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Job

Jobchapter 16

22 verses · BSBJob book hub →

Speaks with:Psalms 109×3Lamentations 2×3Job 7×3Job 13×2Job 6×2Psalms 22×2

Summary

Chapter summary

Job answers Eliphaz with the line every sufferer has borrowed since: 'I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all' (16:2). I also could speak as ye do, if your soul were in my soul's stead: I could heap up words and shake my head at you. Instead he describes being hunted: God has worn him out, gnashed upon him, set him up for a mark, cleaved his reins asunder, run upon him like a giant. His face is red with weeping, 'although there is no violence in my hands.' Yet mid-agony his faith flares: 'even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he that voucheth for me is on high' (16:19).

Context

Poetry · Unknown — Job overview

  • A. 1–11 Job: Miserable Comforters Are Ye All
  • B. 12–22 Job: Even Now, Behold, My Witness Is in Heaven

The outline

  1. A.Job: Miserable Comforters Are Ye Allvv. 1 to 11

    Read vv. 1 to 11 →

  2. B.Job: Even Now, Behold, My Witness Is in Heavenvv. 12 to 22

    Read vv. 12 to 22 →

Threads

Each of these runs on past this chapter. The passage you have just read is marked.

The daysman, the witness, and the redeemer

Pattern

Three times Job reaches for a figure the book never supplies: a daysman to lay his hand upon both parties, a witness in heaven, and at last a living redeemer who shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. The ladder rises rung by rung out of the book's darkest chapters.

Older writers from Gregory onward read the ladder as reaching toward Christ the one mediator between God and men. The rungs themselves are text any reader can see: a sufferer asking for exactly the office the gospel later fills.

  1. Job 9:33

    No daysman betwixt us

    The word daysman stands here and nowhere else in Scripture.

  2. Job 16:19 you are here

    My witness is in heaven

  3. Job 19:25-27

    I know that my redeemer liveth

    The first occurrence of the word redeemer in canonical order.

The world behind this chapter

Job 16
When
The patriarchal age (traditional view) — the second round: Job answers Eliphaz · Setting c. 2000–1800 BC; the reply within the second cycle
Where
The ash heap, surrounded
Who first heard it
Hearers who knew what public contempt looked like in a small town

The history

Job calls them miserable comforters and says he could string words together too, if their souls were where his soul is — shaking his head at them. Head-shaking, gaping with the mouth, and striking a man on the cheek were all recognised gestures of public scorn in that world, done in front of witnesses so that everyone saw a man's standing collapse.

The middle section uses the imagery of an ambush and an execution. God has taken him by the neck and shaken him to pieces, set him up as a mark for the arrow, and his archers surround him and split his kidneys — the innermost part of the body, the seat of the deepest feeling in Hebrew usage. He is describing not just pain but being singled out as a target.

The mourning details are exact. He has sewn sackcloth on his skin — not draped, sewn, the sign of grief that has become permanent — and defiled his horn in the dust. A horn was the standard symbol of a man's strength and honour, taken from the lifted horn of a bull; pushing it into the dirt is the picture of a strong man's dignity ground into the ground where he sits.

Then, in the middle of the darkest speech so far, comes a flash of something else: 'my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high'. Job appeals past his friends and past his own experience to a witness in the heavenly court who knows the truth of him. He asks that his blood not be covered — the ancient conviction that unavenged blood cries from the ground until someone answers for it.

What it meant to them

Job's instinct here is remarkable and the book means it to be. Attacked by God, as he sees it, he appeals to God — 'that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour'.

For hearers, that is the second time the need for a mediator has surfaced, and it is louder than the first. The book keeps raising a hand it cannot yet fill.

Sources cited

  • Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on 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 →

The text of this chapter

This page carries no textual note on Job 16. 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 Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job; Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.

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