Job7chapter 7

Job 7:1-3

Job reads his own life through the figure of a hired laborer, a man bound to a term he did not choose and cannot shorten. Henry notes that the hireling looks for evening the way Job now looks for death, both waiting on a wage they have not yet received. So am I made to possess months of vanity turns the complaint from a single bad day into an entire allotted season, which is Job's answer to the friends' assumption that his suffering is a passing correction.

Job 7:4-6

When I lie down: The night that should end labor only starts a new one for Job, full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Clarke reads my flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust as the disease's own crust, the skin broken and running until it hardens and cracks again. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle turns speed itself into grief, since a swift life spent without hope is not a mercy but a shorter sentence.

Job 7:7-10

Job asks God to remember what Job himself cannot forget, that his life is wind and his eye shall no more see good. Barnes notes the reasoning behind he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more: Job speaks within the Old Testament's ordinary hope of Sheol, a return to dust rather than a settled doctrine of resurrection, which is why the later reach of 19:25-26 stands out as far as it does. He shall return no more to his house states the plain fact of mortality without yet claiming anything beyond it.

Job 7:11-12

Job announces the policy the rest of the book will hold him to: I will complain in the bitterness of my soul rather than perform a silence he does not feel. Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me reads God's attention as a guard set on a dangerous thing, not a father's care. Delitzsch notes the irony the reader can see and Job cannot, that a watch has in fact been set on him, though by the wager of chapters 1 and 2 rather than by any menace in him.

Job 7:13-16

Even sleep is taken from Job as a refuge: my bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint, and God answers with dreams and terrifying visions instead. So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life is the book's plainest statement of a wish to die, and Gill reads it as the extremity of a man worn past the ordinary patience of suffering rather than a settled resolve to act. Let me alone, for my days are vanity restates 7:6 from the far side of a sleepless night.

Job 7:17-19

Job takes Psalm 8:4's question, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and turns it against itself: the visitation the psalm blesses, Job feels as a watch kept on a prisoner. Delitzsch and other commentators note the inversion by name, that the same fact of God's constant attention reads as glory in one poem and as surveillance in this one, and the difference is entirely the state of the man asking. Till I swallow down my spittle is proverbial for the shortest possible respite, and Job cannot get even that much.

Job 7:20-21

I have sinned: I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men holds confession and complaint together in one breath, a concession offered without Job knowing what the offense was. Why hast thou set me as a mark against thee protests that even a real fault would not explain an assault this total, so that I am a burden to myself. Henry reads for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be as Job's closing plea that death would settle the account before any answer comes, the same longing that opened the chapter.