Job6chapter 6

Job asks that his grief be weighed in the balances — a merchant's image. Trade in that world ran on a beam scale and a set of stone weights, and the picture is of loading his misery onto one pan against the sand of the sea on the other.

His complaint about food is domestic and exact: nobody eats tasteless food without salt, or the white of an egg, and the loathsome things he now refuses are what his sickness has made of his meals. He is answering Eliphaz's smooth words by saying that they go down the same way.

The strongest picture in the chapter is a desert wadi. These watercourses run black with meltwater and ice in the cold season and vanish completely in the heat. Caravans planned their routes around them. Job describes the companies of Tema and Sheba — real trading peoples of north and south Arabia — turning aside from the road toward a known watercourse, finding nothing, and dying of the disappointment. That, he says, is what his friends have been.

He also makes clear what he never asked for. He did not ask them for money, or to buy him out of an enemy's hand — the ordinary things a man in trouble asked of his network. He asked only that they teach him where he had gone wrong, and they have brought accusation instead of instruction.