Job27chapter 27

Job opens with an oath in the strongest form his world had: 'As God liveth, who hath taken away my judgment.' Swearing by the life of God bound a man to the truth on pain of divine reckoning, and Job uses it to swear he will not say what everyone wants him to say — till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me.

He then describes the hypocrite's real position, and it is the friends' own doctrine handed back with an edge. What is the hope of the hypocrite when God takes away his soul? Will God hear his cry when trouble comes? Will he delight himself in the Almighty and call on God at all times? The hypocrite's problem, Job says, is not his circumstances but that he does not want God — which is exactly the opposite of everything Job has been doing for twenty-five chapters.

The pictures of the wicked man's estate are drawn from building and farming. He builds his house as a moth — the flimsy case a clothes-moth larva spins — and as a booth that the keeper makes: the temporary shelter of branches thrown up in a vineyard for the few weeks of harvest and abandoned after. Both are structures nobody expects to last a season.

The wealth images are just as concrete. Though he heap up silver as the dust and prepare clothing as the clay, the just shall put it on and the innocent divide the silver — fine garments were a major form of stored wealth, and this is a picture of a man's wardrobe worn by someone else. Then the east wind carries him away in the night and hurls him out of his place, and men clap their hands at him and hiss him out.