Job 17:16
Will it go down to the gates of Sheol? Will we go down together into the dust?”
BSB
ASV
It shall go down to the bars of Sheol, When once there is rest in the dust.
KJV
They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
2 Corinthians 1:9Indeed, we felt we were under the sentence of death, in order that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God, who raises the dead.
leads to
Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim that anything comes from us, but our competence comes from God.
Now we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this surpassingly great power is from God and not from us.
Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and in a sense, he did receive Isaac back from death.
As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the presence of God, in whom he believed, the God who gives life to the dead…
or because of these surpassingly great revelations. So to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.
Through
Ezekiel 37:11Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Look, they are saying, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished; we are cut off.’
leads to
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
“Will the Lord spurn us forever and never show His favor again?
Through
Jonah 2:6To the roots of the mountains I descended; the earth beneath me barred me in forever! But You raised my life from the pit, O LORD my God!
leads to
O LORD, You pulled me up from Sheol; You spared me from descending into the Pit.
Ver. 16. All of mine shall descend into the lowest hell. Whereas it appears that among those below the righteous are held bound not in places of punishment, but in the bosom of tranquillity above, an important question springs up before us, why it is that blessed Job declares, saying, All of mine shall descend into the lowest hell; who even if before the Advent of the Mediator between God and man he had to descend into hell, yet it is plain that into the lowest hell he had not to descend.
They shall go down to the bars of the pit - All that I have must descend into the depths of the grave. Thither are we all going; and there alone can I rest. בדי baddey, which we translate bars, signifies also branches, distended limbs, or claws, and may here refer either to a personification of the grave, a monster who seizes on human bodies, and keeps them fast in his deadly gripe; or to the different branching-off-alleys in subterranean cemeteries, or catacombs, in which niches are made for the reception of different bodies.
They--namely, my hopes shall be buried with me. bars-- (Isa 38:10). Rather, the wastes or solitudes of the pit (sheol, the unseen world). rest together--the rest of me and my hope is in, &c. The word "rest" implies that man's ceaseless hopes only rob him of rest.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.