21:1–6 With his very autobiographical opening (note the use of “I,” “me,” and “my” in every verse), Job mocks his mockers with a tear in his eye. The mocking sarcasm is obvious.

    Keep listening to my words,

    and let this be your comfort.

    Bear with me, and I will speak,

    and after I have spoken, mock on. (vv. 2–3)

Instead of the three friends’ bringing Job comfort with their words, Job is bringing them “comfort,” in the sense of providing them more concepts with which to debate him. He asks them to listen just so they will have more ammunition for their next insensitive attack.

With all this, though, Job wants their sympathy for his spiritual dilemma. He is directing his complaint not against them (“Is my complaint against man?”; v. 4a) but against God. It is true that Job is “impatient” (4:2, 5), but it is a justifiable impatience, as God refuses to speak to him and settle the situation (21:4b). He also wants his friends’ sympathy for his physical sufferings. He wants them to make a fresh examination of his sore and skinny body (“look at me”) and be so “appalled” that they are left speechless (“lay your hand over your mouth”; v. 5). He further wants their sympathy for his psychological sufferings. When Job recalls what happened to his children and wealth on that one day and his loss of status and reputation ever since (“when I remember”), he is “dismayed” (or “terrified”; v. 6a). He is so terrified that it affects his body (“shuddering seizes my flesh”; v. 6b).

21:7–16 Job moves from a plea for their sympathy to a corrective of their theology. In response to Zophar’s claim that the wicked always suffer even if they experience prosperity and pleasure for a fleeting minute, Job argues the opposite (vv. 7–21): the wicked seem to thrive in this world. And God obviously lets them.

Those two arguments are the two points of his speech. First, the wicked thrive. Using exaggerated generalizations, Job lists how “the wicked” (three times in vv. 7–17) reside in safety (“their houses are safe from fear”; v. 9a), “grow mighty in power” (v. 7b), increase in wealth (“they spend their days in prosperity,” v. 13a; “prosperity [is] in their hand,” v. 16a), live long lives (“live, reach old age”; v. 7), see their children and grandchildren (“their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes”; v. 8), and die peaceful deaths (“in peace they go down to Sheol”; v. 13b). More than that, their livestock are fruitful and multiply.

    Their bull breeds without fail;

    their cow calves and does not miscarry. (v. 10)

And, perhaps most ironic of all, the children of the wicked are happy!

    They send out their little boys like a flock,

    and their children dance.

    They sing to the tambourine and the lyre

    and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. (vv. 11–12)

Second, God lets the wicked and their children sing and skip and dance through life. Job says it this way: “No rod of God is upon them” (v. 9b). God does not discipline them through disasters. He lets them live their lives, even though they do not acknowledge his gifts; the phrase “Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand?” (v. 16a) can also be rendered “But their prosperity is not their own doing” (NET). Moreover, God lets them live their lives, even though they deride him and his ways.

    They say to God, “Depart from us!

    We do not desire the knowledge of your ways.

    What is the Almighty, that we should serve him?

    And what profit do we get if we pray to him?” (vv. 14–15)

Praise and prayer are of no profit. Revelation of God’s law—such as “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’” (Deut. 8:17)—is not needed. Allegiance to the Almighty is wholly impractical. Job does not understand why this is the case. “It’s beyond me how they can carry on like this!” (Job 21:16a MESSAGE) is Eugene Peterson’s helpful paraphrase of “The counsel of the wicked is far from me.”

21:17–21 As the last section opened with a question (“Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?”; v. 7), so too does this one (“How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out?”; v. 17). This second question is very similar to the first, being a different way of stating the same problem Job faces. It also connects especially with the second point of Job’s speech in verses 7–16: God lets the wicked thrive. Zophar has claimed that the wicked and their offspring are destroyed, often quite suddenly (“You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children’”; v. 19; cf. Eliphaz in 5:4). Job disagrees. It is rare (“how often”; 21:17a) that God judges the wicked—that “calamity comes upon them” (v. 17b), that they experience pain (v. 17c) or, metaphorically, are “like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away” (v. 18).

Job wants God to judge justly: “Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it” (v. 19b). He thinks that they should experience what he is experiencing: “Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty” (v. 20). But he knows this is usually not the case. He also knows that once they die and are buried for a few months (“when the number of their months is cut off”; v. 21b), the wicked are not worrying about what will happen to their children and grandchildren (“For what do they care for their houses after them . . . ?”; v. 21a).

21:22–26 Job pauses to ponder the incomprehensible way in which God governs the world, and how “God’s exercise of justice transcends what humans can comprehend.”104 Starting with another rhetorical question—“Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those who are on high?” (v. 22)—Job clarifies his confusion. As he observes the world, it is not apparent—certainly not as black and white as Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar claim—that the retribution principle holds true in every case. Job illustrates the grayness of actual life with an illustration of two deaths (“one dies,” v. 23a; “another dies,” v. 25a). The first man dies “in his full vigor, being wholly at ease and secure” (v. 23), his body having been well nourished and his bones healthy (“his pails full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist”; v. 24) his whole life. The second man dies an awful death (“dies in bitterness of soul”) after living a miserable life (“never having tasted of prosperity”; v. 25).

We might picture the first man as the wicked man described above (vv. 7–16) and righteous Job as the second man. Job, however, does not tell us who is who. What he does say is that what the two men now have in common is their decaying dead bodies:

    They lie down alike in the dust,

    and the worms cover them. (v. 26)

Death makes their lives—whether lived for the glory of God or for the glory of self—indistinguishable. The point Job is making is the one he has been making since verse 7. The slightly new nuance is that even the death of the wicked does not necessarily correspond with how he lived. He might have a painful death or a peaceful one. God alone determines.

21:27–34 Job returns to his direct and personal confrontation of his friends, bookending this section with accusations; the first is an accusation of their evil intentions (“your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me”; v. 27) and the second of their useless and untrue counsel (“How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood”; v. 34).

In between those two accusations, Job revises his argument. He first returns to the good life of bad people (cf. vv. 7–21) and how it is obvious to anyone who has observed the world that the wicked are not always judged. Using questions, Job features his friends’ perspective that both the name and the place of the wicked perish with him. “You say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’” (v. 28). He follows their perspective with his:

    Have you not asked those who travel the roads,

    and do you not accept their testimony

    that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity,

    that he is rescued in the day of wrath?

    Who declares his way to his face,

    and who repays him for what he has done? (vv. 29–31)

Job counsels his friends, saying that simple observation, or simply asking someone who has seen the world (accepting the “testimony” of “those who travel the roads”; v. 29), will tell them that God’s anger does not always show itself against the “evil man” (“he is rescued in the day of wrath”; v. 30). God neither rebukes them (“Who declares his way to his face . . . ?”; v. 31a) nor repays them for their crimes (“Who repays him for what he has done?”; v. 31b). Moreover, the funeral of the ungodly is glorious, and their name lives on—“engraved in the rock forever” (cf. 19:24).

    When he is carried to the grave,

    watch is kept over his tomb. (21:32)

After a massive procession to the gravesite (“all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable”; v. 33bc), he is lowered into the ground (“the clods of the valley are sweet to him”; v. 33a), where he rests in peace. Job might even picture a smile on the man’s face.