Job 24: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Job asks why, since times are not stored up by the Almighty, those who know him never see his days. He then lists wrongs that go unpunished: men who move boundary stones, steal flocks, seize the animals of orphans and widows, and drive the poor into hiding. He describes the poor working, harvesting, and pressing oil and wine while going hungry, cold, and thirsty, and he describes murderers, adulterers, and thieves who work in the dark. He ends with lines about the wicked being swept away at last, and dares anyone to prove his words false.

Claim by Claim

1. 24:1
   • A question is asked why times are not stored up by the Almighty.
   • The Hebrew leaves it open whether the times are reserved by the Almighty or hidden from him.
   • A question is asked why those who know him do not see his days.
2. 24:2
   • Some move boundary markers.
   • They seize flocks by violence.
   • They pasture the stolen flocks.
3. 24:3
   • They drive away the donkey belonging to the fatherless.
   • They take the widow's ox as a pledge.
4. 24:4
   • They push the needy off the road.
   • The poor of the land hide themselves together.
5. 24:5
   • Like wild donkeys in the wilderness, these poor go out to their labor.
   • They search early for food.
   • The wasteland supplies food for them and for their young.
6. 24:6
   • They harvest fodder in the field.
   • They glean the vineyard of the wicked.
7. 24:7
   • They spend the night naked, without clothing.
   • They have no covering in the cold.
8. 24:8
   • They are soaked by the rains of the mountains.
   • Having no shelter, they press themselves against the rock.
9. 24:9
   • They snatch the fatherless child from the breast.
   • They take a pledge from the poor.
10. 24:10
    • They go about naked, without clothing.
    • Hungry, they carry the sheaf.
11. 24:11
    • They press oil within the walls of the oppressors.
    • They tread the winepresses.
    • They go thirsty.
12. 24:12
    • Men groan from out of the city.
    • The soul of the wounded cries out.
    • God does not charge wrongdoing against those who do this.
13. 24:13
    • These are among those who rebel against the light.
    • They do not recognize the ways of the light.
    • They do not remain in the paths of the light.
14. 24:14
    • The murderer rises at the light.
    • The murderer kills the poor and the needy.
    • In the night he behaves like a thief.
15. 24:15
    • The eye of the adulterer watches for twilight.
    • The adulterer says that no eye will see him.
    • He puts a covering over his face.
16. 24:16
    • In the dark they break into houses.
    • By day they shut themselves up.
    • They do not know the light.
17. 24:17
    • Morning is to them the same as deep darkness.
    • They are acquainted with the terrors of deep darkness.
18. 24:18
    • He is swift upon the face of the waters.
    • Their portion in the land is cursed.
    • He does not turn toward the way of the vineyards.
19. 24:19
    • Drought and heat snatch away the snow waters.
    • Sheol likewise snatches away those who have sinned.
20. 24:20
    • The womb forgets him.
    • The worm feeds sweetly on him.
    • He is remembered no more.
    • Wickedness is broken like a tree.
21. 24:21
    • He mistreats the barren woman who does not bear.
    • He does no good to the widow.
22. 24:22
    • He drags away the mighty by his power.
    • He rises up.
    • No one is certain of life.
23. 24:23
    • He is given security and he leans on it.
    • His eyes are on their ways.
24. 24:24
    • They are exalted for a little while.
    • Then they are gone.
    • They are brought low.
    • They are gathered up like all others.
    • They are cut off like the heads of grain.
25. 24:25
    • The speaker asks who can prove him a liar if this is not so.
    • The speaker asks who can reduce his words to nothing.

Words Worth Explaining

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

24:1

Job is still speaking, answering his friends' claim that God punishes the wicked promptly and visibly. The picture behind the verse is a judge holding court on fixed days: Job asks why God does not keep a calendar of sessions, so that people loyal to him could watch the cases being heard. "The Almighty" translates the Hebrew title *Shaddai*, an old name for God used throughout the book.

24:2

Boundaries between fields were marked by stones set in the ground; there were no fences or written surveys. Land was normally inherited and stayed in a family for generations, so quietly shifting a stone a few feet at night stole land permanently and was almost impossible to prove. Moving boundary stones was a standing example of theft that the law could not catch.

24:3

Taking something "as security" (the King James word is a "pledge") means a lender kept one of the borrower's possessions until the debt was paid. A donkey or an ox was the animal a household plowed and hauled with; seizing it took away the very means of earning the money to repay. Fatherless children and widows had no adult male to press their case, which is why they appear together here as the easiest people to rob.

24:4

Needy means people who do not have enough to live on. They have little food, little clothing, and no money.

24:5

The wild donkeys are not the robbers but the poor themselves, driven out to scavenge in the wasteland like animals that nobody feeds. "Rising betimes" is old English for getting up early.

24:6

Poor people were allowed to go over a harvested field or vineyard afterwards and collect what the pickers had left: this is called gleaning. The verse pictures them scraping a living from other people's land, including the land of the very men who are mistreating them. "Corn" in the King James Version means grain of any kind, usually barley or wheat; it never means maize.

24:7

"Naked" in this kind of Hebrew usually means stripped of the outer cloak rather than wearing nothing at all. The cloak was a person's blanket as well as their coat, so a poor man who lost his had nothing to sleep under. Israelite law later forbade keeping a man's cloak overnight as security for a debt for exactly this reason.

24:9

A creditor could seize a member of a debtor's family and hold them, effectively as a laborer, until the debt was cleared. Taking a nursing infant is the extreme version of that practice, and Job names it as something that actually happens and goes unpunished.

24:10

A sheaf is a bundle of cut grain tied together. These workers carried in the harvest but were not given any of it to eat.

24:11

Olives were crushed in stone presses and grapes were trodden barefoot in shallow vats to squeeze out the juice. The bitter point is that these laborers handle oil and new wine all day, on their employer's premises, and are given none of it.

24:12

The scene shifts from the countryside to the town. The last line is uncertain in Hebrew: the wording can mean that God brings no charge against the men doing this, or, with a very similar-looking word: that God pays no attention to the victims' prayer. Either way Job's complaint is that heaven does not respond.

24:13

"Light" here means daylight, and the men described in the next few verses are criminals who need darkness to work. The word also carries the sense of what is open and above board, so "rebelling against the light" is both a description of night work and a description of a way of living.

24:14

The Hebrew can mean the murderer rises at first light or that he rises when the light goes; translators differ. Both readings fit the picture of a man whose working hours are the edges of the day, when there are few witnesses.

24:15

Twilight is the murky stretch when there is enough light to move around and not enough to recognize a face. Adultery carried the death penalty in Israelite law, so the covered face is a man protecting his life, not just his reputation.

24:16

House walls were commonly built of sun-dried mud brick, so a thief did not pick a lock: he dug a hole straight through the wall and climbed in. The daytime work of "marking out" a house means scouting which ones to break into after dark.

24:17

The King James "shadow of death" translates a Hebrew word for the thickest kind of darkness. The line reverses the normal order of things: for these men the black of night is what ordinary people's morning is, the time they get up and go about their business.

24:18

From here to verse 24 the passage is one of the hardest in the book, and its speaker is disputed. The sentiments sound like the friends' doctrine that the wicked are swiftly destroyed, which is the opposite of what Job has just been arguing; readers have variously taken these lines as Job quoting his opponents in order to mock them, as a curse he is pronouncing, or as text that has been disturbed in transmission. The translation keeps the lines as they stand rather than deciding the question.

24:19

"The grave" translates *Sheol*, the Hebrew name for the place of the dead below the earth. It is where everyone was thought to go, good and bad alike, not a place of punishment. The image is of meltwater vanishing in the sun: the ground swallows it and it is simply gone.

24:20

"The womb shall forget him" means his own mother forgets him. Being remembered by name after death mattered enormously in this culture, and to be forgotten completely counted as a second and more final death.

24:21

A woman with no children and a widow had no one to support them or to speak for them in a dispute, which is why the two are paired. Preying on them is shorthand for attacking the people least able to hit back.

24:22

The Hebrew does not say who "he" is, and the verse can be read either way: God dragging off the powerful, or the ruthless man dragging off anyone he pleases. The next verse has the same problem, and translations divide.

24:24

The last image is from harvest: standing grain is cut through in one stroke near the top, so the heads all fall at once. It says nothing about how long the stalk stood beforehand, only how fast the end comes.

24:25

Job closes the way a speaker in a legal argument does, daring anyone present to step forward and disprove what he has said. It is a challenge to his three friends, not a question he expects an answer to.