For Teaching

Job 36: What the Passage Says

79 claims across 33 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Job 36 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Elihu keeps speaking on God's behalf, arguing that God is mighty yet looks down on no one, and that he uses chains and hardship to show people what they have done and to call them back. Those who listen and obey live out their days well; those who refuse die by the sword, and the godless store up anger and do not cry out for help. Elihu then turns to Job directly, warning him that he is leaning toward wrongdoing rather than accepting affliction. He closes by pointing to God's greatness in rain, clouds, thunder, and lightning, by which God both judges nations and provides food.

Claim by Claim

36:1
- Elihu continued speaking.
- Elihu said the following.
36:2
- Elihu asked Job to bear with him a little longer.
- Elihu said he would show Job something.
- Elihu said there are still words to be spoken on God's behalf.
36:3
- Elihu said he would bring his knowledge from far off.
- Elihu said he would ascribe righteousness to his Maker.
36:4
- Elihu said his words are truly not false.
- Elihu said that one perfect in knowledge is with Job.
36:5
- God is mighty.
- God does not despise anyone.
- God is mighty in strength of understanding.
36:6
- God does not preserve the life of the wicked.
- God grants justice to the afflicted.
36:7
- God does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous.
- God sets the righteous with kings on the throne.
- God seats them forever.
- They are exalted.
36:8
- Sometimes men are bound in fetters.
- Sometimes men are held fast in cords of affliction.
36:9
- In that case God declares to them what they have done.
- God declares to them their transgressions, that they acted arrogantly.
36:10
- God opens their ear to correction.
- God commands that they turn back from iniquity.
36:11
- If they listen and serve God, they will finish their days in prosperity.
- If they listen and serve God, they will finish their years in pleasантness.
36:12
- If they do not listen, they will perish by the weapon.
- If they do not listen, they will die without knowledge.
36:13
- The godless in heart store up anger.
- They do not cry for help when God binds them.
36:14
- Their life ends in youth.
- Their life ends among the male cult prostitutes.
36:15
- God delivers the afflicted person by means of his affliction.
- God opens their ear by means of oppression.
36:16
- God was drawing Job out of the mouth of distress.
- God was drawing him into a broad place where there is no constraint.
- What was set on Job's table would be full of richness.
36:17
- Job is full of the judgment due the wicked.
- Judgment and justice take hold of Job.
36:18
- There is wrath.
- Job is warned not to be taken away by a stroke.
- A great ransom cannot deliver Job.
- It is unclear whether the warning is that wrath may entice Job into mockery or that God's blow may sweep him away.
36:19
- Job's riches will not be esteemed.
- Gold will not avail him.
- All the exertions of strength will not avail him.
- It is unclear whether the word rendered 'riches' means wealth or a cry for help.
36:20
- Job is told not to long for the night.
- In that night peoples are cut off from their place.
36:21
- Job is warned to take heed.
- Job is told not to turn toward iniquity.
- Job has chosen iniquity rather than affliction.
36:22
- God is exalted in his power.
- No teacher is like God.
36:23
- No one has appointed God his way.
- No one can say to God, 'You have done wrong.'
36:24
- Job is told to remember to magnify God's work.
- Men have sung of God's work.
36:25
- All mankind has looked on it.
- Man beholds it from far off.
36:26
- God is great.
- We do not know him.
- The number of God's years cannot be searched out.
36:27
- God draws up the drops of water.
- They distill as rain from his mist.
36:28
- The skies pour this down.
- The skies shower it abundantly upon mankind.
36:29
- No one can understand the spreading out of the clouds.
- No one can understand the crashing noise of God's pavilion.
36:30
- God spreads his light around him.
- God covers the roots of the sea.
36:31
- By these God judges the peoples.
- God gives food in abundance.
36:32
- God covers his hands with light.
- God gives the light a command against a target.
- It is unclear whether the command sends the lightning at its mark or forbids it to shine.
36:33
- The thunder declares concerning him.
- The cattle also declare concerning what is rising.
- It is unclear whether the declaration concerns God, the storm, or the rising vapor.

Words Worth Explaining

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

36:1: Elihu is the fourth and last of Job's human speakers, a younger man who has been talking without interruption since chapter 32, after the three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) ran out of answers. The "you" he addresses throughout is Job.
36:2: "Suffer me" is old English for "put up with me" or "let me keep going." It has nothing to do with pain.
36:3: "From far off" is an idiom for reaching wide for one's material (from distant places, old traditions, long experience), rather than repeating what is close at hand.
36:4: It is deliberately unclear who "one who is complete in knowledge" is. Elihu may be claiming it for himself, since he has just vouched for his own words; or he may mean God, standing present with Job. Hebrew commentators have read it both ways.
36:5: The Hebrew behind "understanding" is literally "strength of heart." In Hebrew the heart is the seat of the mind and judgment, not the emotions, so the line pairs physical power with mental power.
36:6: "Giveth right" means gives justice, a fair verdict. The Hebrew word behind "the poor" covers anyone beaten down, whether by poverty, illness, or unfair treatment, not only people without money.
36:7: In the ancient Near East, sitting on a throne beside kings was the standard picture of the highest honor and the most secure position a person could reach.
36:8: Fetters are iron shackles for the wrists or ankles. Elihu is using prison imagery for suffering in general: chains and ropes stand for whatever has a person trapped and unable to move.
36:9: "Their transgressions that they have exceeded" is awkward even by 1611 standards. The sense is that God shows them not just what they did wrong but how arrogantly they went about it.
36:10: "He openeth also their ear" is a Hebrew idiom for getting a message through to someone who was not listening, the way we might say something finally got through to a person.
36:11: "Pleasures" in the King James means pleasant circumstances or good things in general. It does not carry the modern suggestion of indulgence.
36:12: "Perish by the sword" is standard biblical shorthand for a violent death, in war or by execution. "Die without knowledge" means dying without ever having understood what was happening to them or why.
36:13: "Store up anger" is ambiguous in the Hebrew. It can mean these people nurse their own resentment, or that they pile up God's anger against themselves like a debt coming due.
36:14: This refers to the men attached to shrines of the fertility gods of Canaan, who took part in sexual rites as part of the worship. Israelite law banned the practice outright, so naming them is a way of saying these men die young and disgraced, at the very bottom of respectable society.
36:15: The Hebrew repeats the same word twice on purpose: God rescues the afflicted *by* their affliction. The suffering is not only what they are saved from but the means of saving them.
36:16: "A tight place" and "a wide, open space" are standard Hebrew images for distress and relief, being hemmed in with no room to move, versus open ground where one can breathe. Whether Elihu means God was in the middle of doing this for Job, or would have done it, is disputed; the Hebrew allows both.
36:17: "Judgment" in the King James usually means the verdict or the sentence handed down, not the act of judging. Elihu is saying Job is carrying the punishment guilty people get.
36:18: A ransom was the payment made to buy a person out of a penalty or out of slavery. The verse is one of the hardest in the book; some read it as a warning that no sum will buy Job off once the blow falls, others as a warning not to let a large bribe pull him off course.
36:19: "All the forces of strength" is a literal rendering of a phrase whose exact sense is uncertain. It probably means every resource a wealthy and powerful man could throw at a problem.
36:20: The Hebrew here is obscure. "The night" is most often taken as the darkness of death (Job has repeatedly wished to die) or as the night in which whole peoples are swept away in a single stroke, the way a city falls in the dark.
36:21: Elihu's charge is that Job, faced with a choice between enduring his suffering and turning against God, has leaned toward the second. The Hebrew is compressed and the sense is argued over.
36:23: "Who hath enjoined him his way" means who ever gave God his orders or laid down the route he had to take. To enjoin someone is to command them.
36:24: The "work" is God's work in the created world, which verses 26 onward go on to describe. "Sung about" points to the hymns people composed praising it.
36:26: Nobody can count God's years because God has always been alive. He had no birthday and will never grow old.
36:27: Verses 27–28 give the ancient picture of the water cycle as it looked from the ground: water drawn up from below, condensing into mist, then falling back as rain. It is observation, not a theory of evaporation.
36:29: God's dwelling is pictured as a tent, a portable pavilion, with the storm clouds as its canopy and the thunder as the noise coming from inside it.
36:30: "His light" means lightning, as it does again in verses 32. The second half of the line is difficult: the Hebrew says he covers the roots or depths of the sea, which may mean the lightning lights up even the sea floor, or that the storm veils it.
36:31: "These things" are the rain and lightning of the preceding verses. The same storm does both jobs: it is how God brings nations to account and how he feeds them, since rain meant harvest.
36:32: The image is of a warrior filling his hands with a weapon and hurling it. The Hebrew literally says he covers his hands with light: that is, with the lightning bolt he is about to throw.
36:33: The Hebrew of this verse is among the most damaged and obscure in the book. It seems to say that the thunder itself announces the storm's approach, and that even the livestock in the field sense it coming.

Read Job 36