Job Will Not Purchase Agreement with a False Confession

A new formula marks a new kind of speech. “Parable” is mashal, a formal discourse in elevated verse, the word used when Balaam “took up his parable” in Numbers 23:7. Zophar would be due to speak here; he never does, and Job takes up the floor again.

“As God liveth” is the form of a solemn oath, used only here in Job. The Almighty who “hath vexed my soul” is literally the one who made it bitter, the same verb and divine name Naomi uses in Ruth 1:20: “the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”

“All the while” is literally “for all the while yet”: as long as any breath is left. The pairing of breath and the spirit of God in the nostrils recalls Genesis 2:7, where God breathed life into the first man's nostrils. The oath is to last as long as that borrowed breath does.

Lips and tongue, wickedness and deceit, pair off in strict parallel. In 6:30 Job asked the friends, “Is there iniquity in my tongue?” Here he answers his own question under oath. To confess what he did not do would be exactly the deceit he swears against.

The King James “God forbid” renders chalilah li, literally “profane be it to me”, an expression of revulsion that does not contain God's name. “Integrity” is tummah, the word God used of Job in 2:3 and his wife flung at him in 2:9, “Dost thou still retain thine integrity?”

“Hold fast” is the verb chazaq, the very verb of 2:3 and 2:9, where Job “holdeth fast his integrity”. Job's heart is his conscience here, as when David's “heart smote him” in 1 Samuel 24:5. He means his heart will not have to accuse him of any day he has lived.

The line reads as a curse formula turned on his accusers. In Israel's law a false witness was to receive the penalty he had sought for the accused (Deuteronomy 19:18–19). If the friends' charges are false, the wicked man's portion they described belongs to them.

“Hypocrite” is chanef, the godless or profane man. The verb for “taketh away” is rare and may mean to draw out, as a thread from a loom or a life from the body. Whatever such a man has gained, it cannot follow him out when that happens.

The question expects the answer no, and it stings coming from Job, who said in 19:7, “I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” The godless man's prayer goes unheard; so, apparently, does his.

“Always” is literally “at every time”. The man who calls on God only when trouble comes (verse 9) is set against the one who calls in every season. Job's point is that the godless man's religion is an emergency measure, while his own has run through good times and bad.

The “you” is now plural again: Job turns from Bildad to all three. “That which is with the Almighty” means God's ways and purposes, and Job promises not to hide it. The former pupil in the debate announces that he will take the teacher's chair.

“Altogether vain” is a pun in Hebrew: hevel tehbalu, “you breathe out breath”, or “you are made empty with emptiness”. The friends have seen what Job has seen of the world. Their failure is not lack of information but talking vapour about it.

“Heritage” is nachalah, the inherited family portion of land that every Israelite household prized. The oppressor's only estate to pass on is judgment. “Oppressors” renders 'aritsim, the ruthless, men who rule by fear.

The sword and hunger for bread are two of the three classic calamities, sword, famine and pestilence, and the third follows in the next verse. A large family was the surest sign of blessing, and here it becomes a larger target.

“Buried in death” uses mavet in its sense of plague, as in Jeremiah 15:2, “such as are for death, to death.” The survivors are carried off by pestilence and put in the ground without mourning. Psalm 78:64 describes the same disgrace: “their widows made no lamentation.”

Clothing was stored wealth in the ancient world; Joseph gave changes of raiment as gifts (Genesis 45:22) and Achan hid a Babylonish garment with his silver (Joshua 7:21). Silver like dust and garments like clay are wealth piled as high as mud.

The wicked man's stockpile ends up on the backs of the righteous. Proverbs 13:22 says the same: “the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.” He sews the garments; someone else wears them. He weighs out the silver; the innocent divide it.

The word for moth may refer to its cocoon, a house spun around itself and soon left empty; the Greek and Syriac read “spider”. The keeper's booth is the flimsy hut a watchman put up in a vineyard or melon patch, the “lodge in a garden of cucumbers” of Isaiah 1:8.

“Shall not be gathered” may mean he will not be gathered to his fathers in an honoured burial, or, following the Greek, that he will lie down rich but not do so again. He goes to bed with his fortune and opens his eyes on nothing.

“Terrors” is ballahot, Bildad's word from 18:11 and 18:14, where the wicked man is brought “to the king of terrors”. Job uses his friend's vocabulary here too. The tempest that steals by night makes the loss as sudden as a thief.

The east wind is the qadim, the scorching desert wind that withers crops and could flatten tents. A reader cannot miss that a great wind “from the wilderness” brought down the house on Job's children in 1:19; the picture is one Job has lived.

“God” is supplied by the King James; the Hebrew says only “it shall cast upon him”, and the subject may still be the east wind of the previous verse. “Would fain flee” is 1611 English for would gladly flee, would desperately like to run from its hand.

If the wind is still the subject, the storm itself claps its hands and hisses, a personified gale driving him out. Lamentations 2:15 uses the same pair of gestures for the scorn of passers-by over fallen Jerusalem: “they hiss and wag their head”.