Job 30:16 Komentář

It is a melancholy "But now" which this chapter begins with. Adversity is here described as much to the life as prosperity was in the foregoing chapter, and the height of that did but increase the depth of this. God sets the one over-against the other, and so did Job, that his afflictions might appear the more grievous, and consequently his case the more pitiable. I. he had lived in great honour, but now he had fallen into disgrace, and was as much vilified, even by the meanest, as ever he had been magnified by the greatest; this he insists much on (Job 30:1-14). II. He had had much inward comfort and delight, but now he was a terror and burden to himself (Job 30:15, Job 30:16) and overwhelmed with sorrow (Job 30:28-31). III. He had long enjoyed a good state of health, but now he was sick and in pain (Job 30:17-18, Job 30:29, Job 30:30). IV. Time was when the secret of God was with him, but now his communication with heaven was cut off (Job 30:20-22). V. He had promised himself a long life, but now he saw death at the door (Job 30:23). One thing he mentions, which aggravated his affliction, that it surprised him when he looked for peace. But two things gave him some relief: - 1. That his troubles would not follow him to the grave (Job 30:24). 2. That his conscience witnessed for him that, in his prosperity, he had sympathized with those that were in misery (Job 30:25).

INTRODUCTION TO JOB 30 Job in this chapter sets forth his then unhappy state and condition, in contrast with his former state of prosperity described in the preceding chapter: things had taken a strange turn, and were just the reverse of what they were before; he that was before in such high esteem and credit with all sorts of men, young and old, high and low, rich and poor, now is had in derision by the meanest and basest of men, whose characters are described, Job 30:1; and the instances of their contempt of him by words and gestures are given, Job 30:9; he who enjoyed so much ease of mind, and health of body, is now filled with distresses of soul, and bodily diseases, Job 30:15; and he who enjoyed so much of the presence of God, and communion with him, and of his love and favour, was now disregarded, and, as he thought, cruelly used by him, who not only had destroyed his substance, but was about to bring him to the grave, Job 30:20; all which came upon him, though he had a sympathizing heart with the poor, and them that were in trouble, and when he expected better things, Job 30:25; and he close the chapter, lamenting his sad and sorrowful circumstances, Job 30:29.

And now my soul is poured out upon me,.... Either in prayer to God for help and deliverance; or rather he was dissolved as it were in floods of tears, because of his distress and anguish; or his spirits were sunk, his strength and courage failed, and his heart melted, and was poured out like water; yea, his soul was pouring out unto death, and he was, as he apprehended, near unto it; his body was so weakened and broken by diseases, that it was like a vessel full of holes, out of which the liquor runs away apace; so his life and soul were going away from him, his vital spirits were almost exhausted: the days of affliction have taken hold upon me; afflictions seize on good men as well as others, and on them more than others; and there are certain times and seasons for them, appointed and ordered by the Lord; and there is a limited time, they are not to continue always, only for some days, for a time, and but a little time, and then they will have an end; but till that time comes, there can be no deliverance from them; being sent they come, coming they seized on Job, they laid hold on him, they "caught" him, as Mr. Broughton renders it, and held him fast, and would not let him go; nor could he get clear of them till God delivered him, who only can and does deliver out of them in his own time and way.

But now my soul in mine own self is withered, and the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. Since 'the soul' of the Elect 'withers now,' because it is afterwards made green in that eternal triumphing. 'Now, the days of affliction take hold upon them,' because the days of joy follow afterwards. As it is written, To him that feareth God it shall go well at the last. And again it is delivered touching the Church, And she shall laugh in the last day. For now is the time of affliction to the good, that one day exulting may follow them apart from tears. Hence it is elsewhere said by those, Thou hast humbled us in the place of affliction. Since 'the place of affliction' is the present life, so the righteous here below, i.e. 'in the place of affliction,' are 'humbled,' because in the eternal life, i.e. in the place of delight, they are elevated. But when he said that 'the soul was withered,' he rightly put before too, in mine own self; because in our own selves, indeed, our soul is afflicted, but in God refreshed, and it is become far removed from the greenness of joy, in proportion as still being withheld from the light of the Creator, it draws back to itself. But then it attains to the greenness of true joy, when being lifted up by the grace of eternal contemplation it even transcends its very self.

When his desirable goods had been taken away, his soul remained in sadness, and so he says, "Now my soul droops within me," through sadness. He truly could not have been anything but sad, after he had lost his children and his property. Because he had lost the health of his body, consequently he also felt corporeal pain, which gave him no rest even in the day, and so he says, "days of pain," physical suffering which gets worse at night, "take possession of me."

Agur's confession of faith, Pro 30:1-6. His prayer, Pro 30:7-9. Of wicked generations, Pro 30:10-14. Things that are never satisfied, Pro 30:15, Pro 30:16. Of him who despises his parents, Pro 30:17. Three wonderful things, Pro 30:18-20. Three things that disquiet the land, Pro 30:21-23. Four little but very intelligent animals, Pro 30:24-28. Four things that go well, Pro 30:29-31. A man should cease from doing foolishly, and from strife, Pro 30:32, Pro 30:33.

(Job 30:1-31) younger--not the three friends (Job 15:10; Job 32:4, Job 32:6-7). A general description: Job 30:1-8, the lowness of the persons who derided him; Job 30:9-15, the derision itself. Formerly old men rose to me (Job 29:8). Now not only my juniors, who are bound to reverence me (Lev 19:32), but even the mean and base-born actually deride me; opposed to, "smiled upon" (Job 29:24). This goes farther than even the "mockery" of Job by relations and friends (Job 12:4; Job 16:10, Job 16:20; Job 17:2, Job 17:6; Job 19:22). Orientals feel keenly any indignity shown by the young. Job speaks as a rich Arabian emir, proud of his descent. dogs--regarded with disgust in the East as unclean (Sa1 17:43; Pro 26:11). They are not allowed to enter a house, but run about wild in the open air, living on offal and chance morsels (Psa 59:14-15). Here again we are reminded of Jesus Christ (Psa 22:16). "Their fathers, my coevals, were so mean and famished that I would not have associated them with (not to say, set them over) my dogs in guarding my flock."

Job's outward calamities affect his mind. poured out--in irrepressible complaints (Psa 42:4; Jos 7:5).

16 And now my soul is poured out within me, Days of suffering hold me fast. 17 The night rendeth my bones from me, And my gnawers sleep not. 18 By great force my garment is distorted, As the collar of my shirt it encompasseth me. 19 He hath cast me into the mire, And I am in appearance as dust and ashes. With this third ועתּה (Job 30:1, Job 30:9) the elegiac lament over the harsh contrast between the present and the past begins for the third time. The dash after our translation of the second and fourth strophes will indicate that a division of the elegy ends there, after which it begins as it were anew. The soul is poured out within a man (עלי as Job 10:1, Psychol. S. 152), when, "yielding itself without resistance to sadness, it is dejected to the very bottom, and all its organization flows together, and it is dissolved in the one condition of sorrow" - a figure which is not, however, come about by water being regarded as the symbol of the soul (thus Hitzig on Psa 42:5), but rather by the intimate resemblance of the representation of a flood of tears (Lam 2:19): the life of the soul flows in the blood, and the anguish of the soul in tears and lamentations; and since the outward man is as it were dissolved in the gently flowing tears (Isa 15:3), his soul flows away as it were in itself, for the outward incident is but the manifestation and result of an inward action. ימי־עני we have translated days of suffering, for עני, with its verb and the rest of its derivatives, is the proper word for suffering, and especially the passion of the Servant of Jehovah. Days of suffering - Job complains - hold him fast; עחז unites in itself, like החזיק, the significations prehendere and prehensum tenere. In Job 30:17 we must not, with Arnh. and others, translate: by night it (affliction) pierces ... , for עני does not stand sufficiently in the foreground to be the subject of what follows; it might sooner be rendered: by night it is pierced through (Targ., Rosenm., Hahn); but why is not לילה to be the subject, and נקּר consequently Piel (not Niph.)? The night has been personified already, Job 3:2; and in general, as Herder once said, Job is the brother of Ossian for personifications: Night (the restless night, Job 7:3, in which every malady, or at least the painful feeling of it, increases) pierces his bones from him, i.e., roots out his limbs (synon. בּדּים, Job 18:13) so inwardly and completely. The lepra Arabica (Arab. 'l-brṣ, el-baras) terminates, like syphilis, with an eating away of the limbs, and the disease has its name Arab. juḏâm from jḏm, truncare, mutilare: it feeds on the bones, and destroys the body in such a manner that single limbs are completely detached. In Job 30:17, lxx (νεῦρα), Parchon, Kimchi, and others translate ערקי according to the Targum. ערקין (= גּידים), and the Arab. ‛rûq, veins, after which Blumenf.: my veins are in constant motion. But ערקי in the sense of Job 30:3 : my gnawers (Jer. qui me comedunt, Targ. דּמעסּן יתי, qui me conculcant, conterunt), is far more in accordance with the predicate and the parallelism, whether it be gnawing pains that are thought of - pains are unnatural to man, they come upon him against his will, he separates them from himself as wild beasts - or, which we prefer, those worms (רמּה, Job 7:5) which were formed in Job's ulcers (comp. Aruch, ערקא, a leech, plur. ערקתא, worms, e.g., in the liver), and which in the extra-biblical tradition of Job's decease are such a standing feature, that the pilgrims to Job's monastery even now-a-days take away with them thence these supposedly petrified worms of Job. (Note: In Mugir ed-dn's large history of Jerusalem and Hebron (kitâb el-ins el-gelı̂l), in an article on Job, we read: God had so visited him in his body, that he got the disease that devours the limbs (tegedhdhem), and worms were produced (dawwad) in the wounds, while he lay on a dunghill (mezbele), and except his wife, who tended him, no one ventured to come too near him. In a beautiful Kurdic ballad "on the basket dealer" (zembilfrosh), which I have obtained from the Kurds in Salihje, are these words: Veki Gergis beshara beri Jusuf veki abdan keri Bikesr' Ejub kurman deri toh anin ser sultaneti to men chalaski 'j zahmeti. "When they divided Gergs with a saw And sold Joseph like a slave, When worms fed themselves in Job's body, Then Thou didst guide them by a sure way: Thou wilt also deliver me from need." More concerning these worms of Job in the description of the monastery of Job. - Wetzst.) Job 30:18 would be closely and naturally connected with what precedes if לבוּשׁי could be understood of the skin and explained: By omnipotence (viz., divine, as Job 23:6, Ew. 270a) the covering of my body is distorted, as even Raschi: משׁתנה גלד אחר גלד, it is changed, by one skin or crust being formed after another. But even Schultens rightly thinks it remarkable that לבושׁ, Job 30:18, is not meant to signify the proper upper garment but the covering of the skin, but כּתּנת, Job 30:18, the under garment in a proper sense. The astonishment is increased by the fact that התהפּשׂ signifies to disguise one's self, and thereby render one's self unrecognisable, which leads to the proper idea of לבושׁ, to a clothing which looks like a disguise. It cannot be cited in favour of this unusual meaning that לבושׁ is used in Job 41:5 of the scaly skin of the crocodile: an animal has no other לבושׁ but its skin. Therefore, with Ew., Hirz., and Hlgst., we take לבושׁ strictly: "by (divine) omnipotence my garment is distorted (becomes unlike itself), like the collar of my shirt it fits close to me." It is unnecessary to take כּפי as a compound praep.: according to (comp. Zac 2:4; Mal 2:9 : "according as"), in the sense of כּמו, as Job 33:6, since פּי כּתּנת is, according to the nature of the thing mentioned, a designation of the upper opening, by means of which the shirt, otherwise only provided with armholes (distinct from the Beduin shirt thôb, which has wide and long sleeves), is put on. Also, Psa 133:2, פּי מדּותיו signifies not the lower edge, but the opening at the head פּי הראשׁע, Exo 28:32) or the collar of the high priest's vestment (vid., the passage cited). Thus even lxx ὥσπερ τὸ περιστόμιον τοῦ χιτῶνός μου, and Jer.: velut capitio tunicae meae. True, Schlottm. observes against this rendering of Job 30:18, that it is unnatural according to substance, since on a wasted body it is not the outer garment that assumes the appearance of a narrow under one, but on the contrary the under garment assumes the appearance of a wide outer one. But this objection is not to the point. If the body is wasted away to a skeleton, there is an end to the rich appearance and beautiful flow which the outer garment gains by the full and rounded forms of the limbs: it falls down straight and in perpendicular folds upon the wasted body, and contributes in no small degree to make him whom one formerly saw in all the fulness of health still less recognisable than he otherwise is. יאזרני, cingit me, is not merely the falling together of the outer garment which was formerly filled out by the members of the body, but its appearance when the sick man wraps himself in it: then it girds him, fits close to him like his shirt-collar, lying round about the shrivelled figure like the other about a thin neck. On the terrible wasting away which is combined with hypertrophical formations in elephantiasis, vid., Job 7:15, and especially Job 19:20. The subject of Job 30:19 is God, whom Job 30:18 also describes as efficient cause: He has cast me into, or daubed (Note: The reading wavers between הרני and הרני, for the latter form of writing is sometimes found even out of pause by conjunctive accents, e.g., Sa1 28:15; Psa 118:5.) me with, mud, and I am become as (כּ instead of the dat., Ew. 221, a) dust and ashes. This is also intended pathologically: the skin of the sufferer with elephantiasis becomes first an intense red, then assumes a black colour; scales like fishes' scales are formed upon it, and the brittle, dark-coloured surface of the body is like a lump of earth.