Job17chapter 17

Job 17:1-2

My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready for me opens the chapter with three declarations of a man already counting himself dead, the graves plural perhaps taking in the family plot Job expects to fill alone. The line that follows, are there not mockers with me, keeps his eye fixed on the friends whose provocation surrounds him. Gill reads corrupt breath as the language of a man near his last gasp rather than a figure, matching the physical ruin the earlier chapters have already described. The two verses set the chapter's key before a single doctrine is argued: this is a man speaking from what he takes to be the edge of the grave.

Job 17:3

Lay down now, put me in a surety with thee asks God to post a pledge on Job's behalf, the commercial figure of a surety who guarantees another man's debt with his own goods or person. Who is he that will strike hands with me carries the same figure forward, striking hands being the ancient gesture that sealed a pledge, the same act Proverbs uses of a bad bargain. Clarke and Delitzsch both read the verse as continuing the mediator language of chapter nine's daysman, now cast as a legal guarantee rather than an umpire between two parties. The plea assumes no human surety is available and asks God to be his own guarantor against the friends' charge.

Job 17:4-5

For thou hast hid their heart from understanding turns Job's complaint toward heaven again, reading the friends' blindness itself as something God has withheld from them rather than a fault they chose. Therefore shalt thou not exalt them asks that men arguing from a hidden understanding not be allowed to triumph in the debate. He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail states a proverb of retribution reaching past the flatterer to his household, which Henry reads as a warning aimed at the very friends now flattering their own arguments instead of comforting Job. The two verses together accuse the friends of a fault while leaving open, in the same breath, that their blindness has a cause beyond themselves.

Job 17:6-7

He hath made me also a byword of the people takes Job from private grief into public shame, his name now a proverb for ruin among people who once respected him. Aforetime I was as a tabret recalls a man whose presence was once welcomed like festival music, the contrast sharpened by nothing more than the one word aforetime. Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow and all my members are as a shadow complete the physical wasting that mirrors the social fall, sorrow spent on the body as thoroughly as scorn has been spent on the reputation. Barnes notes the tabret figure as evidence of Job's former standing, a man of music and welcome now become an object lesson.

Job 17:8-9

Upright men shall be astonied at this predicts that Job's case, once known, will shock the very people the friends claim to represent, and the innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite turns the debate's charge back on the accusers. The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger stands as one bare confidence set in the middle of grave imagery on both sides of it, a claim Job makes about righteousness in general even while his own case looks like its opposite. Gill reads the verse as Job's settled conviction that a right course does not depend on present appearances, a confidence that returns in fuller form at 23:10. Henry notes the abruptness of the turn, comfort spoken for one verse and then set aside as the chapter returns to darkness.

Job 17:10-11

But as for you all, do ye return, and come now dismisses the friends' arguments as spent, and for I cannot find one wise man among you states Job's verdict on the debate so far without softening it. My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart turns from the friends to Job's own ruined plans, every project a healthy man makes for his future now cut off. Clarke reads the pairing as Job closing one line of argument, the friends have nothing left to say, before opening another, his own hope has nothing left to stand on.

Job 17:12-14

They change the night into day is read by the commentators as the friends' false comfort, turning Job's darkness into a claim of light he does not feel, though some take it of Job's own sleepless confusion of day and night. If I wait, the grave is mine house makes the grave Job's expected home rather than an interruption of life, and I have made my bed in the darkness turns mourning into a permanent address. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister completes the figure with a family Job claims for himself in the grave, corruption and the worm standing in for every relation he has already lost, a catalogue the very next chapters will spell out by name. Delitzsch notes the boldness of naming decay as kinship, a man who has run out of living family choosing the grave's occupants as the only household left to him.

Job 17:15-16

The closing line, where is now my hope, and who shall see it, gathers up the surety plea and the surviving confidence of verse nine into one final doubt. They shall go down to the bars of the pit answers it: hope itself will not outlive Job, and their rest together in the dust joins him to it. Henry reads the final line as Job's honest limit in this speech, a hope that reaches no further than the same dust that ends every other man's case. Wesley notes the pit's bars as a figure for the grave's finality as the ancients pictured it, a gate that shuts rather than a door that opens.