Job 3

A. B. D.—Owing to the distance, and the leisurely modes of travel and of sending reports in the East, very likely the “months of wretchedness” of which Job speaks in chap. 7:3 intervened before the friends reached him. J. F. G.

11. Three of them are here named—Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. We shall meet with a fourth after, who, it should seem, was present at the whole conference—namely, Elihu; whether he came as a friend of Job, or only as an auditor, does not appear; these three are said to be his friends. H.—Teman was a city of Edom (Jer. 49:7, 2); Ezek. 25:12, 13); Shuah was a district in the “east country” of

Arabia Petræa, where Abraham’s sons by Keturah were settled (Gen. 25:2, 6); Naamah was a city of Edom (Josh. 15:21, 41). Hales.

12,13. They could not more delicately express their commiseration for him in his terrible sorrows, which it was beyond the power of human helpers to mitigate or to relieve. There is no room for supposing that they entertained any other than the most friendly feelings, or that any ungenerous suspicions had as yet taken possession of their minds as to the reality of Job’s piety, or the reasons of these extraordinary sufferings which had been sent upon him. W. H. G.

1. AFTER this opened Job his mouth, and 2 cursed his day. And Job answered and said:

3. Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the night which said, There is a man child conceived.

4. Let that day be darkness; Let not God regard it from above, Neither let the light shine upon it.

5. Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own; Let a cloud dwell upon it; Let all that maketh black the day terrify it.

6. As for that night, let thick darkness seize upon it: Let it not rejoice among the days of the year; Let it not come into the number of the months.

7. Lo, let that night be barren; Let no joyful voice come therein. 8 Let them curse it that curse the day, Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.

9. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: Let it look for light, but have none; Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning:

10. Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.

11. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me?

12. Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should suck?

13. For now should I have lien down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest:

14. With kings and counsellors of the earth, Which built up waste places for themselves;

15. Or with princes that had gold, Who filled their houses with silver: 16 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; As infants which never saw light.

17. There the wicked cease from troubling; And there the weary be at rest. 18 There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

19. The small and great are there; And the servant is free from his master. 20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, And life unto the bitter in soul;

21. Which long for death, but it cometh not; And dig for it more than for hid treasures; 22 Which rejoice exceedingly, And are glad, when they can find the grave?

23. Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, And whom God hath hedged in?

24. For my sighing cometh before I eat, And my groanings are poured out like water.

25. For the thing which I fear cometh upon me, And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me.

26. I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither have I rest; But trouble cometh.

THE cry of misery is thrice repeated in the chapter:

1-10. Would God I had never been conceived or born.

11-19. Would God I had died from my birth.

20-26. Why does God continue life to the wretched, who long for death? A. B. D.

The opening of Job’s first speech reveals something of the obscure march of his soul during those silent days. The first feeling of a soul thus plunged into undeserved misery we can readily divine—the sense of utter bewilderment. This is the feeling that finds expression in Job’s first speech, wherein he opens his mouth and curses his day. Weariness of life, passionate desire for death with its rest and its oblivion, which are the emotions that shape his utterance, are after all but the surface-waves of his agitation; its deep cause lies in his feeling that his life has lost its guidance and direction. The only outlet for his overburdened heart, in this opening speech, is just to sigh over a life that contains no reason for living. It is worthy of remark that Job’s question is not, why he is punished, but why a life so bitter and dark should have been given at all. Punishment implies desert, or if not desert, then injustice. To have given his affliction the name of punishment would have set him at once in the attitude of seeking for its cause, either in himself or in God. That the cause should be in himself, either as wicked, or even as unconsciously corrupt through the innate sinfulness of men, has never entered his mind; on the contrary, one great element of his bewilderment is his consciousness of the watchful solicitude with which he has hitherto led a life of faithful integrity before God. No more is he ready to fasten the cause, even by remote implication, upon God. J. F. G.

Day after day, week after week, he is still compelled to drag his heavy burden. How long we know not. Through all this protracted period he bore his grief in silence. But at length nature can hold out no more: he can endure it no longer, and he gives vent to the most distressed sighs and groans; but in it all observe that he does not rail against God. In the most passionate manner he utters his wailing cry, “Oh, that he had never been born, or that when born he had perished!” He longs for death; he would clutch at it as the miser grasps his gold. Why is this coveted privilege of death denied him? The sentences are not to be nicely weighed. They must be judged of from the situation of Job. They are the language of one tortured beyond endurance, who cannot support the anguish that he suffers, and whose life has become an intolerable burden. Allowance must be made for these paroxysms of helpless, hopeless sorrow. His strength was not the strength of stones, nor his flesh of brass. He was incapable himself of weighing what he uttered. It only represents the bitterness of irrepressible woe. Still, bruised as he is, hopeless of good, with but one wish, and this that he might die, Job does not reproach or revile his Maker. The tempter has broken his spirit, and crushed him to the earth; but he has not succeeded yet in wresting from him his integrity or bringing him to forsake his God. W. H. G.

A paroxysm of violent grief vents itself in the following imprecations. The passion, however, subsides a little in the latter part of the speech, and flows in the soft complaining strain of elegy. This impotence of mind in Job, so inconsistent with his former firmness, may be accounted for in part from the influence of his disease; to which must be added his not having obtained any abatement of his affliction notwithstanding his submission, and his suspicion, from the silence of his friends, that he was to expect no consolation from them. Scott.—Job is neither rigidly to be taxed with blasphemy or profaneness, nor totally to be excused for this high complaint. It must be granted that Job discovered much frailty and infirmity, some passion and distemper, in this complaint and curse; yet notwithstanding we must assert him to be a patient man, yea, a mirror of patience; for consider the greatness of his suffering, the multiplicity of his troubles; that his complainings and acts of impatience were but few, but his submissions and acts of meekness under the hand of God were very many; take also into consideration that, though he did complain, and complain bitterly, yet he recovered out of these complainings; he recalls what he had spoken, and repents of what he had done. Caryl.

In this wild and passionate outburst of feeling it is important to mark that there is no approach to the impiety which Satan hoped to provoke. The language of the sufferer is reckless and vehement, but it comes from the depths of a single and simple heart. As yet there is not even a complaint of injustice, not a question of the providence which has allowed the affliction. Existence indeed has become inexpressibly miserable, and for a time the active trust once habitual to this pious soul is paralyzed. Sick in body and sick in mind, his one wish is for death to come to end the weary scene of monotonous, never-ending pain that robs him of thought and rest, and even of hope. Aglen. —Surely Satan was deceived in Job, when he applied that maxim to him, All that a man hath will he give for his life; for never any man valued life at a lower rate than he did. H.

1-10. With regard to the mere fact of Job’s cursing the day of his birth, and so forth, this is much less offensive than some of his subsequent utterances. It is less offensive to an Oriental than to a European imagination. The feelings of grief, of despair, of hate, of joy which with us are vented in the simplest forms of expression, are in the East carried to the utmost limits of language and thought, are applied in all their possible circumstances. That this kind of language was not regarded as more heinous than such phrases in common use as we have produced is shown by the fact that (not to mention other instances) the Prophet Jeremiah curses his days in terms as hot and passionate, though “less amplified,” as does our patriarch in this place, and for the very same reason too—“Because he came into the world to see labor and sorrow, and that his days were consumed with shame.” Job is certainly not more to be blamed than Jeremiah—perhaps less, for the prophet possessed the light of a brighter revelation than was afforded to the patriarch. Kitto.

It was not so bad as Satan promised himself; Job cursed his day, but he did not curse his God; was weary of his life, and would gladly have parted with that, but not weary of his religion; he resolutely cleaves to that, and will never let it go. The dispute between God and Satan concerning Job was not whether Job had his infirmities, and whether he was subject to like passions as we are (that was granted), but whether he was a hypocrite, and secretly hated God, and, if he were provoked, would show it; upon trial, it proved that he was no such man. Nay, all this may consist with his being a pattern of patience; for though he did thus speak unadvisedly with his lips, yet, both before and after, he expressed great submission and resignation to the holy will of God, and repented of his impatience; he condemned himself for it, and therefore God did not condemn him; nor must we, but watch the more carefully over ourselves, lest we sin after the similitude of this transgression. H.

11-13. The whole strophe contains strong reasons for his cursing the night of his conception and birth. It should rather have made the womb barren, and so have withdrawn the sorrow he now experiences from his unborn eyes. The four questions (vs. 11, 12) form a climax.

He follows the course of his life from its commencement in embryo to the birth, and from the joy of his father, who took the new-born child upon his knees, to the first development of the infant, and he curses this growing life in its four phases. Delitzsch.

17. How much is here contained in a few words! The grave, it is the boundary line of wrongdoing—“there the wicked cease from troubling.” The grave, it is the close of labor—“there the weary are at rest.” The grave, it is the refuge of the bond-slave—“there the prisoners rest together,” no more afraid of the oppressor’s scourge. The grave, it is the triumph of equality: the small and the great are there, “no distinction between master and servant.” Liberty, equality, fraternity, striven for in the world of the living, is the fundamental law in the world of the dead; the mightiest become equally defenceless with the most feeble, when Death points the finger; and every step we trace across the churchyard shows us the image of quiet, freedom, and repose! Yet let us remember that it is not death that is the deliverer of suffering humanity, but the Prince of life, who lived and suffered and died in order to redeem us both from the curse of sin and from the fear of death. Without Him there can be no tranquil glance upon the grave, and no peace when this opens before us. But with Him there is then also complete victory both over death and its terror, since we know who it is that died for us, and now liveth to all eternity. Van O.

There is nothing more striking about the state of those who have gone into the unseen world than the completeness of their escape from all worldly enemies, however malignant and however powerful. But there is something beyond the mere escape from worldly evil. Now the busy heart is quiet at last, and the weary head lies still. It is sometimes comforting, and we cannot say it is not sometimes fit and right, to think of a place where we shall find rest and quiet, where “the weary are at rest.” But though a deep sleep falls on the body, it is only for a while, and indeed there is a certain delusion in thinking of the grave as a place of quiet rest. The soul lives still, and is awake and conscious, though the body sleeps; and it is our souls that are ourselves. Even that in us which does sleep—even the body—sleeps to wake again. Though these are Old Testament words, we read them in a New Testament light, as those who know that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life to all His people. These words speak of a better world. They point us onward to heaven. The two great things of which they assure us and remind us are safety and peace. There is to be safety, and the sense of safety. “There the wicked cease from troubling.” Not wicked men only, but everything wicked—evil spirits, evil thoughts, evil influences, and our own sinful hearts. When the wicked cease from troubling, there will be no trouble at all. “The weary are at rest.” We know the meaning of all the vague and endless aspirations of our human hearts. It is that “this is not our rest.” Our rest is beyond the grave. There is something of life’s fitful fever about all the bliss of this life; but in that world the bliss will be restful, calm, satisfied, self-possessed, sublime. It will be “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” A. K. H. B.—To the saint Death changes many of his offices. He is the queller of strife and the calmer of care. The aching head throbs no more; the swollen heart fetches no more sighs. The weary are at rest. He is, in one sense, the Destroyer; but he is also the Restorer. He brings back, through Christ’s victorious grace, the lost innocence and peace of Eden. Is he the Divider, sundering the nearest ties, and riving asunder the household bands? But he is also the Re-uniter, gathering me to my dead who sleep in Jesus, and to “the general assembly of the firstborn” Is he the curse of the law? Is he not also, through our blessed Master, who magnified and satisfied that law, become to us who believe the end of sin, the gate of paradise, and the guerdon of a new, a better, and an unending life? W. R. W.

20. Wherefore is light given.** These inquisitive expostulations are the beginning of that striving with his Maker which increases to great boldness in the progress of the poem. Scott.—23. To a man whose way is hid. Why is light cast upon a man whom God hath made so miserable that there is no way to be hoped of his deliverance from this calamity; whom God hath shut up in this distress without the possibility of escape? Bishop H.—Whom God hath hedged in. Hath compassed round about with evils, so that he cannot get out. Before Job was hedged in with good things, so that no evil could come nigh him, but now with evils, out of which he could make no escape Ainsworth.

Job reaches his defining-point, the real secret of his anguish of soul. He has lost the clew to God and God’s ways, being plunged into an abyss of punishment for which he can find no cause. The way that he has hitherto taken, with its consciousness of Divine companionship and friendship, is suddenly closed; there is no longer any outlook. J. F. G.

26. He had not been secure nor indulged himself in ease and softness, had not trusted in his wealth nor flattered himself with the hopes of the perpetuity of his mirth; yet trouble came to convince and remind him of the vanity of the world, which yet he had not forgotten when he lived at ease. Thus his way was hid, for he knew not wherefore God contended with him. Now this consideration, instead of aggravating his grief, might rather serve to alleviate it; nothing will make trouble easy so much as the testimony of our consciences for us that in some measure we did our duty in a day of prosperity; and an expectation of trouble will make it sit the lighter when it comes. The less it is a surprise, the less it is a terror. H.

This chapter exhausts all expressions of agony; there is not a gleam of hope in it; the heart is quite crushed; still, so far as regards the precise object of the trial, there is no giving way. Job neither surrenders his own integrity nor renounces his allegiance to God; not that his words are blameless, but the wrong in them belongs to the infirmity rather than to the corruption of man’s nature. Shadows of dark superstition pass over Job’s spirit and give a form to his complaints, but they are from without, and find no abiding place in his heart. It must be observed that some of his very strongest expressions have been adopted by prophets and great saints, and by the King of Saints Himself. Cook.

Job nowhere says that he will have nothing more to do with God; he does not renounce his former faithfulness; yet this speech is to be regarded as the beginning of Job’s sinning. If a man on account of his sufferings wishes to die early, or not to have been born at all, he has lost his confidence that God, even in the severest suffering, designs his highest good; and this want of confidence is sin. Delitzsch.—These wild and wrongful utterances of Job sinful as they are, yet speak volumes for his habitual trust in God. The ground of his despair is that God has forsaken him. This appears more and more clearly in his further utterances. Vincent.—His soul is cast down, but not destroyed; perplexed, but not in despair. It is on all sides harassed; without are fightings, within are fears; but the will is inflexible on the side of God and truth, and the heart, with all its train of affections and passions, follows it. The man does not wickedly

depart from his God; the outworks are violently assailed but not taken; the city is still safe and the citadel impregnable. Heaviness may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. The reader who closely examines

the subject will find that this was the case of Job. The following chapters show the conflict of the soul; the end of the book, God’s victory and His exaltation. Satan sifted Job as wheat, but his faith failed not. A. Clarke.