Job 24
OGCTODAY’S ENGLISH VERSION
1 Why doesn-’t God set a time for judging,
a day of justice for those who serve him?
2 Men move boundary markers to get more land;
they steal sheep and put them with their own flocks.
3 They steal donkeys that belong to orphans,
and keep a widow’s ox till she pays her debts.
4 They keep the poor from getting their rights
and force the needy to run and hide.
5 So the poor, like wild donkeys,
search for food in the dry wilderness;
nowhere else can they find food for their children.
6 They have to harvest fields they don-’t own,
and gather grapes in wicked men’s vineyards.
7 At night they sleep with nothing to cover them,
nothing to keep them from the cold.
8 They are drenched by the rain that falls on the mountains,
and they huddle beside the rocks for shelter.
9 Evil men make slaves of fatherless infants,
and take the poor man’s children in payment for debts.
10 But the poor must go out with no clothes to protect them;
they must go hungry while harvesting wheat.
11 They press olives for oil, and grapes for wine,
but they themselves are thirsty.
12 In the city you hear the cries of the wounded and dying,
but God ignores their prayers.
13 There are men who reject the light;
they don-’t understand it and avoid its paths.
14 At dawn the murderer goes out to kill the poor,
and at night he robs.
15 The adulterer waits for twilight to come
and hides his face so no one can see him.
16 At night thieves break into houses,
but by day they hide and avoid the light.
17 They fear the light of day,
but darkness holds no terror for them.
Zophar
18 The wicked man is swept away by floods,
and the land he owns is under God’s curse; he no longer goes to work in his vineyards.
19 As snow vanishes in heat and drought,
so a sinner vanishes from the land of the living.
20 No one remembers him, not even his mother;
worms eat him; he is completely destroyed.
21 This happens because he mistreated widows
and showed no kindness to childless women.
God, in his strength, destroys the mighty;
he acts and the wicked man dies.
23 God may let him live secure,
but keeps an eye on him all the time.
24 For a while the wicked man succeeds
but then he withers like a weed, like a stalk of grain that has been cut down.
25 Can anyone deny that this is so?
Can anyone prove that my words are not true?
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 24:1-25
Name and discuss the two emphases fundamental in the O.T. doctrine of God.
Does God know or care about the present day oppression of the poor? Discuss.
Pure religion (James 1:26-27) has a real part of the discussion of verse three. Explain.
Why do the poor of the earth hide themselves? Cf. Job 24:4.
How have we in America been guilty of the sin of verse five? Discuss.
Some poor live no better than animals. How so? Cf. Job 24:6.
Why are the poor naked and cold? Who is at fault?
What is meant by embracing the rocks as in verse eight?
What is the imagery of verse nine; i.e., where does such a cruel act take place?
The poor are treated worse than animals in the kind of work given to them. Discuss.
What work is discussed in Job 24:11? What is the point?
What commandments are broken as discussed in Job 24:12-16?
Please give your own explanation of the problem of suffering of the poor.
Why do wicked people escape divine retribution? What type of stealing is here described?
Why steal and kill the poor and needy? Discuss the circumstances.
Why are darkness and secret action always associated with wrong doing?
Who is digging to get into a house? For what purpose?
How does the term seal relate?
What is every man’s long day’s journey into night?
Who speaks in Job 24:18-24? Discuss.
What will happen to the wicked? Discuss.
Snow water is compared to whom in Job 24:19?
In what sense will the womb of the wicked forget him?
Who is raised up in Job 24:22?
Who is speaking in Job 24:25? For what purpose?
Job 24:1-12
TEXT 24:1-12
**24 Why are times not laid up by the Almighty?
And why do not they that 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 torn the needy out of the way:
The poor of the earth all hide themselves.
5 Behold, as wild asses in the desert
They go forth to their work seeking diligently for food; The wilderness yieldeth them bread 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 hungry 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.
COMMENT 24:1-12
Job 24:1**Job’s reply continues. As in chapter 21, he moves from his specific experience to man’s experience in general. He describes the oppression of wicked, unscrupulous princes and the resultant misery of the poor enslaved by the burdens engendered by poverty. This section of Job’s speech is a negative parallel to Job 21:7-17. There God did not punish the impious; here He does not recover the poor from oppression. These two emphases are fundamental in the Old Testament doctrine of God, i.e., that He will judge the wicked and liberate the oppressed. Where is the evidence for God’s righteous providence in His dealings with man? Job here reflects upon the cosmic dimensions of human misery. Why are the times of judgment (not in the textadded in R. S. V.) for wicked not evident?Job 18:21; Psalms 36:11.
**Job 24:2**The LXX adds the subject, the wicked, to line one and renders as the wicked remove the landmarks. The Law strictly condemns such actionDeu 19:14; Proverbs 22:28; Proverbs 23:10; and Hosea 5:10. The powerful wicked not only remove the boundary stones but also seize the flocks of their weaker neighbors, and openly pasture them on stolen land. The images here are crystal clear; the powerful aggressively dispossess the weak, and nothing is done about it. Does God know about this? Does He have any compassion at all?
**Job 24:3**The defenseless orphans and widows are reduced to abject poverty. Members of these classes had only one animal, and thus they would be rendered without any means of support after their ass or ox was plundered. The wicked publicly flaunt the helpless. Even the Babylonians imposed fines on a person who takes the ox of one in distress (The Code of Hammurabi, No. 241)2 Samuel 12:4; Deuteronomy 24:17; and Exodus 22:26. All pledges from the poor were to be returned if they were necessary for livelihood. Job asks God what He does about the behavior of such calloused men. Their heinous crimes against the poor must be judged if we dwell in a moral universe.
**Job 24:4**The poor are deprived of their rightsAmo 4:1. The poor, once deprived, have no place to turn. This is suggested in the Hebrew text as it has are hidden together. The normal sense of the reflective form means that they hide themselves, which makes perfectly good sense here.
**Job 24:5**Hopelessly oppressed, the poor have been destroyed by extortion and diabolical degradation. Even Plato in his Laws and The Republic held that only the elite minority had a claim to human rights and privileges. Our own American history has its own record of depriving thousands, sometimes millions, of their rights, originally from God as beings in His image.
**Job 24:6**The poor subsist on the type of food used to feed animals. What a precious livelihood. They gather their fodder (A. V. provender), and the shift from plural to singular means each one gathers his own. The A. V. renders an uncertain word glean. Gleaning was an authorized occupation of the poor. If the reaping found in line one is that of a hired laborer, then the parallel would necessitate that the gathering of grapes would be done by those being paid for the work. Often, the rich are adjudged to be wicked, and sometimes they are!
**Job 24:7**The abject poverty of those described in this verse leaves them without clothing in the cold night wind. Misery begets miseryno food, no clothing, no shelter from the cold. Here Job starkly contrasts the poor and the wicked richJob 24:2-4. Job’s agonizing description continues; his heartbreaking picture of human privation versus privilege is further enlarged.
**Job 24:8**The poor embrace the rocks in the mountains since they have no other shelter. They cling (Genesis 29:13) to the security afforded by the rocks. Hardly a more devastating picture could be sketched to reveal their exposure and wretchedness. Their dearest friends are the rocks.
**Job 24:9**In transition, the imagery takes us from one exploited group to another. The verse presents a problem to many commentators (egs. Kissane, Gray, Dhorme, Pope, et al), but does it necessarily interrupt the account of the poor as is alleged? Job has thus far described the meagre possession of the poor, the humiliating circumstances under which scavengers reek out a minimal subsistence. We have toured the cities and the desert places; now we must face those in slavery. Those harsh taskmasters are heartless creditors and take a pledge from off of the poor. The Hebrew means to take something that is on the poor, i.e., their clothing, not merely something from the poor. The first line relates a cruel tyrant removing a baby from his mother’s breast while she is being sold at auction. The parallel line suggests taking the clothes from their back (see Brown, Driver, Briggs).
**Job 24:10**This verse confirms the need to modify the weak A. V. translation and also verifies that their clothes have been removed as pledge, in that they are here described as naked. They are starving and yet must carry the sheaves of their masters.[264] Even animals were not treated like these outcastsDeu 25:4. In Israel one could not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain. Here a laborer is hungry while working in the midst of abundance. How torturing it would be to carry food, which one could not eat, when one is starving. The haves and the have nots are still with us. Though there are have nots in our own midst, the Third and Fourth Worlds are largely composed of the poor,[265] and with Job our contemporary we must ask why it occurs and how can we do anything about it?
[264] E. F. Sutcliffe, Journal Theological Studies, 1969, p. 174.
[265] This presents an enormous challenge to our Christian conscience. Neo-Marxism and various species of socialism are presently being set forth with Messianic vengeance, as though the world’s problems are all caused by hedonistic capitalism. The problem is human nature, not per se our socio-politico structures. Socialism has one consistencyfailure.
**Job 24:11**The Hebrew text can be rendered between their rows(as R. S. V.), i.e., among the olive rows of the wicked they make oil. Dhorme rightly points out that this would be a strange place to press olives, and thus emends the text to read between the millstones. In sight of mouthwatering succulent grapes, they are panting with thirst.
**Job 24:12**In Job 24:12-16 Job focuses attention on violators of the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth commandments, i.e., murderers, adulterers, and thieves, who compose the city of men. From the city men cry out because of violence and social anomie.[266] Men cry out, but God pays no attention (same idiom in Job 23:6) to the moral malaise. The Hebrew term rendered folly in A. V. means tastelessnessJob 1:22or unseasoned and implies a lack of moral savor; yet God remains silent.
[266] All Christian believers must come to an understanding of this phenomenon. Since Hegel, western social theory has had no room for God’s purpose as a solution to our concrete problems of violence and social anomie. Nineteenth century social thought developed from Hegel to Marx by way of Weber, Mannheim, and Durkheim, into The Sociology of Knowledge Thesis (see the critique in my previous work, Newness on The Earth, pp. 44ff) and this socially based theory of knowledge will be critically evaluated in my doctoral thesis: The Kuhn-Popper Debate - Contemporary Revolution in Knowledge Paradigms: The Relationship of Scientific Theory to Scientific Progress. From Marx’s creative destruction to views of contemporary modification of classical Marxism, the neo-Marxist based Frankfort School of Social Research utilizes the Freudian psychoanalytic method as a basis of a new epistemology grounded in Interest. Every creative development in 19th-20th century Social Theory makes fundamental contribution to contemporary Violence and Anomie. All forms of PoliticoRevolutionary-Liberation Theologies (e.g., Frankfort School of Social Research represented by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et. al.) must be understood and confronted in the name of Job’s redeemer.
See the following works for initial analysis and confrontation with these issues: Georges Soul Classic, Concerning Violence, many editions.
Hanah Arendt, On Violence (Penguin paperback, 1970).
John C. Bennett, ed., Christian Social Ethics in a Changing World (NY: Association Press, 1966).
Jacques Ellul, Violence (Seabury, E. T., 1969). Also, Political Illusion, Knopf, 1967. Oz Guinness, The Dust of Death (Inter-Varsity Press, 1973, chp. 5 Violence: Crisis or Catharsis?, pp. 151-191.
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (NY: Basic Books, 1963) chp. Utopia and Violence; also his The Open Society and Its Enemies (2 vols., Harper Torch).
Job 24:13-17
The lovers of darkness (Job 24:13-17)
TEXT 24:13-17
**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 killeth 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 thick darkness;
For they know the terrors of the thick darkness.**
COMMENT 24:13-17
**Job 24:13**Why do these wicked people escape divine retribution? Earlier he describes those who steal because of the circumstances of their poverty; but here Job describes those who are dominated by a wicked heart. The sin described here is more than an act of unrighteousness; it is that the sinner does not abide in the light of God’s moral universe.
**Job 24:14**The first violator of the light is the murderer. The destitute condition of the social structure in which one finds this kind of rebel is clear from the type of persons they prey on. Why the needy and poor; why not more profitable prey? Job is not describing the affluent part of society. The same type of person kills in the daylight and steals in the darkness of the nightJob 24:16.
**Job 24:15**As the prostitute seeks the double protection of disguise and darknessPro 7:9here the adulterer also seeks the hiding power of darkness. These violators of light seek only to perform transgressions in secretRth 3:14.
**Job 24:16**Generally a thief would gain entrance by digging through the wall of the house (Exodus 22:1), not an adultererMat 6:19. The first verb he digs is in the singular; but the second verb is in the plural, they shut themselves up. The reference in the plural refers to all three groups who commit their dark deeds hiding from the day. The verb here means to set a seal upon night and suggests that the thief had marked the house that he would enter come nightfall. But more probably, the seal identifies the person. The purpose of the seal is to keep unauthorized persons from opening or identifying something. The image conveys a search for security. Perhaps Job is saying that these criminals are as secure as if they were sealed. God does nothing about their malignant evil deeds. None (they) of the groups discussed know the light. All wicked people hide from the light because it terrorizes themEze 8:8; Ezekiel 12:5; Ezekiel 12:7. In the Code of Hammurabi, digging is the thief’s mode of entry (No. 21).
**Job 24:17**Just as ordinary people fear the darkness of the night, the wicked dread the day light. This is every man’s long day’s journey into night.
Job 24:18-25
c. The unhappy fate of the wicked (Job 24:18-25)
TEXT 24:18-25
18 **Swiftly they pass away upon the face of the waters;
Their portion is cursed in the earth: They turn not into the way of the vineyards.
19 Drought and heat consume the snow waters:
So doth Sheol those that 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 Yet God preserveth the mighty by his power:
He riseth up that hath no assurance 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 others. And are cut off as the tops of the ears of grain.
25 And if it be not so now, who will prove me a liar,
And make my speech nothing worth?**
COMMENT 24:18-25
Job 24:18It must be acknowledged that these verses (Job 24:, 18-24) are problematic. They probably express the viewpoint of his friends, rather than Job.[267] After his description in Job 24:2-17 of the oppressions which are inflicted upon the poor, the question arises: What is the fate of the evil-doers?Job 8:4. Are they protected in their wicked life style? It is possible to understand Job 24:18-24, as do Davidson and Driver, as the common attitude introduced by Jobian irony? The singular pronoun he represents a member of the class expressed by the plural their. The wicked person is carried along hopelessly by the floodJob 20:28; Hos. 10:17. They derive no happiness from their estates (A. V. their portions); because they are cursed, they are also unfruitful. They know that their vineyards are unfruitful and do not visit them, because there are no grapes to tread. It is not self-evident that these images are at variance with Job’s theology, as Rowley et al contend.
[267] The R.S.V. represents Job 24:18-21 as Job’s citation of the views of his three friends, and Job 24:22-24 as his reply; but there is no indication of this in the text. Dhorme transfers them to Zophar’s third speech, following Job 27:13, so Terrien in Interpreter’s Bible, Job, pp. 1088-1089; Pope transposes the Job 24:18-20; Job 24:22-25 to Job 27:23, Job, p. 179.
**Job 24:19**The heat is so intense that snow water is dried up. The verb rendered consume means to seize violently or tear away (see Brown, Driver, Briggs); as the snow dissolves in the intense heat, so does the wicked in Sheol. Job uses the same image in Job 6:15 ff of those who have abandoned him.
**Job 24:20**The wicked man is even forgotten by his own mother’s womb (rehem). Only the worms who are eating his body find pleasure in him. Wickedness will ultimately be broken to pieces as a treeJob 19:10.
**Job 24:21**The images refer to the ungodly who exploit and mercilessly oppress the poor women without sons. Swift retribution shall be his rewardJob 24:24.
**Job 24:22**The metaphor used in the A. V. presents a powerful God using His might to destroy the confidence of the wicked. The ambiguity of the grammar raises the question of whether or not it is who rises in condemnation or the ungodly who rises in health (note he draws, he rises probably with God as subject). Either is possible from the Hebrew textDeu 28:66.
**Job 24:23**Job seems to be bitterly claiming that God watches over the wicked so that their path is secure.
**Job 24:24**The wicked are, in the midst of their exaltation, cut off like flowers or heads of grain before the reaping knifePsa 103:15 ff; and as all others, they fade and wither. This is his description of the fate of the wicked.
**Job 24:25**Many critics suggest that it is with this verse that we return to Job’s words. The conclusion of Job’s speech may refer especially to Job 24:2-12. This bitter indictment of God’s injustice is Job’s final words in this speech. Life is pictured in all its ugly anomalies which might be evidence for an amoral universe. He concludes, If I am mistaken about my description of the actual state of affairs, you may call me a liar and my words empty, as you have previously charged. Now to Bildad’s third speech.