Job20chapter 20

Zophar admits he is speaking out of stung pride — 'the check of my reproach' — and then delivers the harshest of the friends' portraits. His controlling image is food that turns.

Wickedness, he says, is sweet in the mouth, hidden under the tongue, spared and kept — the way a man saves the best morsel. But the food turns in his stomach into the gall of asps; he swallows down riches and vomits them up again; God casts them out of his belly. Venomous snakes were a constant hazard in that country, and the gall of a viper was the ancient shorthand for poison in the body.

The riches themselves are described in the language of restitution law. He shall restore his labour and not swallow it down; his goods flow away in the day of God's wrath; the increase of his house departs. Anyone who had seen a household broken up and its property distributed after a judgment knew the picture.

The war imagery at the end is technical. He flees from an iron weapon and the bow of bronze strikes him through; the arrow is drawn out of his body and the glittering point comes out of his gall; terrors are upon him. And 'a fire not blown shall consume him' means a fire nobody kindled with bellows — a fire from God rather than from men. Hearers who remembered chapter 1 knew that fire from heaven had already fallen on Job's sheep, and would have felt the cruelty of the line.