Lyrics · Job
O That I Knew Where I Might Find Him
Job 20:1-24:25
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About this song
This song belongs to the Job collection. One recording is available to play here, with the complete lyrics below.
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Named in this songJob
About the passage
Job 20: Zophar describes wickedness as a meal that turns poisonous
Zophar answers Job's warning as though the rebuke itself demands an immediate response. His second speech gives the friends' familiar doctrine a vivid bodily form: wickedness is sweet in the mouth, poisonous in the belly, swallowed wealth that must be vomited out, and fullness interrupted at the very moment satisfaction seems complete. The moral centre of the portrait is genuine oppression, including seizure of another person's house and harm to the poor. The problem is evidentiary. Zophar supplies no witness connecting those crimes to Job. Weapons, fire, darkness, heaven, and earth finally close around the wicked person until nothing offers safety. The speech is powerful as a picture of judgment, but it still assumes the conclusion it needs to prove about the man before him.
Study Job 20 in depthJob 21: Job answers the rule with the world outside the conversation
Job answers the friends' rule by asking them to look beyond the conversation. He describes wicked people who do not collapse on schedule: they grow old, remain powerful, see their children established, hear music in secure homes, and sometimes die after lives of ease. He is careful to reject their counsel even while insisting that their prosperity is real. The challenge then widens. One person dies strong and well supplied, another in lifelong bitterness, and both enter the same dust. Even an expected future judgment does not make present circumstances a dependable moral label. Job appeals to travellers and public experience against the friends' closed system, then ends with the practical result. Comfort built on an account that does not fit observed life cannot actually comfort the sufferer it is meant to explain.
Study Job 21 in depthJob 22: Eliphaz supplies the crimes his argument requires
Eliphaz moves from implication to indictment. He accuses Job of taking pledges unjustly, withholding water and bread, emptying widows' hands, and crushing the fatherless, but he supplies no witnesses and no events. The accusations are not discoveries; they are the crimes his explanation requires if Job's suffering must be deserved. He also assigns Job a theology Job has not expressed, turning difficulty in finding God into a claim that God cannot see through clouds. The second half of the speech sounds more generous, offering peace, instruction, rebuilt life, heard prayer, and light. Yet every promise rests on the same unproved diagnosis that Job has departed from God through hidden iniquity. The invitation comes close to Job's deepest desires while demanding a confession the book has not established as true.
Study Job 22 in depth


