Job 24:12

): Men groan from out of the city, where the rich merchants and traders are as cruel with their poor debtors as the landlords in the country are with their poor tenants.

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — leading-punctuation+unbalanced-parens

16 In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked for themselves in the daytime: they know not the light. 17 For the morning is to them even as the shadow of death: if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death. These verses describe another sort of sinners who therefore go unpunished, because they go undiscovered.

quarantine:scripture (2026-07-29) — verbatim-run:47w-of-62

Men groan from out of the city,....

"From out of the city"; that is, they long to get forth and be free outside of it (Ex 1:11; 2:23). wounded--by the oppressor (Eze 30:24). layeth not folly--takes no account of (by punishing) their sin ("folly" in Scripture; This is the gist of the whole previous list of sins (Ac 17:30).

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — unbalanced-parens

Men groan from out of the city - This is a new paragraph. After having shown the oppressions carried on in the country, he takes a view of those carried on in the town. Here the miseries are too numerous to be detailed. The poor in such places are often in the most wretched state; they are not only badly fed, and miserably clothed, but also most unwholesomely lodged. I was once appointed with a benevolent gentleman, J. S., Esq., to visit a district in St. Giles’s London, to know the real state of the poor.

Men groan from out of the city - The evident meaning of this is, that the sorrows caused by oppression were not confined to the deserts and to solitary places; were not seen only where the wandering freebooter seized upon the traveler, or in the comparatively unfrequented places in the country where the poor were compelled to labor in the wine presses and the olive presses of others, but that they extended to cities also. In what way this oppression in cities was practiced, Job does not specify. It might be by the sudden descent upon an unsuspecting city, of hordes of freebooters, who robbed and murdered the inhabitants, and then fled, or it might be by internal oppression, as of the rich ever the poor, or of masters over their slaves. The idea which Job seems to wish to convey is, that oppression abounded. The earth was full of violence. It was in every place, in the city and the country, and yet God did not in fact come forth to meet and punish the oppressor as he deserved. There would be instances of oppression and cruelty enough occurring in all cities to justify all that Job here says, especially in ancient times, when cities were under the control of tyrants. The word which is translated “men” here is מתים mathı̂ym, which is not the usual term to denote men. This word is derived from מוּת mûth, “to die”; and hence, there may be here the notion of “mortals,” or of the “dying,” who utter these groans. And the soul of the wounded crieth out - This expression appears as if Job referred to some acts of violence done by robbers, and perhaps the whole description is intended to apply to the sufferings caused by the sudden descent of a band of marauders upon the unsuspection and slumbering inhabitants of a city. Yet God layeth not folly to them - The word rendered “folly” תפלה tı̂phlâh means “folly”; and thence also wickedness. […]