23:1–2 We might label these two opening verses “A New Beginning; an Old Complaint.” What is new is how Job offers no verbal jab at his friends. We do not hear his taunts, “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you” (12:2), or “miserable comforters are you all” (16:2; cf. 13:4), or “How long will you torment me . . . ?” (19:2), or “mock on” (21:3). Instead he returns to the tone he first set. His opening words—“Today also my complaint is bitter; my hand is heavy on account of my groaning” (23:2)—more resemble 6:2–3a: “Oh that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances! For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea.” Is this progress a return to his earlier civility? Or has he just given up on his friends and knows that only God can speak for God?

23:3–7 Instead of turning on his three friends (cf. comment on 23:1–2), he turns to God for the rest of the chapter (vv. 3–17). Job mentions God in every verse but the last (v. 17)—God is his focus. However, Job’s vision of God is out of focus. He cannot find him: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him” (v. 3a; cf. v. 8). Job wants to find God so that God might hear his case (vv. 3b–7). Job longs to come before the judgment seat (“Oh . . . that I might come even to his seat!”; v. 3). There he envisions himself as presenting his “case” before God (“my judge”; v. 7b), making his “arguments” (v. 4). He also envisions God as listening, understanding, and siding with him (vv. 5–7). Instead of contending against a mere mortal by using the “greatness of his power” (v. 6a), God would “pay attention” and, in paying attention, would surely acquit the “upright” (vv. 6b–7).109

23:8–17 Verse 8 echoes and expands upon verse 3. This court case sounds great. The problem is that Job still cannot find God:

    Behold, I go forward, but he is not there,

    and backward, but I do not perceive him;

    on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him;

    he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him. (vv. 8–9)

Job is relieved, however, to know that God knows where to find him (“but he knows the way that I take”),110 and, when he gets around to hearing the case (“when he has tried me”), Job will be found innocent (“I shall come out as gold”; v. 10). Job knows that his life is a pure life (as pure as “gold” refined by fire), and in light of this fact he trusts that God will eventually see, vindicate, and even reward such righteousness. Like the psalmist of Psalm 119, Job has followed God’s word and delighted in his words:

    My foot has held fast to his steps;

    I have kept his way and have not turned aside.

    I have not departed from the commandment of his lips;

    I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my portion of food. (Job 23:11–12)

However, in verse 13 Job loses focus on the positive possibilities. His hope is deferred. His trust dissipates. The problem is not his innocence but God’s sovereignty. God’s sovereignty should be a comfort to him, but instead it makes him tremble in fear for the future. Due to God’s immutability (“he is unchangeable”), omnipotence (“and who can turn him back?”), and absolute sovereignty (“what he desires, that he does”; v. 13), Job dreads that he will have no say in when his case will be heard or what the outcome will be. He is completely in God’s hands, for God “will complete what he appoints,” or “decrees,” for Job, doing whatever else he has planned for Job (“and many such things are in his mind”; v. 14). Job expresses his fear of the unknown and his trepidation at actually meeting God in this way:

    Therefore I am terrified at his presence;

    when I consider, I am in dread of him.

    God has made my heart faint;

    the Almighty has terrified me. (vv. 15–16)111

Job is terrified to meet God (v. 15), and God’s very presence is the cause of such trepidation (v. 16). Nevertheless, Job presses on. He does the only thing he now knows to do. He returns to lament. While he is blind to God’s purposes, such “darkness” will not silence him:

And speak he will! Job has another chapter to go before Bildad’s brief interruption.

24:1–12 In chapter 24, Job shifts from addressing God’s uncommunicative relationship with him to addressing God’s apathetic relationship with the wicked. This is shocking to Job, because, unlike with Eliphaz’s false and short list of Job’s sins (22:6–9), the wicked have a true list, and a long one (24:2–11, 13–16). Job uses the same categories as Eliphaz to detail the crimes against humanity (table 4.6).

TABLE 4.6: Eliphaz’s Charges against Job; Job’s Charges against the Wicked

While Job uses the same categories as Eliphaz, he expands upon them (e.g., adding murder and adultery in 24:13–16 to the list above, and speaking more directly of stealing land and flocks in v. 2). What he also expands upon are the effects of such crimes upon the poor.

The disadvantaged are disadvantaged in the following ways: when the wicked “move landmarks” or boundary markers (v. 2a), falsely claiming that the poor man’s land and animals are now theirs (“they seize flocks”; v. 2b) and stealing even the orphan’s donkey and the widow’s ox (v. 3), the poor have nowhere to go. Then, when the wicked turn violent, even pushing the destitute into a ditch (“thrust the poor off the road”; v. 4a),112 “the poor” go into hiding (“hide themselves”; v. 4b). If the wicked are bold enough to steal their land and evil enough to push them off the road, the poor fear what the wicked might do to them next.

Verses 5–10 record what does happen next: stripped of their land, possessions, and dignity, the poor become scavengers, “like wild donkeys in the desert” (v. 5a). Like hardworking but unkempt animals, they go out into “the wasteland” looking for “food for their children” (“go out to their toil, seeking game”; v. 5bc). They eat whatever they can find (“game”; Hb. tereph, a root used only here and in Ps. 104:21: “The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God”). The sense, as we arrive at Job 24:6, is that these wanderers in the wilderness have wandered back to town for work. But the only work they can find is with the landowning wicked. Without any options, they take the job, becoming worse off than they were in the wilderness. While they provide for “the wicked man”—gathering animal feed (“fodder in the field”) and picking grapes (“glean the vineyard”; v. 6)—the wicked man does not provide for them. They are deprived of “shelter” (vv. 7b, 8) and “clothing” (vv. 7a, 10a), two essentials of human life:

    They lie all night naked, without clothing,

    and have no covering in the cold.

    They are wet with the rain of the mountains

    and cling to the rock for lack of shelter. (vv. 7–8)

They are also deprived of food and water, the most absolute essentials. Even though they work with food (“the sheaves” of wheat, v. 10b; rows of “olives” for olive “oil,” v. 11a) and drink (the wine of “the winepresses”; v. 11b) all day, “they go about . . . hungry” (v. 10) and “suffer thirst” (v. 11b).

In verse 9—a poetic parenthesis near the middle of all this misery (vv. 6–11)—Job offers a gross and graphic image of how bad times have gotten:

    (There are those who snatch the fatherless child from the breast,

    And they take a pledge against the poor.) (v. 9)

We feel like we have entered the worst moment of Israel’s exile, the aftermath of the siege of Jerusalem—or a Dickens novel, for that matter. The “those” are the wicked who have reached a new low: kidnapping a baby (“snatch the fatherless child”) from the mother who is nursing him (“from the breast”; v. 9a) and selling the child to pay off a debt or using him as collateral for a debt the poor owe them (“they take a pledge against the poor”; v. 9b). Where is God in the middle of such misery? Job wonders.

As noted above, all of the sins of the wicked center around oppression of the poor (note “the poor” mentioned in vv. 4, 5, 9, and also all of the pronouns referring to them: “they” [vv. 6 (2x), 7, 8, 10 (2x), 11 (2x)]; “their” [vv. 5 (2x), 6]; “themselves” [v. 4]). And thus all of Job’s difficulty centers on the problem of evil. Having described what the wicked do (vv. 2–11), he summarizes in verses 1 and 12 (which thus forms an inclusio to this section), what God does not do. Job first asks why, if God in his sovereignty has decided to allow evil for a season, does it seem like injustice is never dealt with (“Why are not times of judgment kept by the Almighty?”; v. 1a)? Moreover, why do the righteous (“those who know” God) look in vain for the time of God’s judgment of the wicked (“never see his days”; v. 1b)? Similarly, verse 12 speaks of the unanswered cries of the poor: “From out of the city the dying groan” (v. 12a), out of the very depths of their hearts (“the soul of the wounded”; v. 12b) they cry for help, but heaven hears not nor helps not. God does not act. He “charges no one with wrong” (v. 12c). He fails to execute justice.

24:13–17 Just as every line in 23:3–16 features God, so does every line in 24:2–24 feature the wicked. Verses 13–17 continue to focus on “those who rebel against the light” (v. 13) by featuring two notorious sinners: the “murderer” (v. 14) and the “adulterer” (v. 15). The “light” likely represents God (cf. Isa. 60:19; 1 John 1:5), specifically his light of revelation. Therefore, to “rebel against the light” is to refuse to hear God’s word (these rebels “are not acquainted with [God’s] ways”; Job 24:13b) or to heed his directions (they “do not stay in [God’s] paths”; v. 13c).

The murderer rebels in this way. He rises around 3:00 a.m. (“rises before it is light”; v. 14a). He has a premeditated plan to senselessly slaughter the already oppressed (“that he may kill the poor and needy”; v. 14b). He takes their possessions and their land, as easily as he did their lives (“in the night he is like a thief”; v. 14c). In the morning, it is as though nothing has happened; he has gotten away with this horrific crime. In a similar manner and with a similar outcome, the adulterer rebels. Right after dark (“the eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight”; v. 15a), trusting that he will not be seen (“saying, ‘No eye will see me’”; v. 15b)—both because of the time and because of his disguise (“he veils his face”; v. 15c)—he gets into the house, or many houses (“they dig through houses”; v. 16a),113 and into another man’s wife (they “take [their] fill of love till morning”; Prov. 7:18). The two adulterers lay together until the coast is clear—the next twilight (“by day they shut themselves up; they do not know the light”; Job 24:16bc). And, unlike what happens to the adulterers in Proverbs 6:20–7:27, where the “twilight” rendezvous (7:9) is met with a husband’s rage and “revenge” (6:34), here in Job 24 the sinners escape unnoticed and “unpunished” (contra Prov. 6:29; 7:23, 26–27).

Both sinners commit their sins at night (“before it is light,” Job 24:14a; “in the night,” v. 14c; “waits for the twilight,” v. 15a; “they do not know the light,” v. 16c). In the words of Jesus, these rebels “loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19; cf. 1 Thess. 5:4–8). In Job’s rendition:

    Deep darkness is morning to all of them;

    for they are friends with the terrors of deep darkness. (Job 24:17)

Innocent Job has experienced the “deep darkness” (16:16) of not hearing from God; to the guilty ungodly, however, the “deep darkness” (24:17) safeguards their sin. It hides them, so it seems to Job, from God’s inspecting and adjudicating eye.

24:18–25 More than not being seen and judged for their sins, the wicked often experience the opposite of punishment: prosperity! As in 21:7–21, Job argues against his friends’ view (“you say”; 24:18a). Job 24:18–20 is Job’s summary of their bad theology. They claim that the wicked (“they,” vv. 18a, 20c; “their,” v. 18bc [2x]; “them,” v. 20ab [2x]; “those who have sinned,” v. 19b) do not get away with anything but experience a threefold fall into disgrace. First, whatever prosperity they might experience is very short-lived. They are pushed down the river and off a waterfall like driftwood (“swift are they on the face of the waters”; v. 18a), unnoticed, unimportant, unremembered. Their grapes are blighted (“their portion is cursed in the land”; v. 18b), so their business deals fall through (“no treader turns toward their vineyards”; v. 18c) and the family winery goes bankrupt. Then, second, comes death (“Sheol”) to snatch “those who have sinned” away, like “snow waters” are soaked up on a 100-degree day or by a seven-month “drought” (v. 19). Third, they are forgotten. As they are buried in the ground, only the worm notices them (“the worm finds them sweet”; v. 20b). No one else will remember them (“they are no longer remembered”; v. 20c), not even their own mothers (“the womb forgets them”; v. 20a). In the end, they have been judged by God and rendered useless—“so wickedness is broken like a tree” (v. 20d; cf. Ezek. 17:24). In summary, the friends claim that the wicked (1) do not prosper, (2) suffer quick deaths, and (3) are soon forgotten.

Job agrees with one point of his friends’ analysis, that the wicked will die and be forgotten:

    They are exalted a little while, and then are gone;

    they are brought low and gathered up like all others;

    they are cut off like the heads of grain. (Job 24:24)

However, he cannot concede their other points, for he still struggles with his observation of life. The absolute fact, Job is convinced (“If it is not so, who will prove me a liar and show that there is nothing in what I say?”; v. 25), is what he has said in 24:1–17. Even though the wicked commit the most horrendous crimes (“they wrong the barren, childless woman, and do no good to the widow”; v. 21; cf. Ex. 22:21–27; Deut. 24:17–22), no swift justice comes. They do not suffer quick deaths; they do not feel the hand of God’s judgment. Instead, it seems that they experience his helping hand. God “prolongs the life of the mighty by his power; they rise up when they despair of life” (Job 24:22). He not only helps them up when they have fallen down, he also lifts them up, giving them security and support (v. 23a). His eye is protecting their way (“his eyes are upon their ways”; v. 23b), rather than judging it (cf. vv. 13–17).