Job 18: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Bildad the Shuhite speaks for the second time. He begins by objecting to Job's long speeches and to being treated as stupid, and asks whether the world should be rearranged for Job's sake. He then gives an extended picture of what happens to a wicked man: his lamp goes out, traps catch him, terrors chase him, something devours his skin, he is dragged from his tent to the king of terrors, and nothing of his name or family is left. He closes by saying that such is the home of the wicked, the place of the person who does not know God.

Claim by Claim

1. 18:1
   • Bildad the Shuhite answered.
   • Bildad spoke.
2. 18:2
   • Bildad asks how long until they put an end to words.
   • Bildad tells them to understand, and afterward we will speak.
3. 18:3
   • Bildad asks why they are counted as beasts.
   • Bildad asks why they are regarded as unclean or stupid in their eyes.
4. 18:4
   • He tears himself in his anger.
   • Bildad asks whether the earth is to be abandoned on his account.
   • Bildad asks whether the rock is to be moved from its place.
5. 18:5
   • The light of the wicked is put out.
   • The flame of his fire does not shine.
6. 18:6
   • The light in his tent grows dark.
   • His lamp above him goes out.
7. 18:7
   • The steps of his strength are made narrow.
   • His own counsel throws him down.
8. 18:8
   • He is sent into a net by his own feet.
   • He walks over a mesh.
9. 18:9
   • A trap seizes him by the heel.
   • A snare holds fast on him.
10. 18:10
    • A rope is hidden for him in the ground.
    • A trap for him lies on the path.
11. 18:11
    • Terrors frighten him on every side.
    • The terrors chase him at his feet.
12. 18:12
    • His strength is famished.
    • Calamity is ready at his side.
13. 18:13
    • It devours the parts of his skin.
    • The firstborn of death devours his limbs.
14. 18:14
    • His confidence is torn away from his tent.
    • It marches him off to the king of terrors.
15. 18:15
    • What is not his dwells in his tent.
    • Brimstone is scattered over his dwelling place.
16. 18:16
    • His roots dry up beneath.
    • His branch withers above.
17. 18:17
    • His memory perishes from the earth.
    • He has no name in the open street.
18. 18:18
    • He is driven from light into darkness.
    • He is chased out of the world.
19. 18:19
    • He has no offspring among his people.
    • He has no descendant among his people.
    • There is no survivor in the places where he lived.
20. 18:20
    • Those who come after are appalled at his day.
    • Those who went before were seized with horror.
    • The two groups may be those who come later and those who came earlier, or those in the west and those in the east.
21. 18:21
    • Such are the dwellings of the unrighteous man.
    • This is the place of him who does not know God.

Words Worth Explaining

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

18:1

Bildad is the second of Job's three friends to speak, and this is his second speech. "Shuhite" identifies him by his family or homeland, probably a people or district east of Israel; the friends are all pictured as coming from outside Israel.

18:2

"Ye" in the King James is plural (Bildad is speaking to more than one person) even though Job is the only one who has just spoken. The Hebrew is plural too, and no one is certain why: Bildad may be lumping Job in with anyone who talks as he does, or the plural may just be a turn of phrase.

18:3

"Vile" in 1611 English did not mean evil here. It meant worthless or stupid, and the Hebrew word behind it carries the idea of being dull and unable to understand. Bildad's complaint is that Job has been treating the three of them as dumb animals.

18:4

Rocks and the solid earth stand here for the fixed order of the world. Bildad's point is that Job is demanding the world be rearranged around him.

18:5

In this world a lamp kept burning in the tent through the night was the sign of a living, prospering household. A lamp put out is a standard image for a family line brought to an end, not just for a dark room.

18:6

"Tabernacle" in the King James simply means tent or dwelling, the ordinary word for where a person lives. It does not refer to the portable sanctuary of the same name elsewhere in the Bible.

18:7

"Straitened" means narrowed or cramped. The picture is of a man who used to walk with long confident strides being forced into short, hemmed-in steps. "His own counsel" means his own plans and advice to himself, the very thing that is supposed to keep a man safe.

18:8

Verses 8 to 10 pile up six different words for hunting equipment: nets, meshes, snares, nooses and pit traps. The effect in Hebrew is a hunt closing in from every direction, and the point is that the trapped man walked into all of it himself.

18:9

"Gin" is an old English word for a snare or trap. The King James "robber" translates a Hebrew word most now take as another kind of snare or noose. Verses 8–10 pile up six different words for hunting gear (nets, meshes, nooses, pits) an effect the English can only partly carry.

18:11

"Drive him to his feet" is the King James rendering of a phrase that means the terrors dog him at every step, chasing him wherever he goes.

18:12

"Hungerbitten" is an old English word for famished. The Hebrew can be read either as his strength being starved away or as disaster being hungry for him; both readings have been defended.

18:13

"The firstborn of death" is a grim figure of speech, not a name. "Firstborn" meant the foremost or strongest of a set, so this is death's deadliest offspring, most take it as a fatal disease pictured as a living thing that eats a man alive.

18:14

"The king of terrors" is not explained anywhere in the book. It is generally taken as death itself, or the ruler of the world of the dead, pictured as a monarch to whom the condemned man is marched under guard.

18:15

The Hebrew of the first line is genuinely obscure. It can be read as "what is not his lives in his tent" (strangers take over his home) or, with a small change, as "fire lives in his tent." Brimstone is burning sulfur; sulfur deposits near the Dead Sea burn with a choking smell and leave ground where nothing grows, so scattering it over a house means the place is left permanently uninhabitable.

18:16

A family line was regularly pictured as a tree. Roots dried up and branches cut off means ancestors and descendants alike gone, the whole line ended at both ends.

18:17

The street, or the open square inside the town gate, was where public business and public talk happened. To have no name there is to be spoken of by nobody, which in this world was close to never having existed.

18:19

"Nephew" in 1611 English meant grandson or descendant, not a brother's son. Son and grandson together stand for a continuing line; to have neither was the deepest disaster this culture could name, since a man survived through his descendants.

18:20

"Astonied" is an older form of "astonished," here meaning appalled or struck dumb with horror. The two Hebrew words behind "they that come after" and "they that went before" can mean either later and earlier generations or, since Hebrew directions face east, people in the west and people in the east. Translators split on it; the plain rendering follows the time reading.