Job18chapter 18

Bildad's whole speech is one extended portrait of the wicked man's end, and the images come from the two most familiar trades in the region: trapping and mourning.

The trapping section piles up six different devices in a few lines — a net, a snare, a noose held by the heel, a hidden cord on the ground, a trap on the path, and a pit. Fowlers and hunters used every one of them, and each Hebrew word names a different mechanism. The picture is of a man who cannot put a foot down anywhere without something closing on it.

'The light shall be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall be put out with him' is domestic. A household kept a small clay lamp burning through the night; an extinguished lamp meant the house was empty, and 'his lamp put out' was standard ancient shorthand for a family line ending.

The last images are the curse laid on a ruined site. Brimstone — sulphur — scattered on the place made it barren and marked it as accursed; sowing a destroyed site with salt or sulphur was a known ritual across the ancient Near East. And 'the firstborn of death' devouring his strength personifies a killing disease, the way that world spoke of plague as a power with a name. He is left with no son and no nephew among his people, and no one remaining in his dwellings — total erasure.