Job — Chapter 14

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: This is the last chapter of Job's long answer to Zophar (chs 12–14), the longest speech in the first round of the debate, and it closes that whole first round (chs 4–14). In chapter 12 Job mocked his friends, "No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you" (12:2), and insisted he knew as well as they that God rules everything. In chapter 13 he called them "worthless physicians" (13:4), then turned away from them to speak to God. He declared, "Though he slay me, I will hope in him" (13:15), asked God for two things, to take his hand away and to stop terrifying him (13:20–21), and begged to be told what his sins were (13:23). Chapter 13 ended with a picture of a man rotting away "like a garment that is moth-eaten" (13:28). Chapter 14 carries that thought straight on, still spoken to God. It is a poem about how short and fragile human life is, and it moves in three waves, marked by the ESV's paragraph breaks: a plea for God to leave a frail man alone (vv1–6), the haunting question of whether a dead man can live again (vv7–17), and a fall back into darkness (vv18–22). Matthew Henry called it "proper for funeral solemnities," and the old Book of Common Prayer burial service echoes its first line.

Job Continues: Man Born of Woman (vv1–22)

• "Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble" (v1). Job now speaks of every human being. To be "born of a woman" simply means to be human, with all its weakness (the friends use the phrase in 15:14 and 25:4). The verse is a contrast: few in days, full of trouble. Life is short, and what there is of it is crowded with grief. "Trouble" is the same word Job used in 3:26, "I have no rest, but trouble comes."
• "He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow" (v2). Two pictures of how quickly life passes. The Tyndale notes point to the many places Scripture uses the fading flower (Ps 103:15–16; Isa 40:6–7) and the passing shadow (1 Chr 29:15; Ps 102:11). A desert wildflower may bloom for only a few days, and a shadow is gone the moment the sun moves.
• "And do you open your eyes on such a one and bring me into judgment with you?" (v3). Here is Job's real complaint. Why would the great God fix his stare on a creature this small and fleeting, and haul him into court? The Tyndale notes connect this with Job's earlier protests about God's constant watching (7:17–20; 10:6, 14; 13:27). Psalm 8 marvels that God is "mindful" of man. Job asks the same question, but for him God's attention is a weight.
• "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? There is not one" (v4). Job admits what Zophar accused him of denying (11:4). He does not claim to be sinless. Every human being comes from an unclean source, so no one can be perfectly clean. David says the same in Psalm 51:5: "I was brought forth in iniquity." This is one of the Old Testament's early witnesses to what Christians later called original sin, the idea that sin is in human nature from birth. Job's point is a plea: why hold a frail man to a standard no human could meet?
• "His days are determined… and you have appointed his limits that he cannot pass" (v5). Job had just said God "set a limit for the soles of my feet" (13:27). Now he widens it: God has fixed the length of every life. Psalm 139:16 says the same with comfort: "in your book were written… the days that were formed for me." For Job, it is one more reason God might as well let him be.
• "Look away from him and leave him alone, that he may enjoy, like a hired hand, his day" (v6). "Hired hand" (sakir) is a day laborer, the man in Leviticus whose wages were not to be held back until morning (Lev 19:13). Job used the same picture in 7:1–2, where he compared his life to "hard service" and the days of "a hired hand" who longs for evening. A hired worker's day is hard, but it ends with rest and a wage. Job asks for that much: let a man have his short day in peace.
• "For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again" (v7). Now Job turns to nature. Many trees in the region, the olive above all, can be cut to the stump and still send up new shoots from the roots. "Hope" here is tiqvah, a key word in Job. Job asked earlier, "what is my end, that I should be patient?" (6:11), and said his days "come to their end without hope" (7:6). Here a tree has more hope than he does. The same word comes back in v19, "so you destroy the hope of man," and the two lines frame the middle of the chapter.
• "Sprout again" (v7). The Hebrew verb here (chalaph, in a form that means to put forth something new) is worth noticing. The lexicon gives this exact verse as its example of a tree "putting forth fresh shoots." Job will use a noun from the same root in v14, "till my renewal should come." English hides the link, but the Hebrew reader would hear it. Job takes the word for the tree's new growth and, for one moment, dares to use it of himself.
• "Though its root grow old… yet at the scent of water it will bud" (vv8–9). The stump seems dead, but when rain reaches it, it comes alive "like a young plant," as if it could smell the water coming.
• "But a man dies and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he?" (v10). The contrast is blunt. A tree can come back. A man dies, and then where is he? Two different Hebrew words for "man" stand in the verse. JFB notes the first is the word for a strong man (geber) and the second the ordinary word for a human being (adam). Even the strongest goes down the same way as anyone else. Like a dried-up lake (v11), he does not refill.
• "So a man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake" (v12). Death is pictured as sleep. The question is what "till the heavens are no more" means. The Tyndale notes take it as a way of saying "never." The heavens were the most lasting thing anyone knew (Ps 89:29; 148:6), so Job means the dead stay dead for good. The notes add that Job did not have even the small amount of light on resurrection the later Old Testament gives (Isa 26:19; Dan 12:2). JFB reads the phrase more hopefully: Job only means a dead man does not come back to this world, and he leaves open a life in a new order after the heavens pass away (Isa 51:6; 2 Pet 3:10–13). Either way, Job sees no return to ordinary life.
• "Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath be past" (v13). This is one of the most daring prayers in the book. Sheol is the Old Testament's name for the realm of the dead. Israel's neighbors pictured the underworld as a dark "land of no return," ruled by its own gods. The Bible's Sheol is also shadowy and silent (10:21–22; Ps 88:10–12), but it is never outside God's reach: "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" (Ps 139:8). Job imagines God using the grave as a hiding place until his anger cools, then setting a date to "remember" him and bring him out. To "remember" in the Old Testament means to act on someone's behalf, as when "God remembered Noah" (Gen 8:1). The Tyndale notes observe that Job has just called the grave permanent (vv10–12), so he knows this is a wish he cannot have.
• "If a man dies, shall he live again?" (v14). This is the question at the center of the chapter. How much did Job believe? Readers differ. Many modern scholars, along with the Tyndale notes, think Job is asking a real question with no settled answer. Everything he said in vv10–12 points to "no," but his longing reaches past it. Matthew Henry, on the other hand, wrote that "the resurrection of the dead was doubtless an article of Job's creed," and took the "no" of vv10–12 to mean only that the dead do not return to life in this world. JFB stands between them. It says Job's hope here is real but vague, and that "the Gospel revelation was needed to change fears, hopes, and glimpses into clear and definite certainties." What can be said fairly is that the question is not finally answered in this chapter. It opens a door Job will push further open in 19:25–26, "I know that my Redeemer lives… in my flesh I shall see God."
• "All the days of my service I would wait, till my renewal should come" (v14). "Service" is tsaba, the ordinary word for an army, warfare or military duty. It is the word in God's title "the LORD of hosts." Job pictures himself as a soldier on a long, hard tour of duty (as in 7:1). "Renewal" is chaliphah, the word that elsewhere means a "change" of clothes (Gen 45:22) or workers sent in "shifts" (1 Kgs 5:14). The lexicon reads it in this verse as "revival after death, under figure of relief from military service," and JFB, followed by many, takes it the same way: Job would wait at his post like a soldier until his relief arrives. That reading is well supported. The KJV's "till my change come" captures the same word. If a man could live again, Job says, he could bear any length of waiting, even waiting in the grave.
• "You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands" (v15). This is the warmest line Job has spoken to God so far. In 13:22 he used the same words to challenge God in court: "Then call, and I will answer." Here they describe a reunion. "The work of your hands" echoes 10:3 and 10:8, where Job complained that God was destroying what he made. Now he imagines God longing for it. The verb (kasaph) is a strong word for yearning, used of Jacob homesick for "your father's house" (Gen 31:30) and of the soul that "longs, yes, faints" for God's courts (Ps 84:2). JFB says it literally means to turn pale with longing. The lexicon gives the meaning here as simply "long for." It mentions a link to paleness only in related languages and later Hebrew, so JFB's "literally" claims more than the lexicon shows, though the strength of the longing is real.
• "For then you would number my steps; you would not keep watch over my sin" (v16). In that day, God's watching would change its nature. Job has felt watched like a suspect (13:27). The Tyndale notes say counting his steps here means protective care, like a father watching a toddler rather than a guard watching a prisoner.
• "My transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity" (v17). Valuables and documents were tied in a pouch and sealed. Readers take the picture two ways. Some read it as storing sins up for a later reckoning, as in Hosea 13:12, "The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up." Most, including the Tyndale notes and JFB, read it as forgiveness: the sins are sealed away and never opened again. The second half of the verse, "you would cover over my iniquity," supports this reading. "Cover" is the language of Psalm 32:1: "Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." Job, who admitted in v4 that no one is clean, is asking for mercy.
• "But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place" (v18). "But" turns the poem back toward darkness. Even mountains and rocks, the symbols of permanence, give way.
• "The waters wear away the stones… so you destroy the hope of man" (v19). Water grinds stone into sand, slowly and surely. Job feels God doing the same to human hope, the same word used for the tree in v7. A stump has hope, but man's hope is worn to nothing. The friends kept offering hope if Job would repent (4:6; 11:18). Job says God himself is wearing it away.
• "You prevail forever against him, and he passes; you change his countenance, and send him away" (v20). God always wins, and man "passes." "You change his countenance" most likely describes the face changing in death, as JFB takes it.
• "His sons come to honor, and he does not know it" (v21). The dead are cut off from what happens to those they love. Their children may do well or badly, and the parent never hears of it. Ecclesiastes says the same: "the dead know nothing" (Eccl 9:5). For Job these words are especially painful. His sons and daughters are already dead (1:18–19). There are no sons left to rise or fall.
• "He feels only the pain of his own body, and he mourns only for himself" (v22). The chapter ends in the bleakest possible place. It may describe a dying man so wrapped in pain he can think of nothing else, or the dead in Sheol, aware only of their own decay. The Tyndale notes take the second view: Job no longer sees Sheol as the rest he longed for in 3:17–19. They add that the Old Testament usually speaks of the dead as unfeeling, while the New Testament says more plainly that the wicked dead suffer (Luke 16:23). The poem that reached up in v14 ends in the dust.
• The shape of the chapter. The poem climbs from despair (vv1–12) to a peak of hope (vv13–17) and falls back (vv18–22). The same pattern runs on through the book: a flash of hope here, a stronger one in 16:19 ("my witness is in heaven") and the strongest in 19:25. And at the end God does call and Job answers (38:1; 42:1–6), though not as he imagined here.
• Commentators: Matthew Henry takes the chapter as Job turning from arguing with his friends to reflecting on human frailty before God. On v4 he writes that our corruption is "bred in the bone" and that clean children can no more come from unclean parents than "pure streams from an impure spring." On v14 he takes the question as a resolve to prepare for death, since "it is but once to die, and that had need be well done that is to be done but once," and he calls the grave "not only a resting-place, but a hiding-place, to the people of God." On v17 he reads the sealed bag differently from the others. To him it is the way God seals up "against the day of wrath, the transgression of the impenitent," not forgiveness. And against the despair of vv18–19 he sets the Christian answer: hope in Christ "death will consummate and not destroy." JFB calls v4 "a plea in mitigation" and adds that "the doctrine of original sin was held from the first." On v12 it insists that Job means only "no hope of living again in the present order of the world," and on v15 it says plainly that the calling happens "at the resurrection," citing John 5:28. On v22 it makes the point that Scripture "rests the hope of a future life, not on the inherent immortality of the soul," but on the body being raised. JFB has no comment on v8, only cross-references on vv2 and 5, and nothing on the hired hand of v6 beyond a link to 7:1. Guzik sees Job swinging back and forth, despair in vv7–12 and vv18–22 and confident hope in vv13–17, and passes on Francis Andersen's suggestion that the middle of a poem may hold the author's real conviction. Guzik is blunter than Henry. He says Job's words about the afterlife accurately record what Job believed, not what is true, and must be weighed by the rest of Scripture, as God later corrects Job (38:2, 17). He ties Job's "change" to the promise that believers will be changed (1 Cor 15:51–53; Phil 3:21). Henry and JFB see a firmer faith in resurrection behind v14 than the Tyndale notes and Guzik do. All agree that Job's question is fully answered only in the gospel.

Pointing to Christ

Job asked the question every grave asks: "If a man dies, shall he live again?" (v14). The Old Testament leaves it open. Jesus answers it: "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live" (John 11:25). Job pictured God calling and the dead man answering (v15), and Jesus says, "an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out" (John 5:28–29). Job envied a cut-down tree that could sprout again, and Isaiah promised that from David's cut-down family tree "there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse" (Isa 11:1). Christ is that shoot, cut down in death and risen as "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:20). Job longed for the day of his "renewal," and Paul says, "we shall all be changed" (1 Cor 15:51). Job longed for his sins to be sealed up and covered (v17), and in Christ God has done exactly that, not by overlooking them but by bearing them. Christ "abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel" (2 Tim 1:10). What Job glimpsed through the dark, believers now hold in the open.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik highlights vv.13-15 as one of the most remarkable moments in the book: Job reaches toward resurrection hope centuries before it is clearly revealed. His vision is incomplete — it flickers and fades — but it is genuine. The idea that God would "hide" him in Sheol until wrath passes and then "remember" him anticipates the full biblical revelation of bodily resurrection. Guzik notes that Job's oscillation between hope and despair is realistic: even mature faith alternates between confidence and darkness.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• BibleProject: bibleproject.com On the whole book: the speech from the whirlwind, and why it answers Job the way it does.
• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of Job -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

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Reflection

• Living With Urgency (v.1) — Job names human life as brief and full of trouble, a stark reminder that our days are numbered and not to be wasted. Does the shortness of life move you to prioritize what actually matters, or do you still live as if you have unlimited time?
• A Tree Has More Hope Than a Man (vv.7-10) — Job observes that a felled tree can sprout again at the scent of water, but a man who dies simply doesn't rise the same way, leaving humanity's fate looking bleaker than a plant's. When death or loss feels final, where do you look for hope that a tree cannot offer?
• A Flicker of Resurrection Hope (vv.13-15) — Job wonders aloud whether a man could live again after death, imagining God hiding him away until wrath passes and then calling him back. Do you let yourself hope for what God has promised even when the fulfillment still feels distant?
• Hope Collapsing Under Mortality (v.19) — Job's momentary hope gives way again to despair as he watches mountains erode and stones wear away, concluding that God wears down even human hope itself. When hope fades in a hard season, can you keep bringing your honest discouragement back to God rather than hiding it?