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Jobchapter 10

22 verses · KJVJob book hub →

Key verse

Are thy days as the days of man? are thy years as man’s days,

It stands in scene A of the chapter, verses 1 to 12.

The chapter

Chapter summary

Job's reply continues, now addressed straight to God. 'My soul is weary of my life; I will give free course to my complaint.' Do not condemn me; show me wherefore thou contendest with me. Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress the work of thy hands? Then a tender argument from creation: 'thy hands have framed me and fashioned me': poured me out as milk, curdled me like cheese, clothed me with skin and flesh, knit me with bones and sinews. Life and lovingkindness thou hast granted, yet this was hid in thy heart. He asks a little comfort before he goes to 'the land of darkness and of the shadow of death.'

Context

Poetry · Unknown · Job overview

Where the chapter sits

Job 10 falls in Dialogue: three cycles (chapters 3–27). Job's opening complaint (3); three rounds with Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar; the friends' rigid retribution theology; the third cycle breaks: Zophar does not speak again. The dialogue exhausts itself as argument.

Before it: Prose prologue: heavenly court, chapters 1–2. After it: Hymn to wisdom, chapters 28.

The whole shape of Job

The world behind this chapter

Job 10
When
The patriarchal age (traditional view), the first round: Job files his complaint · Setting c. 2000-1800 BC; continuing the reply to Bildad
Where
The ash heap, addressed entirely to God
Who first heard it
Hearers who had asked God why and received nothing back

The history

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 rest of the history, and what it meant to them

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.

What it meant to them

Job's argument to God is essentially: you made me carefully, on purpose, and you know I am not guilty, so what is this? He is holding God to God's own workmanship.

Hearers were watching a man refuse two easy exits at once. He will not say God is unreal, and he will not say he himself is guilty. Holding both is what nearly tears him apart, and it is why the book calls him right at the end.

Sources cited

  • John E. Hartley, The Book of Job
  • John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews & Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament

Every work MannaFest builds on →

A. Job: Thy Hands Have Fashioned Me: Wilt Thou Destroy Me?

1. (vv. 1-2)

a.My soul is weary of my life: turns lament into legal petition: Do not condemn me, shew me wherefore thou contendest with me is the demand of a defendant kept from the charges brought against him. Henry notes Job does not ask to escape suffering but to know its ground, a plea for information rather than relief. Barnes reads the verb contendest as the language of a lawsuit, God cast as the party Job must answer without ever hearing the indictment.

Job 10:1, 1 voiceWhat preachers and commentators have said about this verse, in their own words.

Job 10:1

My soul is weary of my life - compare the note at Job 7:16. The margin here is, Or,” cut off while I live.” The meaning in the margin is in accordance with the interpretation of Schultens. The Chaldee also renders it in a similar way: אתגזרת נפשי - my soul is cut off. But the more correct interpretation is that in our common version; and the sense is, that his soul, that is, that he himself was disgusted with life. It was a weary burden, and he wished to die.

Job 10:2, 1 voice

Job 10:2

I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore Thou so judgest me. Whereas he declares himself a sinner 'in the bitterness of his soul,' what else does he say to God, but that he may not be condemned, in that the bitterness of his present penance does away with the pains of ensuing wrath? Now God judgeth man in this life in two ways, seeing that either by present ills He is already beginning to bring upon him the torments to come, or else by present scourges He does away with the torments to come.

2. (vv. 3-4)

a.Is it good unto thee: Job asks whether it profits God to oppress the work of his own hands while the counsel of the wicked prospers unchallenged, the same complaint he raises elsewhere against the world's uneven justice. Hast thou eyes of flesh, or seest thou as man seeth presses the point further, asking whether God's judgment of him is as shortsighted as a human accuser's would be. Clarke notes the question is not doubt of God's nature but a plea that he judge as one who sees the whole case, not merely its surface.

Job 10:3, 1 voice

Job 10:3

Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress - The sense of this is, that it could not be with God a matter of personal gratification to inflict pain wantonly. There must be a reason why he did it. This was clear to Job, and he was anxious, therefore, to know the reason why he was treated in this manner. Yet there is evidently here not a little of the spirit of complaining. There is an insinuation that God was afflicting him beyond what he deserved; see Job 10:

Job 10:4, 1 voice

Job 10:4

Hast thou eyes of flesh? - Eyes like man. Dost thou look upon man with the same disposition to discern faults; the same uncharitableness and inclination to construe everything in the severest manner possible, which characterizes man? Possibly Job may have reference here to the harsh judgment of his friends, and means to ask whether it could be possible for God to evince the same feelings in judging of him which they had done.

3. (vv. 5-7)

a.Are thy days as the days of man?: are thy years as man's days asks whether God investigates him the way a mortal judge must, hurried by a life too short to wait for truth to surface on its own. Wesley notes the irony: a God without Job's limits still searches after mine iniquity as though pressed by the same clock. Job's protest closes on a claim he never withdraws through the whole book, thou knowest that I am not wicked, set beside the honest admission that none can deliver out of thine hand.

Job 10:5, 2 voices

Job 10:5

The third defect of human knowledge is the result of the nature of time, both because his knowledge increases from day to day and also because he forgets those things which he knows through a long period of time, so it is necessary for him …

Thomas Aquinas· written before 1274· Commentary on Jobpatristic

Job 10:5

Are thy days as the days of man - Does thy life pass on like that of man? Dost thou expect soon to die, that thou dost pursue me in this manner, searching out my sins, and afflicting me as if there were no time to lose? The idea is, that God seemed to press this matter as if he were soon to cease to exist, and as if there were no time to spare in accomplishing it.

Job 10:6, 1 voice

Job 10:6

He continues, "That you should interrogate me about my evildoing and examine my sin," to investigate through tribulations if I have sinned in my work or am evil in my thought, like men investigate criminal guilt using torture.

Thomas Aquinas· written before 1274· Commentary on Jobpatristic

Job 10:7, 1 voice

Job 10:7

Thou knowest that I am not wicked - That is, that I am not a hypocrite, or an impenitent sinner. Job did not claim perfection (see the note at Job 9:20), but he maintained through all this argument that he was not a wicked man, in the sense in which his friends regarded him as such, and for the truth of this he could boldly appeal to God. The margin is, “It is upon thy knowledge.” This is a literal translation of the Hebrew, but the sense is well expressed in the text.

4. (vv. 8-12)

a.Thine hands have made me: and fashioned me together round about opens an argument from workmanship to care, the same hands credited with curdling him like cheese and clothing him with skin and flesh, in Delitzsch's reading of the embryology figure common to the ancient world. Thou hast granted me life and favour, and thy visitation hath preserved my spirit turns the survey toward tenderness, the Hebrew visitation carrying the sense of a watchful, sustaining care rather than a single act. Henry notes the argument's edge: a potter who shaped the vessel with such attention has no ready reason to smash it, and Job puts the question to God rather than answering it himself.

Job 10:8, 2 voices

Job 10:8

Thine hands have made me and fashioned me, altogether round about: and dost Thou thus suddenly cast me down? As if He said to Him in humility; 'Whereas that which I have done being submitted to a just examination is not meet for the propitiating of Thee, consider in Thy mercy lest that should perish which is Thy doing.' By which same words too the wicked doctrine of Manichaeus is destroyed, who feigning that there are two Principles, strives to maintain that the spirit was made by God, but the flesh by Satan.

Job 10:8

Thine hands have made me - Thou art well acquainted with human nature, for thou art its author. And fashioned me together round about - All my powers and faculties have been planned and executed by thyself. It is thou who hast refined the materials out of which I have been formed, and modified them into that excellent symmetry and order in which they are now found; so that the union and harmony of the different parts, (יחד yachad), and their arrangement and completion, (סביב sabib), proclaim equally thy wisdom, skill, power, and goodness.

Job 10:9, 2 voices

Job 10:9

Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay - There is evident allusion here to the creation of man, and to the fact that he was moulded from the dust of the earth - a fact which would be preserved by tradition; see Gen 2:7. The fact that God had moulded the human form as the potter moulds the clay, is one that is often referred to in the Scriptures; compare Rom 9:20-

Job 10:9

"Thou hast made me, as the clay, by an act of sovereignty; and wilt thou by a like act of sovereignty unmake me again? If so, I must submit." 3. "Wilt thou destroy the work of thy own hands?" It is a plea the saints have often used in prayer, We are the clay and thou our potter, Isa. lxiv.

Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan

Job 10:10, 2 voices

Job 10:10

Hast thou not poured me out as milk - After all that some learned men have said on this subject, in order to confine the images here to simple nutrition, I am satisfied that generation is the true notion. Respicit ad fetus in matris utero primam formationem, quum in embryonem ex utriusque parentis semine coalescit - Ex semine liquido, lac quodammodo referente, me formasti - In interpretando, inquit Hieronymus, omnino his accedo qui de genitali semine accipiunt, quod ipsa tanquam natura emulget, ac dein concrescere in utero ad coalescere jubet. I make no apology for leaving this untranslated.

Job 10:10

In the organization of the body from its rude commencements, the original liquid gradually assumes a more solid consistency, like milk curdling into cheese (Ps 139:15, 16). Science reveals that the chyle circulated by the lacteal vessels is the supply to every organ.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed

Job 10:11, 2 voices

Job 10:11

Here [Job] foreshadows the incarnation of the divine Word through the assumption of human nature. These words, in fact, appear to be addressed to the Father, as if they were said by the person [the Son] of the Lord.

Ephrem the Syrian· written before 373· COMMENTARY ON JOB 10:11-12patristic

Job 10:11

Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh - This refers, undoubtedly, to the formation of man in his foetal existence, and is designed to denote that the whole organization of the human frame was to be traced to God. Grotius remarks that this is the order in which the infant is formed - that the skin appears first, then the flesh, then the harder parts of the frame. On this subject, the reader may consult Dunglison’s Physiology, vol. ii. p. 340ff. And hast fenced me - Margin, Hedged. Literally, Hast covered me. The sense is plain.

Job 10:12, 2 voices

Job 10:12

Thou hast granted me life and favorer - Thou hast brought me from my mother’s womb; given me an actual existence among men; by thy favor or mercy thou hast provided me with the means of life; and thy visitation - thy continual providential care, has preserved me in life - has given me the air I breathe, and furnished me with those powers which enable me to respire it as an agent and preserver of life.

Job 10:12

IT is well, sometimes, to sit down and take a grateful review of all that God has done for us, and with us, from our first day until now. We must not be like hogs under the oak, that eat the acorns but never thank the tree, or the Lord who made it grow. We must not receive the dew and yet never think of the Heaven from which it comes. To be ungrateful is to be unmanly—to be ungrateful to God is to commit high treason against the majesty of His goodness.

B. Job: Let Me Alone, That I May Take Comfort a Little

1. (vv. 13-14)

a.these things hast thou hid: And these things hast thou hid in thine heart accuses God of concealing a settled purpose behind the trial, Job's private conviction that his affliction was no improvisation but a plan held back from him. If I sin, then thou markest me, and thou wilt not acquit me from mine iniquity extends the charge, that God watches for a fault to justify what has already been decided. Gill reads the verse as Job's suspicion of a fixed design rather than a case argued on its merits, the very complaint the book's frame in chapters 1 and 2 shows to be true in a sense Job cannot see.

Job 10:13, 1 voice

Job 10:13

And these things hast thou hid in thine heart - This may either refer to the arrangements by which God had made him, or to the calamities which he had brought upon him. Most expositors suppose that the latter is intended. Such is the opinion of Rosenmuller, Good, Noyes, and Scott. According to this the idea is, that God had purposed in his heart to bring these calamities upon him. They were a part of his counsel and design. To hide in the heart, or to lay up in the heart, is a phrase expressive of a secret purpose.

2. (vv. 15-17)

a.If I be wicked, woe unto me: , and if I be righteous, yet will I not lift up my head states the trap Job feels closing on him, that shame follows him whichever way the verdict falls. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion pictures relentless pursuit, and thou renewest thy witnesses against me turns the courtroom image of the chapter's opening into an unfair contest, fresh testimony brought in as fast as Job can answer the last. Barnes notes changes and war are against me reads literally of relief troops, a besieging army sent in successive companies so that no respite comes.

Job 10:15, 2 voices

Job 10:15

If I be wicked, woe unto me; and if I be righteous, yet will I not lift up my head: I am full of affliction and misery. Yea, the wicked man has 'woe,' and the righteous man 'affliction,' in that both everlasting damnation follows the lost sinner, and each one of the Elect is purified by the pains of temporary affliction. The wicked man lifts up his head, yet when so lifted up he cannot escape the woe that pursues him.

Job 10:15

If I be wicked, woe unto me - The meaning of this in this connection is, “I am full of perplexity and sorrow. Whether I am wicked or righteous, I find no comfort. Whatever is my character, my efforts to be happy are unavailing, and my mind is full of anguish. Woe follows if I have been guilty of sin; and if I am not a sinful man, I am equally incapable of enjoyment. In every way I am doomed to wretchedness.” And if I be righteous, yet will I not lift up my head.

Job 10:16, 2 voices

Job 10:16

For it increaseth - Probably this refers to the affliction mentioned above, which is increased in proportion to its duration. Every day made his escape from such a load of evils less and less probable. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion - As the hunters attack the king of beasts in the forest, so my friends attack me. They assail me on every side. Thou showest thyself marvelous - Thy designs, thy ways, thy works, are all incomprehensible to me; thou dost both confound and overpower me.

Job 10:16

God was not only strange to him, but showed himself marvellous upon him, by bringing him into uncommon troubles and so making him prodigy, a wonder unto many. All wondered that God would inflict and that Job could bear so much. That which made his afflictions most grievous was that he felt God's indignation in them; it was this that made them taste so bitter and lie so heavy.

Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan

Job 10:17, 2 voices

Job 10:17

Thou renewest Thy witnesses against me, and multipliest Thy wrath: and pains war in me. HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION For 'God's witnesses' are they, who bear witness by the practice of holy works, what are the rewards of Truth that shall overtake the Elect. Hence too those, whom we see to have suffered for the sake of the Truth, we style in the Greek tongue, 'Martyrs,' i.e. witnesses. And the Lord says by John in the Angel's voice, Even in those days, wherein Antipas was my faithful witness, who was slain among you.

Job 10:17

Thou renewest thy witnesses against me - Margin, “that is, plagues.” The Hebrew is, “thy witnesses” - עדיך ‛ēdeykā. So the Vulgate. The Septuagint is, “renewing against me my examination,” τὴν ἐξέτασίν μου tēn ecetasin mou. Rabbi Levi supposes that the plague of the leprosy is intended. But the true meaning seems to be, that God sent upon him calamities which were regarded by his friends as “proofs” or “witnesses” that he was wicked, the public and solemn attestation of God, as they supposed, to the truth that he was eminently a bad man.

3. (vv. 18-19)

a.Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth: out of the womb returns to the death wish of chapter 3, now aimed as a direct question at God rather than a curse on the day itself. Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me carries the wish back before birth, and I should have been carried from the womb to the grave asks for a life that ended at its very start. Henry notes Job does not act on the wish, only voices it to God, the same distinction the book draws throughout between honest complaint and rebellion.

Job 10:18, 1 voice

Job 10:18

Someone could think that Job's statement comes from desperation, but that is proven wrong by what God has said: "Do you believe I treated you like this for any other reason than to reveal your righteousness?" Job, who previously had said, "If I am wicked, …

Didymus the Blind· written before 398· COMMENTARY ON JOB 10:18-22patristic

Job 10:19, 2 voices

Job 10:19

Wherefore then hast Thou brought me forth out of the womb. Oh that I had been consumed, and no eye had seen me. Which same sentiment he had already uttered in his first speech, saying, Why died I not from the womb? and whilst he subjoins that which he adds here, I should have been as though I had not been, I should have been carried from the womb to the grave; he adds in other words, but no other sense, saying, Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants which never saw light.

Job 10:19

I should have been as though I had not been,.... For though it cannot be said absolutely of such an one, an abortive or untimely birth, that it is a nonentity, or never existed; yet comparatively it is as if it never had a being; it being seen by none or very few, it having had no name, nor any conversation among men; but at once buried, and buried in forgetfulness, as if no such one had ever been; see Ecc 6:

4. (vv. 20-22)

a.Are not my days few?: cease then, and let me alone asks for a small mercy, comfort before an end Job assumes is near and irreversible. The land of darkness he pictures at his death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness, is described exactly as Job understands death at this point in the book, with none of the hope that will surface later at 14:14 or reach its height at 19:25. Davidson notes the verse should be read as Job's own horizon in the ninth speech, not the book's last word on what lies beyond death, since the argument has not yet climbed to the daysman or the redeemer.

Job 10:20, 1 voice

Job 10:20

Are not my days few? - My life is short, and hastens to a close. Let not then my afflictions be continued to the last moment of life, but let thine hand be removed, that I may enjoy some rest before I go hence, to return no more. This is an address to God, and the meaning is, that as life was necessarily so short, he asked to be permitted to enjoy some comfort before he should go to the land of darkness and of death; compare the note at Job 7:

Job 10:21, 2 voices

Job 10:21

Before I go - from where “I shall not return.” To the grave, to the land of shades, to “That undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveler returns.” To the land of darkness - This passage is important as furnishing an illustration of what was early understood about the regions of the dead. The essential idea here is that it was a land of darkness, of total and absolute night. This idea Job presents in a great variety of forms and phrases.

Job 10:21

Secondly, That there is no light there. In the grave there is thick darkness, darkness that cannot be felt indeed, yet cannot but be feared by those that enjoy the light of life. In the grave there is no knowledge, no comfort, no joy, no praising God, no working out our salvation, and therefore no light.

Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan

Job 10:22, 2 voices

Job 10:22

Where the light is as darkness - A palpable obscure: it is space and place, and has only such light or capability of distinction as renders “darkness visible.” The following words of Sophocles convey the same idea: Ιω σκοτος εμοι φαος; “Thou darkness be my light.” It is, as the Vulgate expresses it, Terra tenebrosa, et operta mortis caligine: Terra miseriae et tenebrarum, ubi umbra mortis, et nullus ordo, sed sempiternus horror inhabitat: “A murky land, covered with the thick darkness of death: a land of wretchedness and obscurities, where is the shadow of death, and no order, but sempiternal horror dwells everywhere.” Or, as Coverdale expresses this last clause, Wheras is no ordre but terrible feare as in the darknesse.

Job 10:22

Three Hebrew words are used for darkness; in Job 10:21 (1) the common word "darkness"; here (2) "a land of gloom" (from a Hebrew root, "to cover up"); (3) as "thick darkness" or blackness (from a root, expressing sunset). "Where the light thereof is like blackness." Its only sunshine is thick darkness.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed

The text of this chapter

This page carries no textual note on Job 10. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →

This page draws on 13 works. Open for the list.

This page draws on A. B. Davidson, The Book of Job, Cambridge Bible; Adam Clarke; Albert Barnes; Charles Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2314: “Three Blessings of the Heavenly Charter” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition); Didymus the Blind, COMMENTARY ON JOB 10:18-22; Ephrem the Syrian, COMMENTARY ON JOB 10:11-12; Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Book of Job; Gregory the Dialogist, Morals on the Book of Job, Book IX; Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871); John Gill; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament; Matthew Henry and Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Job.

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