case, and so Job closes (v. 25) with a challenge to his antagonists to disprove his facts, or to show any want of pertinence in his arguments that God does not, in His judgments, distinguish between the wicked and the righteous. Curry.

24. The form of their death itself is by no means such as to reveal the retributive justice of God. And does it become at all manifest during their life? These, whose trust in their own strength God might smite down by His almighty power, He preserves alive, even in critical positions, by His power. God grants them a secure, peaceful existence, sustains them, and raises them up again; His eyes are on the ways of these men—they stand, as it were, beneath His special protection. They are brought to death without great suffering like other men. D.—Job thus declares, in direct opposition to the other speakers, that so far from living in terror, the evil-doer is in perfect security; instead of being overthrown he is supported; he is an object of special providential care; he rises to eminence, and when, like all men, he dies, it is by a sudden or painless death, preceded by no lingering disease, and not until he has reached his full term of life, like corn ripe for the harvest. In all this exaggeration there is an underground of substantial facts. It would have been easy to prove that such is not the general result of an evil life; but nothing short of a clear proof that no innocent man is ever overwhelmed by misfortune, and no guilty man ever escapes it, would overthrow Job’s position. The mystery is unsolved; Job does not doubt that God has a solution; he is sure that his opponents have not. “Who,” he concludes (v. 25), “will prove the falsehood of this statement, and invalidate my argument?” With this last outburst the storm passes by. Cook.

Job had now attacked their main position and had appealed to facts in defence of what he held. He maintained that, as a matter of fact, the wicked were prospered, that they often lived to old age, and died a peaceful death without any direct demonstration of the Divine displeasure. He boldly appeals to any one to deny this or to prove the contrary. The appeal was decisive. The fact was undeniable, and the controversy was closed. Barnes.—Job has shown that God’s rule of the world is not just, in the sense in which the friends insisted that it

was just, and in the sense in which his own moral feeling demanded that it should be just. God is not righteous, in the sense that He punishes wickedness with outward calamity and rewards the righteous with outward good. So far the three friends are defeated, and with their defeat on the general question their infer-

ences from Job’s calamities as to his guilt fall to the ground. A. B. D.—Job’s conclusive victory over his friends is indicated by the challenge with which he here seals his words. No one takes it up; for though Bildad yet speaks, his words are so aside from the issue as to be a virtual confession of defeat. J. F. G.