Job14chapter 14

The chapter opens with three pictures of a short life, all agricultural or domestic: a flower that comes up and is cut down, a shadow that does not stay, and a hired man's fixed term. Job then adds a legal touch — a man's days are determined and his bounds appointed so he cannot pass them, like a boundary a tenant may not cross.

The centre of the chapter is a piece of real horticulture. A felled tree, he says, still has hope: through the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant, even if its root has grown old and its stump died in the ground. This is true of olive, terebinth, and several other trees of that region, which regrow vigorously from a cut stump — orchards were managed on exactly this principle. Job's grief is that a man is not a tree. He lies down and does not rise till the heavens are no more.

Then he asks the question outright: if a man die, shall he live again? And he answers it as a wish rather than a doctrine — that God would hide him in the grave until his anger passed, set him a fixed term, and then call, and he would answer. Israel's clear teaching on resurrection came later and fuller; here a man in the dark is feeling for it.

The chapter closes with erosion. Waters wear away stones, floods wash away the soil of the earth, and so God destroys the hope of man. Anyone who had watched a winter torrent take a hillside terrace knew precisely what that looked like.