The first half is a catalogue of social death, listed by relationship. Brothers put far away; acquaintances estranged; kinsfolk failed; the guests of his house counting him a stranger; his servant not answering when called; his breath strange to his wife; young children despising him; his close friends abhorring him. In a society where a man was his household and his clan, this is what total ruin actually meant.
Then he asks for his words to be permanently recorded: printed in a book, or better, graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever. That describes real monumental practice — letters cut into stone with an iron chisel and the grooves filled with molten lead so they stood out and lasted. Rulers across the ancient Near East recorded their claims that way, and Job wants his testimony to have the same permanence as a king's inscription.
The word he uses next is a legal one every hearer knew: goel, the redeemer. The goel was the nearest male relative, and his duties were specific — buy back land the family had lost, buy a relative out of slavery, marry a childless widow to preserve the line, and pursue the killer of a murdered kinsman. Job has just finished saying every human kinsman has abandoned him. So he names a different one: 'I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.'
The following verse is famously hard in the Hebrew, and translations differ over whether Job expects to see God in his flesh or after his flesh is destroyed. What is not in doubt is the direction: he expects to see God himself, with his own eyes, and not as a stranger.
