Job30chapter 30

The reversal is exact: 'but now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.' Sheepdogs were working animals, not pets, and they ranked at the bottom of the household; saying a man's father was not fit to keep company with them is as low as the insult goes.

Then Job describes who these people are, and the description is a piece of social history. They are men driven out from among ordinary society, hungry and gaunt, fleeing into the wilderness and the wasteland. They gather saltwort by the bushes and juniper roots for food — real famine foods, the bitter marsh plants and woody roots people ate when nothing else was left. They live in the clefts of the valleys, in caves of the earth and among the rocks, and they bray in the bushes like animals. Bands of outcasts really did live in the badlands beyond the settled country, and every ancient community had them.

Job's point is that even these have him for a byword and spit in his face, because his cord — the tent-rope image for a man's strength and standing — has been loosed. They push away his feet and cast up their ways of destruction against him, the language of a siege ramp raised against a wall.

The last section is his body and his God. His bowels boil and do not rest; his skin is black and falls off him; his bones burn with heat. He is a brother to jackals and a companion to ostriches, the two creatures whose night cries the desert was known for — a wailing sound anyone who had camped out there had heard. His harp is turned to mourning and his pipe to the voice of them that weep. And he says the thing under all of it: I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me.