Job20chapter 20

Job 20:1-3

Zophar opens agitated rather than measured: therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste. He hears Job's words at the end of chapter 19 as a personal reproach, the check of my reproach, and answers out of that sting rather than out of new argument. Henry notes the haste itself as a mark of a man more nettled than reasoned, and Gill reads the spirit of my understanding as Zophar's claim to speak from insight rather than mere feeling, a claim the speech proceeds to test.

Job 20:4-7

Zophar grounds his doctrine in age rather than in argument, since man was placed upon earth, and states it plainly: the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment. However high his excellency mounts, reaching the clouds, he perishes for ever like his own dung, a deliberately degrading figure Clarke reads as chosen to match the height just claimed. Barnes notes that the doctrine is traditional wisdom common to the ancient Near East and not Zophar's invention, which is part of why it sounds so confident and answers so little of Job's own case.

Job 20:8-11

The wicked man's disappearance is pictured as a dream that leaves no trace, chased away as a vision of the night, until the eye that once saw him sees him no more. His own children are reduced to seeking favor from the poor his hands once wronged, restoring what he took. Gill reads his bones full of the sin of his youth as inherited consequence carried into old age and buried with him in the dust, a picture of guilt outlasting the body that bore it.

Job 20:12-16

The chapter's central figure runs in one escalating line: sin tastes sweet and is hidden under the tongue, kept and savored rather than spat out, until it turns in his bowels into the gall of asps. The riches swallowed down are vomited up again, God himself casting them out of his belly, and the same poison that fed him now kills him, the viper's tongue shall slay him. Delitzsch reads the whole figure as sin under the image of a delicacy that becomes venom once digested, the pleasure and the poison being one substance viewed at two moments.

Job 20:17-19

The rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter name the land's own blessing language, and Zophar says the wicked man forfeits it: what he labored for he must restore, taking no joy in it. The reason given is concrete rather than general, he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor, and hath violently taken away an house which he builded not. Davidson notes that this is the one place in the speech where the doctrine touches a specific wrong, oppression and seizure, rather than resting on the abstract triumph of verse 5.

Job 20:20-23

The man who swallowed so much finds no rest in it, he shall not save of that which he desired, and Zophar turns his own former companions against him, every hand of the wicked shall come upon him. The climax is timed for the worst moment, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating, the meal itself becoming the occasion of judgment. Barnes reads the image as deliberately reversing verse 12, the sweetness taken into the mouth answered by wrath poured out at the very table.

Job 20:24-25

Escape from one danger only delivers him to another, he flees the iron weapon and the bow of steel strikes him through, the arrow drawn out again from the body it entered. Clarke reads the glittering sword coming out of his gall as continuing the poison figure of verses 14 and 16, the very organ that turned sweetness to venom now pierced. Terrors are upon him closes the couplet with the state Zophar has been building toward across the whole speech.

Job 20:26-29

The speech closes with a fire not blown, one Zophar does not name but leaves unexplained in its origin, consuming what darkness had hidden away, and with heaven and earth both turning witness against the man, the heaven shall reveal his iniquity, and the earth shall rise up against him. This is the portion of a wicked man from God names the whole catalogue as a single doctrine rather than a threat aimed at Job by name. Watson notes that this is the last speech given to Zophar in the book; his third turn in the friends' third round never comes, and the debate's structure lets his silence stand where his argument ran out.