Job16chapter 16

Job 16:1-5

Job opens his fourth reply naming the friends outright: I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are ye all, the book's sole use of the phrase and the flattest verdict Job passes on their counsel. Vain words have an end asks whether their speeches will ever stop, and Job answers his own question by imagining the reversal: if your soul were in my soul's stead, he could heap up words against them as they have against him. He chooses instead the harder path, I would strengthen you with my mouth, naming the comfort he needed and did not receive.

Job 16:6-8

Speech brings no relief and silence brings none either, though I forbear, what am I eased. Job reads his own body as evidence against him: thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a witness against me, his wasted appearance testifying as though guilt itself showed in a shrunken face. Barnes notes that a wasting illness becomes for the friends proof of hidden sin, when the text has already told the reader otherwise. Job's grief and his exhausted body are yoked to the same complaint, that God hath made him weary and made desolate all his company.

Job 16:9-11

He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me pictures God himself as a beast of prey, gnashing his teeth and sharpening his eyes upon Job like a hunter marking game. The human mockers who gape upon me with their mouth and smite me upon the cheek reproachfully act out the same hostility on the ground that Job has just charged to heaven. Job draws no line between the two: God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked, naming God as the one who handed him to his tormentors rather than merely permitting them. Delitzsch reads the verse as Job's honest but partial sight, the affliction read as personal assault because the court of chapters one and two stays hidden from him.

Job 16:12-14

I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder turns a settled life into a target: God has taken him by the neck, shaken him to pieces, and set me up for his mark, the language of an archer practicing on a mark. His archers compass me round about extends the figure into a siege, cleaving his reins asunder and pouring out his gall upon the ground, and breach upon breach pictures a city wall broken through again before the first gap can be repaired. He runneth upon me like a giant closes the unit with the plainest simile in the speech, God pictured as an overwhelming warrior rather than a judge weighing a case. Henry notes that Job never doubts God's power in these verses, only God's apparent purpose, the same God he will call his witness a few verses later.

Job 16:15-17

I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin makes the mourning garment permanent, stitched rather than merely worn, and defiled my horn in the dust takes the horn's normal sense of strength and dignity and grinds it into the ground. My face is foul with weeping and the shadow of death on his eyelids complete the portrait of a man who looks exactly as guilty as the friends have judged him. Against that appearance Job sets his plea of innocence plainly, not for any injustice in mine hands: also my prayer is pure, refusing to let his ruined body stand as proof of hidden sin. Clarke notes that sewing sackcloth to the skin pictures a grief too settled to be laid aside and taken up again as ordinary mourning was.

Job 16:18-19

O earth, cover not thou my blood asks that his death, if it comes, be left exposed rather than hidden, a cry that his case stay open for a hearing he has not yet received. Let my cry have no place refuses any burial of his complaint along with his body. Also now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high answers his own appeal: while the friends sit as accusers on the ground, Job claims a witness above them who has kept a true record. Delitzsch reads this as the second rung of a ladder the speeches keep climbing, after the daysman wished for at 9:33 and before the redeemer named at 19:25.

Job 16:20-21

My friends scorn me sets the human court against him even as his eye poureth out tears unto God, the same double address the whole chapter has been making, complaint to men and appeal to heaven at once. O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour asks for an advocate in the ordinary sense of a neighbor speaking up for a neighbor in a dispute. Gill notes the verse keeps the mediator vocabulary in a human register, short of the witness of verse 19 and short of the redeemer Job will name in chapter 19, a plainer wish for someone to take his part. Henry notes that Job's plea imagines only a human advocate, an office the following chapters will press further as his confidence in a heavenly witness grows.

Job 16:22

When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return closes the chapter on the plainest fact available to him, that his time is short and death is one-directional. The verse carries none of the hope of the redeemer speech two chapters ahead; here Job's outlook is only the grave he cannot escape. Barnes notes the phrase belongs to Job's honest range of moods across the book, and the confidence of 16:19 and the flat mortality of 16:22 stand side by side without either canceling the other. Wesley reads the verse as pressing Job's plea for a hearing now, since death will close the case before any earthly court can open it.