16:1–6 Job has heard enough. His friends are not doing their job. They came to “comfort him” (2:11; Hb. nakham). Instead, however, they are “miserable comforters” (16:2; Hb. menakhame ʻamal). Job is not the one filled with “windy knowledge” (15:2; cf. 8:2); they are. Their useless and oppressive counsel (their “windy words”; 16:3a) seems endless. He is sick of their hot air in his face. Job wonders what their problem is. What continues to provoke them, that they keep answering Job’s laments with their lies (cf. v. 3b)? He wants to be left alone.

In verses 4–6 Job imagines trading places with them.

    I also could speak as you do,

    if you were in my place; (v. 4ab)

He could act like they are acting. He could prod them with dispassionate poetry (“I could join words together against you”; v. 4c) and shake his head in disbelief and dismay (“and shake my head at you”; v. 4d). Or he could take the high road, the path they should be on. He could use his words (“mouth” and “lips”) to build them up, not tear them down, bringing “strength” and “solace,” helping “assuage” their “pain” (v. 5). Job has tried everything. He has tried to comfort himself with such words of strength and solace, but even his own method does not work. “If I speak, my pain is not assuaged” (v. 6a). He has also tried refraining from offering himself words of comfort, and yet that too offers little relief (“and if I forbear, how much of it leaves me?”; v. 6b).

16:7–17 Job cannot find comfort from his friends (vv. 2–4). He cannot even comfort himself (v. 6). Is God, then, the solution? In verses 7–17 Job answers with an emphatic “No!” To him, God is not the solution but the problem.

Using psalm-like language of lament, Job describes with metaphor after metaphor the awfulness of his ongoing experience. The focus of his lament is God. His opening line is “surely now God has” (v. 7a). He then goes on to describe what “God has” done to him:

Job is exhausted (v. 7a). His friends and their words are barren and worthless (v. 7b). Yet, because he is just skin and bones, such emaciation has been seen as a sign of sin. His “shriveled” body is a “witness against” him; his “leanness” lies to his “face” (v. 8)—“See, you are guilty!” More than that, Job feels that God has turned against him. It is as if he is under God’s indignation. God’s “wrath” is against him. The “hatred” is so deep that Job envisions God as his “adversary,” gnashing his teeth at him, fixing (“sharpening”) his eyes against him (cf. v. 9), and ready to attack!

The attack comes, so Job suggests, in the form of “men”—three men who could not believe their eyes when they first spotted Job (they “gaped at me”; v. 10a; cf. 2:12) but who quickly united to turn against him (“they have struck me insolently on the cheek; they mass themselves together against me”; 16:10bc). Job admits defeat. He assumes the warrior God is their commander-in-chief.

God throws Job to the ungodly!? Such is certainly how Job feels as he indeed feels the full arsenal of his friends’ attack, as well as that of the mockers who stroll by to see the skinny statue of “The Wise Man of the East” deconstructed.

Job next recounts the stealthy and severe strikes:

    I was at ease, and he broke me apart;

    he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces;

    he set me up as his target;

    his archers surround me.

    He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare;

    he pours out my gall on the ground.

    He breaks me with breach upon breach;

    he runs upon me like a warrior. (vv. 12–14)

Job has lost wealth. His health. His children! His wife and his friends’ respect. The imagery—God choking him, throwing him to the ground, then having his archers use him as target practice and afterward slashing open his innards and watching his blood flow into the soil—is not as exaggerated as we might imagine. Job once had peace and prosperity. But he did not live happily ever after. Since the end of chapter 1 (for months, perhaps years), a constant crusade of seemingly cosmic forces has been warring against him. He does not know what to do. He has done what he thinks he should do; he has repented of anything he can possibly repent of:

    I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin

    and have laid my strength in the dust. (16:15)89

He has turned to God for help. He is physically exhausted, spiritually drained:

    My face is red with weeping,

    and on my eyelids is deep darkness, (v. 16)

But the sky seems made of stone. He does not understand why God will not hear his prayer and show mercy upon him. He is, after all, innocent, and his cries for help sincere (“although there is no violence in my hands, and my prayer is pure”; v. 17).

16:18–17:16 Job 16:18 is another beautiful supplication, one that ties into what Job has said in 16:7–17. He is not sure if God can or will hear him, so he calls on the earth to vindicate him: “O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place” (16:18; cf. 16:13). He also calls on heaven to be his advocate:

    Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven,

    and he who testifies for me is on high. (16:19)

He knows not if heaven and earth will come to the rescue, but he has no other hope. Both his closest companions and his faithful God have forsaken him (his “friends scorn” him, 16:20a; his “eye pours out tears to God” to no avail, 16:20b). But Job seems conflicted, as he speaks perhaps prophetically:

    that he would argue the case of a man with God,

    as a son of man does with his neighbor. (16:21)

Who is the “he”? Is this “son of man” the Son of Man, the one who has come to “seek and save” (Luke 19:10)? Is this intercessor the God-man or just abstract “heaven” and “earth”? We know, but Job does not. Job is neither messianic nor optimistic: “when a few years have come I shall go the way from which I shall not return” (Job 16:22). He will soon die.

Chapter 17 continues this theme of his impending death:

    My spirit is broken; my days are extinct;

    the graveyard is ready for me. (17:1)

Sheol awaits Job, where death will mock his existence. Greatest man of the east? Phooey! But for now, his friends do the job. He is surrounded by deriders (“surely there are mockers about me”; 17:2a); he is forced to stare directly into their taunts (“my eye dwells on their provocation”; 17:2b). He wants God’s support—a down payment on Job’s innocence (“lay down a pledge for me”; 17:3a)—because no one else is wise enough and willing enough to do it, considering the circumstances (“Who is there who will put up security for me?”; 17:3b). Since Job believes that God has barred his friends’ minds from grasping the truth (“you have closed their hearts to understanding”; 17:4a), Job hopes that they will not have the last word in the debate (“therefore you will not let them triumph”; 17:4b). For, after all, their sin is obvious, and their retribution principle needs to be practiced on them! If they are going to mock and denounce Job, their children should suffer the consequences of their crimes: “He who informs against his friends to get a share of their property—the eyes of his children will fail” (17:5).

Job’s words are not careless; they are crafted against those who think he is crafty (cf. 15:5). Yet they are sad words. He is lost, confused. He turns again, in 17:6, to contemplating God and his role in Job’s sorrows. God, he says, “has made” him a “byword of the peoples” (the laughingstock of Uz) and the object of degrading physical scorn (“men spit” on him; 17:6). Due to Job’s sufferings, he can no longer see (“my eye has grown dim from vexation”; 17:7a) or stand up straight. All of his body parts (“members”) are like sticks reflecting the morning sun (“like a shadow”; 17:7b). Yet, under the shadow of the Almighty, Job still stands. He believes that his vindication is soon to come, for he knows that anyone who is truly blameless (“the upright” man) is appalled about what is happening to him, and such a man freely joins Job in his raging against the machine (“the upright are appalled at this, and the innocent stirs himself up against the godless”; 17:8). Job trusts that his “godless” friends are not wise (cf. 17:10b). Sarcastically, he encourages them to give it another try (“but you, come on again”; 17:10a). Meanwhile, he (“the righteous . . . he who has clean hands”) stands firm (“holds to his way”), and in doing so only “grows stronger and stronger” (17:9).

His strength, however, has its limits. He can only hold so much weight over his head. In 17:11–16, he again sinks (as he has done thus far in all of his speeches) into despair. His good “days” are a thing of the “past,” along with his heart’s “desires” and “plans” for the future (17:11). All that he might have hoped for is surely not going to happen (“broken off”; 17:11). His friends have brought him to this place. They call good “evil” and evil “good” (cf. Isa. 5:20):

    They make night into day:

    “The light,” they say, “is near to the darkness.” (Job 17:12)

Job again embraces this darkness:

    If I hope for Sheol as my house,

    if I make my bed in darkness,

    if I say to the pit, “You are my father,”

    and to the worm, “My mother,” or “My sister,”

    where then is my hope?

    Who will see my hope?

    Will it go down to the bars of Sheol?

    Shall we descend together into the dust? (17:13–16)

Even if he embraced death as his abode (“Sheol” as his “house,” “the darkness” of the grave as his “bed”; 17:13) and as the only family he now has (calling his earthen tomb “father” and the decomposition of his body “mother” and “sister”; 17:14), he will find no solace. Will hope join him in the grave (“descend together into the dust”; 17:16b)? Surely not. Hope is not going to rest in peace with him.