Job 9: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Job answers Bildad. He agrees that no person can be counted right in a case against God, and he describes God's power over mountains, earth, sun, stars and sea, and how no one can question what God does. He says he could not win an argument with God even if he were blameless, that God destroys the blameless and the wicked alike, and that washing himself clean would not help. He wishes for someone to stand between him and God, and for God to lift his rod so he could speak without fear.

Claim by Claim

1. 9:1
   • Job answered
   • Job spoke
2. 9:2
   • Job says he knows truly that it is so
   • Job asks how a man can be righteous before God
3. 9:3
   • If a man wished to contend at law with God, he could not answer God one time out of a thousand
4. 9:4
   • God is wise in heart
   • God is mighty in strength
   • No one has hardened himself against God and come through whole
5. 9:5
   • God removes mountains and they do not know it
   • God overturns mountains in his anger
6. 9:6
   • God shakes the earth out of its place
   • The pillars of the earth shudder
7. 9:7
   • God commands the sun and it does not rise
   • God seals up the stars
8. 9:8
   • God alone stretches out the heavens
   • God treads on the heights of the sea
9. 9:9
   • God made the constellation called the Bear (rendered Arcturus)
   • God made the constellation Orion
   • God made the Pleiades
   • God made the chambers of the south
10. 9:10
    • God does great things beyond searching out
    • God does wonders without number
11. 9:11
    • God passes by Job and Job does not see him
    • God moves on and Job does not perceive him
12. 9:12
    • God snatches away
    • Job asks who can turn God back
    • Job asks who will say to God, What are you doing?
13. 9:13
    • God does not turn back his anger
    • The helpers of Rahab bow down beneath God
14. 9:14
    • Job asks how much less he could answer God
    • Job asks how he could choose out his words to argue with God
15. 9:15
    • Even if Job were in the right, he would not answer
    • Job would plead for mercy from the one judging him
16. 9:16
    • If Job called and God answered him, Job would not believe that God had listened to his voice
17. 9:17
    • God crushes Job with a tempest
    • God multiplies Job's wounds without cause
18. 9:18
    • God does not let Job get his breath back
    • God fills Job with bitterness
19. 9:19
    • If it is a matter of strength, God is the mighty one
    • If it is a matter of judgment, Job asks who can set a summons to court; the text leaves unclear whether the one summoned is Job or God
20. 9:20
    • If Job justified himself, his own mouth would condemn him
    • Though Job is blameless, he would be declared crooked
21. 9:21
    • Job is blameless
    • Job does not know his own self
    • Job despises his life
22. 9:22
    • It is all one thing
    • Job says that is why he speaks
    • Job says God destroys the blameless and the wicked alike
23. 9:23
    • If a scourge kills suddenly, God mocks at the despair of the innocent
24. 9:24
    • The earth is given into the hand of the wicked
    • God covers the faces of the earth's judges
    • Job asks, if it is not God, then who is it?
25. 9:25
    • Job's days are swifter than a runner
    • Job's days flee away
    • Job's days see no good
26. 9:26
    • Job's days pass by like boats of reed
    • Job's days pass like an eagle swooping down on food
27. 9:27
    • Job considers saying he will forget his complaint
    • Job considers leaving off his sad face
    • Job considers being cheerful
28. 9:28
    • Job dreads all his pains
    • Job knows that God will not hold him innocent
29. 9:29
    • Job will be counted guilty
    • Job asks why he should labor in vain
30. 9:30
    • If Job washed himself with snow
    • If Job cleansed his hands with lye
31. 9:31
    • God would still plunge Job into the pit
    • Job's own clothes would abhor him
32. 9:32
    • God is not a man like Job
    • Job cannot answer God as he would a man
    • Job and God cannot come together into court
33. 9:33
    • There is no arbiter between Job and God
    • There is no one to lay his hand upon them both
34. 9:34
    • Job asks that God remove his rod from him
    • Job asks that God's terror not frighten him
35. 9:35
    • Then Job would speak and not fear God
    • Job says it is not so with him; the statement is ambiguous, meaning either that his situation is not like that or that he is not himself as he stands

Words Worth Explaining

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

9:1

Job is answering his friend Bildad, who had just argued that God only punishes people who deserve it.

9:2

From here to the end of the chapter Job talks in the vocabulary of a lawsuit: being "just" or "right" means winning your case, not being morally flawless. The Hebrew phrase can mean "be in the right before God" or "win a case against God", Job is asking whether a human could ever come out of such a trial as the winner.

9:3

The Hebrew leaves open who does the questioning and who fails to answer: either a person could not answer one of God's thousand questions, or God would not answer one of a person's thousand. Ancient and modern translators divide over it, and the sentence works either way.

9:4

"Hardened himself" translates a phrase meaning to stiffen oneself in defiance, like an animal bracing its neck against the yoke. "Prospered" here means came through it intact, not grew rich.

9:5

"They know not" describes the mountains: God moves them before they realize what is happening. Mountains were the standard image for the most permanent thing anyone could imagine.

9:6

Hebrew descriptions of the world picture the earth as a flat structure set on pillars or foundation posts, the way a building or a tent platform rests on supports. An earthquake was the pillars shuddering.

9:7

"Seals up" is the image of closing something with a wax or clay seal (a door, a bag, a legal document), so that no one can open it. God shuts the stars away as one shuts a sealed room.

9:8

"Spreads out the heavens" uses the verb for stretching a tent-cloth over its poles. The second half literally reads "treads on the backs of the sea"; in the older poetry of the region, the sea is a defeated opponent, and treading on its back is what a victor does to a beaten enemy.

9:9

The Hebrew star names are ʿAsh, Kesil and Kimah, and no one is certain which constellations they mean; the traditional guesses are the Bear (the KJV's "Arcturus"), Orion and the Pleiades. "The chambers of the south" means the southern stars, imagined as rooms out of which the constellations come.

9:12

"What are you doing?" was a set phrase in the ancient Near East for the question no subject was permitted to put to a king. Job's point is that no one is in a position to call God to account.

9:13

The Hebrew reads "the helpers of Rahab", Rahab is not the woman of Jericho but the name of a sea monster in older poetry, a figure for the chaotic waters. Her "helpers" are her allies in that fight. The KJV translators, unsure of the name, read it as the ordinary word for "pride," which is why it comes out as "the proud helpers."

9:15

The word rendered "my judge" can also mean "my opponent at law." That double sense is the knot of the whole speech: the one Job would have to sue is also the one who would try the case.

9:17

The Hebrew word here differs by one letter from the word for "a hair," and some readers take the line as "he crushes me for a hair" (that is, over a trifle), rather than "with a storm." Both readings are old.

9:18

"Suffer me" in 1611 English means allow me, not cause me pain. The image is of someone held under water or pinned down, never given the space to draw a breath.

9:19

"Set me a time to plead" is the technical act of summoning a defendant and fixing a court date. Job's complaint is procedural: there is no officer with standing to compel God to appear.

9:20

"Perfect" in the King James does not mean sinless. It translates a word meaning whole, sound, of one piece, blameless in the sense that no charge sticks. The same word carries through verses 21 and 22.

9:21

The middle clause is obscure in Hebrew. "I would not know my soul" has been read as "I do not know myself," "I have no concern for myself," and "I do not care what happens to me." The rendering picks one; the others remain possible.

9:23

A "scourge" is a whip, used here for a disaster that sweeps through and kills without picking its victims, plague, war, flood. The word translated "trial" means the melting away of courage, the collapse of the people it strikes.

9:24

Covering a judge's face means blindfolding him so that he cannot see the case in front of him, the reverse of the blindfold that later stood for impartiality. Here it means justice is not being done because those who should see have been blinded.

9:25

A "post" was a professional royal courier who ran messages in relays; such runners were the fastest thing anyone in that world had seen move overland.

9:26

The Hebrew is "ships of papyrus", light skiffs made of bundled reeds, used on the Nile, far quicker than a wooden boat. The bird is a nesher, which covers both the eagle and the griffon vulture.

9:27

"Heaviness" means a gloomy expression. The Hebrew says something like "I will abandon my face," meaning to drop the miserable look and arrange a cheerful one instead.

9:28

Job has been speaking about God in the third person; here he turns and addresses him directly as "you," and keeps doing so through verse 31. "Hold me innocent" is the courtroom term for an acquittal.

9:29

"If I be wicked" is not Job admitting guilt. He means that since he has already been treated as guilty whatever he does, there is no point exhausting himself trying to prove otherwise.

9:30

The second cleaning agent is lye, potash leached from plant ash, the strongest soap available and harsh enough to burn the skin. Snow water was thought of as the purest water there was. Job is naming the two most thorough cleansers he knows.

9:31

The word behind "ditch" means a pit, and elsewhere a grave or a cesspit. The last clause reverses the normal relation between a person and his clothes: instead of his filth soiling them, the garments themselves recoil from the man wearing them.

9:33

A "daysman" in 1611 English was an arbitrator, someone appointed to hear a dispute on an agreed day. Laying a hand on both parties was the gesture that showed he had authority over each of them and could hold them both to his ruling. Job's point is that between a human and God no such third party exists. Some Hebrew manuscripts read "would that there were an arbitrator" rather than "there is not."

9:34

The rod is the stick a king, a master or a father used for beating, an instrument of punishment held by someone with the right to use it, not a walking staff.

9:35

The last clause is difficult in Hebrew; it reads roughly "for I am not so in myself." It has been taken as "but that is not how things stand with me," "but I am not like that," and "but I am left to myself." The uncertainty is in the text, not in the translation.