Job 21:5
Look at me and be appalled; put your hand over your mouth.
BSB
ASV
Mark me, and be astonished, And lay your hand upon your mouth.
KJV
Mark me, and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
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
Job 40:4“Behold, I am insignificant. How can I reply to You? I place my hand over my mouth.
leads to
If you have foolishly exalted yourself or if you have plotted evil, put your hand over your mouth.
Reached by 3 independent paths from here.
The princes refrained from speaking and covered their mouths with their hands.
Reached by 2 independent paths from here.
Therefore I retract my words, and I repent in dust and ashes.”
and said: “O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, because our iniquities are higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached the heavens.
Then Abraham answered, “Now that I have ventured to speak to the Lord—though I am but dust and ashes—
Through
Psalms 39:9I have become mute; I do not open my mouth because of what You have done.
leads to
“You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept from God only good and not adversity?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.
Through
Judges 18:19“Be quiet,” they told him. “Put your hand over your mouth and come with us and be a father and a priest to us. Is it better for you to be a priest for…
leads to
“Stay with me,” Micah said to him, “and be my father and priest, and I will give you ten shekels of silver per year, a suit of clothes, and your provisions.” So the Levite…
Mark me - Margin, “look unto.” Literally, “Look upon me. That is, attentively look on me, on my sufferings, on my disease, and my losses. See if I am a proper object of repreach and mockery - see if I have not abundant reason to be in deep distress when God has afflicted me in a manner so unusual and mysterious. And be astonished - Silent astonishment should be evinced instead of censure.
He owns that God does sometimes hang up a wicked man as it were in chains, in terrorem --as a terror to others, by some visible remarkable judgment in this life, but denies that he always does so; nay, he maintains that commonly he does otherwise, suffering even the worst of sinners to live all their days in prosperity and to go out of the world without any visible mark of his wrath upon them.
"It is true," says Job, "remarkable judgments are sometimes brought upon notorious sinners, but not always; for we have many instances of the great and long prosperity of those that are openly and avowedly wicked; though they are hardened in their wickedness by their prosperity, yet they are still suffered to prosper." I.