Job 16: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Job answers his friends' second round of speeches by calling them miserable comforters, saying he could pile up words the same way if their places were switched. He describes God tearing at him, setting him up as a target, and breaking him, while people mock him and strike him, though his hands have done no violence and his prayer is pure. He calls on the earth not to cover his blood, says his witness is in heaven, and wishes someone could argue his case with God before the few years he has left run out.

Claim by Claim

1. 16:1
   • Job answered.
   • Job spoke.
2. 16:2
   • Job says he has heard many things like these.
   • Job says all of them are comforters who bring trouble rather than comfort.
3. 16:3
   • Job asks whether words of wind will ever come to an end.
   • Job asks what ails or provokes the one addressed that he keeps answering.
   • Job addresses this question to a single person.
4. 16:4
   • Job says he too could speak as they do.
   • Job says this would be so if they were in his place.
   • Job says he could string together words against them.
   • Job says he could shake his head at them.
5. 16:5
   • Job says he would strengthen them with his mouth.
   • Job says the movement of his lips would hold back grief.
   • The Hebrew does not state whose grief the moving of his lips would restrain.
6. 16:6
   • Job says that if he speaks, his pain is not held back.
   • Job says that if he keeps silent, nothing of his pain leaves him.
7. 16:7
   • Job says that now he has been worn out.
   • Job says the one he addresses has made desolate all his company.
   • Job shifts from speaking of God in the third person to addressing him in the second person.
8. 16:8
   • Job says he has been seized and shriveled.
   • Job says this has become a witness against him.
   • Job says his gauntness rises up against him.
   • Job says his gauntness testifies to his face.
9. 16:9
   • Job says God's anger has torn him.
   • Job says God has hated him.
   • Job says God gnashes his teeth at him.
   • Job says his adversary sharpens his eyes at him.
10. 16:10
    • Job says they have opened their mouths wide against him.
    • Job says they have struck his cheeks with reproach.
    • Job says they mass themselves together against him.
11. 16:11
    • Job says God hands him over to the unjust.
    • Job says God throws him into the hands of the wicked.
12. 16:12
    • Job says he was at ease.
    • Job says God shattered him.
    • Job says God seized him by the neck.
    • Job says God dashed him to pieces.
    • Job says God set him up as his target.
13. 16:13
    • Job says God's archers surround him.
    • Job says God splits open his kidneys.
    • Job says God does not spare him.
    • Job says God pours his gall out on the ground.
14. 16:14
    • Job says God breaks him with breach upon breach.
    • Job says God runs at him like a warrior.
15. 16:15
    • Job says he has sewn sackcloth over his skin.
    • Job says he has thrust his horn into the dust.
16. 16:16
    • Job says his face is inflamed from weeping.
    • Job says deep darkness is on his eyelids.
17. 16:17
    • Job says there is no violence in his hands.
    • Job says his prayer is pure.
18. 16:18
    • Job commands the earth not to cover his blood.
    • Job says let there be no resting place for his cry.
19. 16:19
    • Job says that even now his witness is in heaven.
    • Job says the one who testifies for him is on high.
20. 16:20
    • Job says his friends are his scorners.
    • The Hebrew word for what his friends are to him can mean either mockers or spokesmen who plead for him.
    • Job says his eye pours out tears to God.
21. 16:21
    • Job wishes that someone would argue the case of a man with God.
    • Job wishes the same for a son of man with his neighbor.
    • The Hebrew does not make clear whether the second clause is a comparison or a second thing pleaded.
22. 16:22
    • Job says a few numbered years will come.
    • Job says he will then go the way from which he will not return.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

16:1

Job has lost his children, his animals, and his health. Three friends came to sit with him. They keep telling him his troubles are his own fault. This chapter is Job answering them back.

16:2

Job is replying to his three friends, who came to sit with him in his suffering. In this culture visiting and consoling a mourner was a recognized social duty, so calling them "comforters" who are miserable at the job turns their own role against them.

16:3

"Vain" in the King James means empty or pointless, not vain in the modern sense of conceited. "What emboldeneth thee" asks what is spurring his friend on to keep talking.

16:4

Shaking the head at someone was a gesture of scorn and gloating in the ancient Near East, not sympathy or disagreement, the equivalent of a jeer.

16:5

"Asswage" is an old spelling of assuage, meaning to soften or ease. Job's point is that he would use the same speaking position to hold someone up rather than knock him down.

16:7

Job switches here from speaking about God ("he") to speaking directly to God ("you"), and keeps addressing him through the next verse. The Hebrew makes the same abrupt shift; it is not an error.

16:8

The Hebrew verb behind "made me shrivel up" can also mean "seized" or "bound" me, and translators divide over which is meant. Either way the point is that his ruined body is being treated as evidence: legal language (witness, testify, advocate, plead a case) runs through this whole chapter, as though Job were in a courtroom.

16:9

Grinding or gnashing the teeth was a stock image of open rage and hostility, often described of a predator; the picture is of an attacker, not of someone merely annoyed.

16:10

Two distinct hostile acts. Opening the mouth wide is the gape of a beast about to devour, or of a crowd howling abuse. Striking someone on the cheek was a calculated public humiliation rather than an ordinary blow, an insult so serious that later Israelite law treated it as an offense in its own right.

16:12

"Target" is literally an archer's mark. From here to verse 14 Job describes God as a besieging army: first a bowman setting up his aim, then troops, then a breached wall.

16:13

The King James "reins" means the kidneys. Hebrew thought located a person's deepest feelings and inmost self in the kidneys, so a wound there is both mortal and intimate. "Gall" is bile from the gall bladder; a spilled gall bladder was a stock description of a fatal wound.

16:14

"Breach" is a siege term: the gap smashed through a city wall. Job pictures God assaulting him the way an army breaks through a wall again and again. The King James "giant" translates a word meaning a champion or mighty warrior, not a creature of unusual size.

16:15

Sackcloth was coarse cloth of goat or camel hair, worn next to the skin as a sign of mourning or grief. Sewing it onto the skin, rather than putting it on and taking it off, suggests mourning that has become permanent. A "horn", from the horn of a bull or ram, was the standard image for a person's strength and standing; to put one's horn in the dust is to have all dignity and power brought to the ground.

16:16

The Hebrew phrase behind "deep shadows" is the same one the King James elsewhere renders "the shadow of death." It means thick darkness or gloom, and here describes the discolouring around the eyes of someone who has wept for a long time.

16:17

"My hands have done no violence" is a formal declaration of innocence, the kind a person would make to clear himself of a charge. Job is not claiming to be sinless in general; he is denying the specific crime his friends assume he must have committed.

16:18

Blood that had been shed but not covered over was believed to cry out for justice until the killing was answered for, the idea behind Abel's blood crying from the ground in Genesis. Job asks the earth not to soak his blood away, so that his death will stand as an unanswered accusation. "Let my cry have no place" means: let it never be given a resting place, never be allowed to fall silent.

16:19

The King James "record" here means a witness, someone who testifies, not a written document. Job is asking for a second witness in the heavenly court to back up his claim, alongside the accusing testimony of his own body in verse 8.

16:20

The Hebrew of the first half of this verse is genuinely uncertain. The word rendered "scoffers" can also mean spokesmen or interpreters, so the line has been read both as "my friends mock me" and as "my friends are my go-betweens", and possibly it plays on both.

16:21

"Plead" means to argue a legal case on someone's behalf, as an advocate or an arbitrator would. Job wants someone to do for him with God what a neighbor would do for a neighbor in a local dispute.

16:22

"The way from which I will not return" is the road to the realm of the dead, Sheol, in Hebrew thought the shadowy place all the dead go, from which no one comes back.