Job 7

26. Is it your object merely to reprove my words? The next clause should be rendered, but the words of the despairing are for the wind. Words wrung from a man in such a condition had, as Job would argue, no bearing upon the question of his guilt; they followed, and could not therefore have provoked the visitation, and were after all merely uttered to the wind, borne away by it and leaving no trace, at the worst idle and meaningless. Cook.

27. A strong invective against their unfeeling behavior. The words are severe; the preceding passage, however, in which their refusal of sympathy (vs. 22, 23) and their petty fault-finding with Job’s language (vs. 25, 26) are referred to, naturally leads up to the idea. The same phrase, to cast lots, occurs 1 Sam. 14:42, and the phrase bargain over, or make merchandise of, occurs again (Job 41:6), “Will the partners bargain over him?” The “fatherless” is probably the child of the debtor. After his death the ruthless creditors cast lots for possession of the child as a slave. A. B. D.

28. Look upon me. A still closer challenge. Look me in the face, and detect my falsehood, if you can. To propose such a test is itself a strong presumption of conscious innocence, of which the continued importunity of the next sentence is a still stronger proof. However far wrong he may be before God, in the sight of all men he knew his cause was just, and that his sufferings were not inflicted upon him by reason of his exceptional wickedness. His own conscience, his moral sense, which tries actions as the palate tries mischievous things, acquits him of iniquity. Curry.—Though he had let fall some passionate expressions, yet, in the main, he was in the right, and his afflictions, though very extraordinary, did not prove him to be a hypocrite or a wicked man. His righteousness he holds fast, and will not let it go. H.

29,30. Bethink yourselves of the wrong you have done me, and repent of it. Let me not be charged with sin and hypocrisy for what I have said. Think again, and better of it. Upon further consideration the righteousness of my cause and person will fully appear to you. Clark.—See whether I utter anything that is false; and whether I possess not a sound judgment to distinguish between right and wrong. Rosenmüller.

My taste, literally my palate, meaning here, not the aesthetic sense that we associate with taste, but spiritual sense and insight. Job avers that his spiritual sense is not blunted; that when he says he is righteous it is from a real discernment, as keen and true as it ever was, of good and evil. Both Job and the friends recognize that one’s spiritual discernment of truth may be impaired or destroyed, so that evil and good may cease to appear in their real guise; and Job is evidently solicitous to keep this fine sense intact in all his affliction. J. F. G.

1. Is there not a warfare to man upon earth? And are not his days like the days of an hireling?

2. As a servant that earnestly desireth the shadow, And as an hireling that looketh for his wages:

3. So am I made to possess months of vanity, And wearisome nights are appointed to me. 4 When I lie down, I say,

When shall I arise and the night be gone?

And I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.

5. My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust;

My skin closeth up and breaketh out afresh.

6. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, And are spent without hope.

7. Oh remember that my life is a breath: Mine eye shall no more see good.

8. The eye of him that seeth me shall behold me no more :

Thine eyes shall be upon me, but I shall not be.

9. As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away,

So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more.

10. He shall return no more to his house, Neither shall his place know him any more.

11. Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

12. Am I a sea, or a sea-monster, That thou settest a watch over me ?

13. When I say, My bed shall comfort me, My couch shall ease my complaint;

14. Then thou scarest me with dreams, And terrified me through visions :

15. So that my soul chooseth strangling, And death rather than these my bones.

In this chapter Job’s mind begins to turn from the cruelty of his friends to the larger aspects of his sorrow ; and his words take on the character of a soliloquy. When his words run into appeal or address it is no longer to the friends, but to God. V.

Renewed outburst of despair at the thought of his sorrowful destiny. With a deeper pathos than any that had gone before, this innocence of his and this capacity to form true moral judg- ments regarding his history being his starting- point, Job turns to the broad world to contem- plate how helpless man is with these qualities against that fated, inexorable misery called human life. His view is general, though he himself is the centre of it, and his own history gives color to that of man. He speaks out of the agony of suffering and from the abjectaess of his own whole condition, and contrasts these with the natural greatness of the Being who has plunged him into them. It is the physical claim of sentient life which he urges, not to be tortured on any grounds whatsoever they be. A. B. D.

This chapter marks another stage in the de- velopment of Job’s innermost feelings. In the first part (1-10), he repudiates altogether the hope of a possible restoration to life, and claims the right of unqualified complaining. In the latter part (11-21) he enters into direct expostu- lation with God. In all this he still keeps clear from the sin of renouncing God ; so far the temptation completely fails ; but he incurs the very serious reproach of arraigning His govern- ment. This distinction must be borne in mind

16. I loathe my life ; I would not live alway : Let me alone ; for my days are vanity.

17. What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him, And that thou shouldest set thy mind upon him,

18. And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, And try him every moment ?

19. How long wilt thou not look away from me, Nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle ?

20. If I have sinned, what do I unto thee, O thou watcher of men ? Why hast thou set me as a mark for thee, So that I am a burden to myself ?

21. And why dost thou not pardon my trans- gression, and take away mine iniquity ? For now shall I lie down in the dust ; And thou shalt seek me diligently, but I shall not be.

throughout. Job is faulty, and “darkens coun- sel by words without knowledge,” but his fault is that of a man who fears and loves God, yet cannot understand His ways. Cook.—The pathetic lament of Job does not argue a spirit of impatience or of complaint against God ; it is the weakness of the flesh first expostulating with the harsh judgment of his friends upon his longing for death, and then appealing to the Almighty to send him the relief that he hoped for in the future state. He had borne with a majestic patience the sudden loss of all earthly good ; but this protracted suffering from a disease that caused him to loathe himself had so far exhausted his nervous vitality and the spirit of hope, that even the instinct of life had died out within him. Never was a picture more true than this of the weariness of a prolonged and seemingly incurable sickness, which leaves no hope of life, yet does not bring the relief of death. In such a condition it is not wrong to wish to die. Yet Job humbled himself before God, and acknowledged his sinfulness and ill- desert, and did not murmur under the chasten- ing hand of the Preserver of men. J. P. T.

1. Job argues that since life is bounded within certain limits, with its appointed work, when those limits are reached and the work is done a man may be justified in longing for the rest of the grave. This position at once meets the argument of Eliphaz, and supplies a basis for the following expostulation. Cook.

1,2. How pathetic is the touch which gives character to this description—the slave panting for the shades of evening, which may bring him rest from his toil; the hired soldier, who looks for his wages not so much from greed as from the fact that the time of payment is the time of release and rest. Such, says Job, am I. V.—Man’s life is a warfare, and as the days of a hireling. We are every one of us to look upon ourselves in this world (1) as soldiers, exposed to hardship and in the midst of enemies; we must serve and be under command; and, when our warfare is accomplished, we must be disbanded, dismissed with either shame or honor, according to what we have done in the body. (2) As day-laborers, that have the work of the day to do in its day, and must make up their account at night. Job had as much reason, he thought, to wish for death, as a poor servant or hireling that is tired of his work has to wish for the shadows of the evening, when he shall receive his penny and go to rest. The darkness of the night is as welcome to the laborer as the light of the morning is to the watchman. H.

3. But there is this difference, that the hireling in the midst of all his toils can look forward with assured confidence to the precise hour at which they will close, and when his wages will be given to him. But Job knows not the appointed time for his release. Death seems his only refuge, it is his only hope; and although he knows that it must come at last, he knows not when. Meanwhile he says: “Months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me.” In the last clause, respecting the “wearisome nights,” there is an apparent transition from the greater to the lesser sense of the comparison. The nights, which bring sound and healthful rest to the hireling, are to Job more wearisome and full of seeming horrors than even the day. This was one of the symptoms of his disease. But apart from this, every one knows that under mental trial the nights are far more terrible than the days. The mind no less than the body lies loose and relaxed; and all the avenues of the soul are open to receive those impressions of grief, horror and despair against which the guarded mind might be able to stand up. Hence it is that Job and other sacred poets speak so much of the terrors of the night; and that the Psalmist, especially, so often dwells upon the blessedness of filling the mind with thoughts of God and of His loving-kindness when we lie down upon our beds. Kitto.

5. This verse gives an exact description of the symptoms of the disease. Maggots breed rapidly in the mouldering flesh; clods, as it were, of earth are formed by the dry, swollen skin, rough as the hide of the elephant, which gives the name to the malady. When fully formed the lumps burst, the skin falls off in masses, and the body is covered by virulent discharge. Such symptoms, presented incidentally, and without consciousness on the part of the speaker that he is supplying materials for the diagnosis of his disease, do not belong to fiction; they bear the impress of living truth. Cook.

6. He compares his life to a web; the days which composed it are the threads; the work is God’s, who determines the measure of every man’s life; retrospection on time that is passed away makes it appear, to a man in misery, very swift, and past happiness as nothing. His days seemed now to him to have gone off faster than a manufacture of the loom. Scott.—Our days are like a weaver’s shuttle, thrown from one side of the web to the other in the twinkling of an eye, and then back again, to and fro, until at length it is quite exhausted of the thread it carried; and then we cut off, like a weaver, our life (Isa. 38:12). Time hastens on apace, the motion of it cannot be stopped, and when it is past it cannot be recalled. While we are living we are weaving; every day, like the shuttle, leaves a thread behind it; many weave the spider’s web, which will fail them (8:14). If we are weaving to ourselves holy garments and robes of righteousness, we shall have the benefit of them when our work comes to be reviewed, and every man shall reap as he sowed and wear as he wove. H.

Without hope. That is Job’s present feeling. The question remains, whether the truth of a future vindication will reveal itself in the conflict of a soul conscious of integrity and devotion to God, but in misery hopeless, so far as this life is concerned. In the actual state of Job’s mind he can as yet wish for nothing but death. Cook.

8. In the representation of the hopelessness of a return from the underworld, the most touching feature is v. 8—that there neither the eye of any man would see him again, nor would even God Himself, if He would, as Job continues firmly to believe, at some time in the future (alas! too late) judge his cause, and on that account seek for him—seek for him among the living, other than in vain! Hence, too, the language of the second part of the verse is particularly agitated. Ewald.

9. Sheol. The Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the words “the grave,” to denote the final undefined resting-place of all. J. F. G.—Man gone into the invisible word, never to return hither, is the subject of the comparison; the thing to which he is in this regard compared is a cloud that is vanished; unsubstantial in its composition, transient in its duration, it disappears and is nevermore seen. Scott.

10. What he saith is not a denial of a dying man’s resurrection to life, but of his restitution to such life as he parted with at the grave’s mouth. They who die a natural death do not live a natural life again; therefore he addeth in the next verse, he shall return no more to his house. He shall have no more to do with this world, with worldly businesses or contentments, with the labors or comforts of the creature, or of his family; he shall return no more to his house. Neither shall his place know him any more. When a man lives and comes home to his house, his house (as it were) welcomes him home, and his place is glad to entertain him. As in the Psalm the little hills are said to rejoice at the showers, so when a man comes home, his house and all he hath have, as it were, a tongue to bid him welcome and open arms to receive and embrace him; but when he dies he shall return no more, and then his place shall know him (that is, receive him) no more. Caryl.

11. Job heaps image upon image to set before himself and the eye of God the brevity of life, the weaver’s shuttle (v. 6), the wind (v. 7), the morning cloud (v. 9), ending with a pathetic reference to his home, which shall see him no more (v. 10). These regrets altogether overmaster him, and, combining with his sense of the wrong which he suffers and his impatience of the iron restraints of human existence, hurry him forward, and he resolves to open the floodgates to the full stream of his complaint (v. 11): Therefore I will not refrain my mouth -i.e., therefore I also, I on my side, will not refrain. A. B. D.

12. Now we see Job at his worst. He gives way to bitter indignation against God. The burden of his complaint is that God acts as a spy upon him, as though he were a rebellious wretch plotting against God’s government and needing to be kept constantly under guard. He is utterly without defence in his charges against God, in his bitter, defiant tone, and his presumptuous impugning of God’s justice and love. V. —And these harsh and presumptuous speeches against God are accompanied by no qualifications or partial retractions, such as we find in nearly all the lamentations of the Psalmist and of the Prophet Jeremiah, where they make use of similar expressions, and represent God now by this and now by that figurative expression as their unsparing persecutor, and their stern, unpitying Judge. Job persists in all that he says in this direction of a doubtful character; he takes nothing back; he concludes his discourse immediately after the most passionate and presumptuous of these sayings has passed from his lips. Zöckler.—It is not Job’s peculiar sin that he thinks God has changed to an enemy against him; that is the view that comes from his vision being beclouded by the conflict through which he is passing, as is frequently the case in the Psalms. His sin does not even consist in the inquiries, How long? and Wherefore? The Psalms, in that case, would abound in sin. But the sin is, that he hangs on to these doubting questions, and thus attributes apparent mercilessness and injustice to God. And the friends constantly urge him on still deeper in this sin the more persistently they attribute his sufferings to his own unrighteousness. Jeremiah (Lam. 3), after similar complaints, adds: “Then I repeated this to my heart, and took courage from it; the mercies of Jehovah they have no end; His compassions do not cease.” Many of the Psalms that begin sorrowfully end in the same way; faith at length breaks through the clouds of doubt. Delitzsch.

13-16. He is keenly and violently plagued by God; yea, does not even find rest in sleep—is absolutely weak and harmless. Rather than continue to carry about this wretched skeleton, this body which has been reduced to “bones” (see 19:20), he would prefer strangling or death in any form. This body (life) he despises (9:21), he has already lived too long; and, therefore, at last the wild demand escapes him that God may at least now grant him a moment’s rest, as in any case his life is already forfeited and he has no desire to retain it. Ewald.—Doubtless this was Job’s infirmity, for though a good man would not wish to live alway in this world, and would choose strangling and death rather than sin, as the martyrs did, yet he will be content to live as long as pleases God, not choose them rather than life, because life is our opportunity of glorifying God and getting ready for heaven. H.

16. Life should be considered by the Christian as a possession greatly to be cherished. To esteem lightly and wish to abridge life is wrong. The desire to be with Christ—the attractive end of the magnet—cannot be too strong: but the weariness of this world, the longing to escape from it—the repulsive end—may easily run into excess. The present state of existence is the only one in which we shall ever glorify God by patience and the resistance of evil, or, as far as we know, by extending His kingdom upon earth. And therefore let us not be in haste to quit the field; for it may be the only field we shall ever have where we can glorify God for these high ends. To the majority of people, however, the danger lies on the other side. They are unwilling to die. Notwithstanding all warnings and preparations which God is sending every day, the real spirit of their mind is, “I would live alway.” It is because they are so encased and absorbed with the present life that they have no room for another. When our sins are once cancelled, our nature spiritualized, ourselves “meetened for the inheritance of the saints in light,” who would not say, with the patriarch, “I would not live alway”? We know and are sure that another life is awaiting us, to which this life is but as death; and our arms stretch out to that life. “We would not live alway.” J. V.

17. David’s “What is man, that Thou shouldst think of him to bless him?” is turned into “What is man, that Thou shouldst think of him to curse him?” A. B. D.—This same question is asked by the Psalmist (8:4) with adoring wonder at the Divine condescension; here with bitter complaint that, perishable as man is, he is possessed with ceaseless sufferings, for which cause he had become an object of terror; and he now asks only the poor boon of being let alone. Curry.—Magnify him. There is a bitter irony in this expression; that God should concern Himself so long, busy Himself, so to speak, with His creatures, implies in them a Titanic grandeur, so to speak, a relation of proportion, if not equality, between Him and them. In the eighth Psalm God is said to magnify man by rich endowments of soul and body, here by the infliction of tortures, which imply godlike capacities of endurance. Cook.

18. Try him every moment? The question expresses one of the first of those great mysteries which the stern reality of trouble had forced on his thoughts. It was no curious inquiry on his part; it was not a question which he could be content to leave unanswered; it was one which the agony of his life had compelled him to meet. Every earthly hope had been wrecked, all the charm of life had faded, his very friends had proved unkind in the hours when he most needed their sympathy. And, still more, he had no peace in his own soul, for by day dark doubts respecting God perplexed him, and at night those doubts haunted him in dreams. It was not strange that he should choose death rather than life, and pray for the time when he should enter that region where the “wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.” And then arose the mysterious question, Why did God prolong his life? To live amid the desolation of his great sorrow, and struggling with awful doubts, was a constant trial, and why did God thus “try him every moment” by keeping him alive? E. Hull.

19. Till I swallow down. A proverbial expression, common in Arabic, for a moment of time, equivalent to “the twinkling of an eye.” It may be here suggested by the feeling of suffocation, the distressing gasping of the diseased throat in elephantiasis.

20,21. The last objection is dealt with here—“I have sinned”—that is, granted that I have committed some sin, what then? Is it in my power now to make any compensation, to live and act for God’s service?

20. O Thou preserver of men. There is in this a touching appeal. Job does but contrast what he now experiences with what he believes and knows of God’s providential goodness and care of His creatures. Cook.

21. Job seems to claim pardon almost indignantly, as if it were a right. Even the God who will by no means acquit may be called on for pardon; and much more when the sin is below consciousness, not to be merciful is not to be just. For now I shall sleep in the dust; this, after all, is what makes Job’s inquiries and expostulations so natural. So near death as he is, the logic of his case demands pardon; for what is the significance of torturing by pain a life so soon to go out? The thought of a life beyond has not risen to Job’s mind out of this enigma. J. F. G.

In one very important point he and his friends were agreed; both alike falsely regarded his afflictions as indications of God’s displeasure; they at once concluding that his refusal to submit proved radical unsoundness, while he is driven to utter perplexity and hopelessness. The solution of the problem involved two conditions, one of which was as yet beyond the reach of either party; first, the certainty that all punishments falling on God’s true servants are directed by His wisdom and controlled by His power; and, secondly, the knowledge of a future state, in which the living Redeemer will rectify all inequalities. Each step in the discussion brings the necessity of such a solution nearer. Cook.