Job Answers the Rule with the World Outside the Conversation

Job now answers Zophar's second speech (chapter 20), and it is the last time he will answer Zophar at all. In the third round of speeches Zophar never takes his turn, so this reply closes a conversation with him for good.

“Consolations” picks up Eliphaz's own word from 15:11, “Are the consolations of God small with thee?” Job turns it round: the only consolation he now asks of them is that they listen closely, which costs them nothing and which they have not yet given.

“Suffer me” is the 1611 sense of suffer, to permit. In Hebrew “mock on” is singular while the rest of the chapter addresses the friends in the plural, so Job may be aiming the jab at Zophar, who has just spoken, in particular.

The word for complaint, siach, means an anxious musing poured out, and Job says it is not addressed to any man. The second half runs literally “why should my spirit not be short?”, a Hebrew idiom for impatience. His quarrel is with how God governs, so patience is not the obvious response.

A hand laid on the mouth is the gesture of stunned silence. In 29:9 princes do it when Job himself arrived at the gate, and in 40:4 Job will do it before God: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” Here he wants the friends shocked into it first.

The word for trembling, pallatsut, is rare and physical, a shuddering of the body; Psalm 55:5 and Isaiah 21:4 use it of horror. What frightens Job is not an enemy but a memory of how the world actually runs, the evidence he is about to lay out.

The three verbs deliberately contradict Zophar, who had just said the triumphing of the wicked is short (20:5). They live, they grow old, and they gather strength. “Mighty in power” can also be heard as grown great in wealth, since the Hebrew chayil covers both.

The line answers Bildad's claim that the wicked man “shall neither have son nor nephew” (18:19). It lands with particular weight from a father whose seven sons and three daughters died together in chapter 1. The children of the wicked stand in plain view; his are gone.

“Safe from fear” is literally peace from dread, shalom mippachad. The rod of God is the image Job used of himself in 9:34, “Let him take his rod away from me.” The rod Job begs to have lifted from his own back never seems to fall on these houses.

Breeding stock was the measure of a herdsman's wealth. “Gendereth” is an old word for breeds, and a cow that “casteth not her calf” does not miscarry. Job, whose oxen, asses, sheep and camels were all taken in a single day (1:14–17), is describing someone else's barnyard.

The word for little ones, awilim, appeared in 19:18, where Job said “young children despised me.” The same small children who jeer at Job are, in the houses of the wicked, let out to play like a flock of lambs and dancing.

The timbrel is a hand drum, the harp a lyre, and the organ (ugav) a pipe or flute; in 1611 “organ” could mean any instrument. Job will reverse this very line about himself in 30:31: “My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.”

A sudden death after a full life was counted a mercy, and “in a moment” means exactly that: no lingering illness. The contrast with Job, dying slowly on an ash heap and begging for an end that does not come, is left unspoken.

“Depart” is the verb sur, the same verb the Book of Job used in 1:1 when it said Job “eschewed evil”, turned aside from it. Job turned away from evil; these people tell God to turn away from them. They do not lack knowledge of his ways; they decline it.

This question, what profit is there in serving God, comes back to haunt Job. Elihu will accuse Job of saying it himself, “It profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God” (34:9), putting the words of these wicked men into Job's mouth.

The first half can mean that the prosperity of the wicked is not their own doing but God's gift, or it can be read as a question, “Is not their good in their hand?” Either way Job disowns their counsel, and Eliphaz will quote this exact line back at him in 22:18.

“The candle of the wicked” is Bildad's phrase from 18:5–6, where he said the light of the wicked would be put out and his candle with it. Job borrows his friend's lamp to test it. “Sorrows” renders a word that can mean pangs of pain or allotted portions.

The image comes from the threshing floor, where grain was tossed into the wind and the husks blew off while the heavier kernels fell. Stubble and chaff are the friends' picture of the wicked; Job repeats it only to ask how often anyone has actually seen it happen.

Many translations add “Ye say” at the start, because Job is quoting the friends' fallback: if the wicked man escapes, his children will pay (Zophar had said as much in 20:10). The second half is Job's reply: let God repay the man himself, so that he knows it.

The cup of wrath is a picture of judgment as a drink forced down. In 6:4 Job said the arrows of the Almighty were within him and their poison drank up his spirit. He has been made to drink; he wants the wicked to taste it with their own eyes open.

Once his months are counted out, a dead man has no stake in what happens to his house. Job made the same point about himself in 14:21: “His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not.” Punishing the children does not reach the one who earned it.

The line can be heard as Job anticipating the friends' objection, or as Job turning it on them: in defending their tidy scheme they are presuming to instruct God about how he should rule. “Those that are high” likely means heavenly beings, the lofty ones he judges.

“In his full strength” is literally “in the bone of his completeness”, and the word for completeness, tom, belongs to the same root as tam, “perfect”, which described Job in 1:1. This man dies whole, secure and untroubled, with nothing to show that he deserved otherwise.

The word the King James renders “breasts” is uncertain; it may mean pails or vessels full of milk, or the sides of a body well covered with fat. Marrow-filled bones are a picture of vigour, set against Job's own bones cleaving to his skin in 19:20.

“The bitterness of his soul” is Job's own phrase from 7:11 and 10:1, “I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.” The second man in the comparison has Job's features. “Never eateth with pleasure” is literally never tasted good.

The word for worm, rimmah, has followed Job through the book: in 7:5 his flesh is clothed with worms, and in 17:14 he calls the worm his mother and sister. Here the worms cover the well fed man and the bitter man together, making no distinction between them.

The verb behind “wrongfully imagine” is related to chamas, violence. Job hears their theories as schemes that do him harm. He already knows where their questions are heading, which is toward him.

The prince's house (the word nadiv means a noble) and the tents of the wicked sound like general questions, but everyone present knows whose house fell down. Job's eldest son's house collapsed on all his children in 1:19. Bildad had spoken of “the dwellings of the wicked” in 18:21.

Travellers on the trade roads were the ancient world's newscasters. Their “tokens” are their signs or reports, the evidence they bring back from far away. “Do ye not know” means do you not recognise it, as though the friends have heard such reports and set them aside.

The Hebrew can be read as the King James takes it, reserved for a coming day of destruction, or as many modern versions do, spared in the day of calamity and led away safe. On the second reading the verse is a report of the wicked escaping the disaster that catches others.

No one tells a powerful man his faults to his face, and no one pays him back. “Repay” is the very thing Job asked of God in verse 19: that the wrongdoer himself be rewarded for what he did. Job's complaint is that the repayment he asks for does not arrive.

The second half reads literally “and over the heap one keeps watch”: the grave mound is guarded, a sign of an honoured burial. The word for heap, gadish, is the one Eliphaz used in 5:26 for the righteous man who comes to his grave like a shock of grain in its season.

The clods lie sweetly on him, a phrase for a gentle rest in the ground. “Every man shall draw after him” pictures a funeral procession, the crowd walking behind the bier, while those who have gone before him in death are beyond counting. He is buried with honour, not disgrace.

“In vain” is hevel, breath or vapour, the word that fills Ecclesiastes. “Falsehood” is maal, a word normally used for breach of faith, as in Achan's “trespass” in Joshua 7:1. Job calls their answers not merely mistaken but a betrayal of the friendship they came to show.