Job19chapter 19

Job 19:1-5

Then Job answered: Ten times have ye reproached me is a round number of completeness rather than a tally, as Gill notes, and it opens the fifth of Job's replies with the friends' cruelty itself now part of his case. His answer to their magnifying is that if he has erred, mine error remaineth with myself: an undiscovered private fault would be God's business and not theirs. Henry observes that the friends have made themselves strange to the man they came to comfort, which is the failure of chapter 2:13's better silence.

Job 19:6-9

Job answers Bildad's doctrine that the wicked man is taken in a net by his own feet (18:8) by naming the net's true owner: God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. The images that follow are of a siege and a degradation, the fenced-up way, darkness set in the path, the stripped glory and the crown taken from his head. Barnes notes that Job's error here is honest and profound at once: he reads his suffering as God's hostility because he cannot see the court of chapters 1 and 2, and the reader always can.

Job 19:10-12

The uprooted tree answers Job's own earlier image at 14:7, where a tree cut down had hope that a man lacked; now even the tree's hope is taken from him. His troops come together turns one afflicted man's tent into a city under siege by armies, which Delitzsch reads as the language of the Chaldean and Sabean raids of chapter 1 turned into a figure for God's whole campaign. The disproportion is the point the verse states without softening: encamped round about my tabernacle, a war against a tent.

Job 19:13-16

The estrangement catalogue descends by rank through a patriarchal household: brethren, acquaintance, kinsfolk, familiar friends, house guests, maids, and the servant who no longer answers though his master intreats him. Henry marks the inversion of the last pair, a lord begging his own servant and being refused, as the depth of the humiliation. Gill notes that every relation the restoration of chapter 42:11 will name again is lost here first, so the catalogue is the measure of what God will later give back.

Job 19:17-19

The catalogue reaches its innermost ring: his breath is strange to his wife, young children despise him when he rises, and all my inward friends abhorred me. The readings on the children's sake of mine own body divide, whether Job pleads by the memory of his dead children or by the sons of his own mother, and Barnes and Gill set out both without deciding. The three friends sitting in front of him are inside the sentence about inward friends turned against him, which is the charge of verse 2 restated as grief.

Job 19:20-22

the skin of my teeth: I am escaped with the skin of my teeth is the birthplace of the proverb, and the commentators differ over what the figure holds: escape with nothing at all, or the bare gums the disease has left, and Clarke and Delitzsch set out both. The doubled cry have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends asks from men what he believes God has withheld, for the hand of God hath touched me. Why do ye persecute me as God charges the friends with joining the prosecution instead of the defense, an office the book's last chapter will reverse when Job prays for them.

Job 19:23-24

Job wishes his protest made permanent in three rising degrees: written, inscribed in a book, and graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever. Clarke notes that printed is the translators' word from their own age and the Hebrew asks for engraving, the lead run into rock-cut letters after the manner of ancient inscriptions. The wish was granted beyond its asking, as Henry observes: the words were written in the book the reader is holding, and have outlasted every rock.

Job 19:25

This is the first occurrence of the word redeemer in the canon's order, and the Hebrew is the goel, the kinsman with the right to buy back a relative's land and person (Lev 25:25) and to stand for his blood: the word Ruth's story builds on is here first, claimed by a man in ruins about God. It is the summit of a ladder the speeches have been climbing, the daysman wished for at 9:33, the witness in heaven of 16:19, and now a living redeemer who shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, the Hebrew saying at the last, upon the dust. Gregory and the older writers read the goel as Christ the one mediator, and that reading is theirs by name; the verse's own claim, that Job's vindicator lives and will stand on his dust, is text.

Job 19:26-27

yet in my flesh: The Hebrew of this verse is among the hardest in the book and the margin is honest about it: in my flesh shall I see God can also be rendered from or without my flesh, and the readings divide with the words. Henry, Gill and most of the older bench read a resurrection hope, seeing God in the body after the skin's destruction; Delitzsch renders without my flesh and hears a vision of God from beyond the body's ruin. What no reading removes is the certainty and the personal claim: whom I shall see FOR MYSELF, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another, a longing so strong that my reins be consumed within me.

Job 19:28-29

the root of the matter: Job closes by warning the prosecutors: if the root of the matter is found in me, then the persecution itself will come under review, and wrath bringeth the punishments of the sword. That ye may know there is a judgment turns the friends' favorite doctrine back upon them, since the judgment they preached at Job will weigh their words about God as well. The book keeps the warning: at 42:7 the wrath of the Lord is kindled against Eliphaz and his two friends for the very speeches this chapter answers, as Henry notes.