Job10chapter 10

Job's language here is formal legal language turned on its head. He asks God not to condemn him but to 'show me wherefore thou contendest with me' — the request of a defendant for the charge sheet. In an ancient trial at the town gate, the accuser stated the case and the accused answered it; Job's whole grievance is that he has been sentenced with no charge read.

The picture of his own making is craft work. Thine hands have made me and fashioned me — the verb is a potter's word, and the same image appears wherever the ancient world imagined a god forming a human out of clay. He then switches to the dairy: poured out as milk and curdled like cheese, clothed with skin and flesh, knit together with bones and sinews. Milk left to separate and set was one of the most familiar processes in a herding household, and it is being used to describe a body forming in the womb.

'Thou huntest me as a fierce lion' brings in the other great image of that world, the royal lion hunt, where the animal is driven and cornered by beaters. Job casts himself as the quarry and God as the hunter who keeps renewing his witnesses against him.

The chapter ends where chapter 3 ended, asking for a little light before he goes to the land of darkness and the shadow of death, where the light is as darkness. That is the ancient picture of the grave — not annihilation, but a dim, silent, orderless place from which no one returns.