Job — Chapter 16

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: The second round of speeches has begun. Eliphaz, the oldest and gentlest of Job's three friends, has just spoken again (ch 15), and this time he is not gentle. He called Job's words "windy knowledge" (15:2), said Job was "doing away with the fear of God" (15:4), and told him, "your own lips testify against you" (15:6). He asked, "Are the comforts of God too small for you?" (15:11), meaning the friends' own counsel, and then gave a long portrait of the wicked man who lives in terror and ends in ruin (15:20–35). Every line of it was aimed at Job. Now Job answers, in a speech that runs through chapter 17. In chapter 16 he turns first on his "miserable comforters" (vv1–5), then pours out the most violent description in the book of how God seems to be treating him (vv6–17), and finally, at his lowest point, makes one of the great leaps of faith in the Old Testament: "my witness is in heaven" (vv18–22). The chapter moves from protest, to agony, to hope. The hope is small and fragile, but it is real.

Job Replies: Miserable Comforters Are You All (vv1–22)

• "I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all" (v2). Eliphaz said nothing new. He only said it louder. "Miserable comforters" is literally "comforters of trouble." The Hebrew word for "miserable" is 'amal, which the lexicon defines as trouble, toil or sorrow. It is the same word Eliphaz had just used to end his speech, when he said the godless "conceive trouble and give birth to evil" (15:35). Job picks up the word and turns it around. Eliphaz says the wicked produce 'amal. Job says the friends who came to comfort him produce nothing else. The friends had come to "show him sympathy and comfort him" (2:11). Their comfort has become one more burden.
• "Shall windy words have an end?" (v3). Another word thrown back. Eliphaz called Job's speech "windy knowledge" (15:2). Job says the friends are the ones full of wind. Both sides now accuse each other of hot air, and the debate has become a quarrel.
• "I also could speak as you do, if you were in my place" (v4). Job asks his friends to imagine trading places. If they were sitting in the ashes and he were the healthy one, he could easily string clever speeches together against them. "Shake my head at you" was a gesture of scorn or horror. The Tyndale notes trace it through Scripture, from the enemies who mock the sufferer in Psalm 22:7 to the passersby at the cross who were "wagging their heads" (Matt 27:39). Job knows what it is to be on the receiving end of that gesture.
• "I could strengthen you with my mouth" (v5). This is the turn. Job says that if he were in their place, he would not do what they are doing. He would use his words to strengthen them, and "the solace of my lips" would ease their pain. This fits what Eliphaz himself said of Job in better days: "your words have upheld him who was stumbling" (4:4). Job knows what real comfort sounds like, because he used to give it. JFB hears bitter irony in vv4–5, as if Job means he too could offer empty "comfort." The ESV reads it straight: Job would have done better by them than they have done by him.
• "If I speak, my pain is not assuaged" (v6). Job turns from his friends to his pain. Talking doesn't help, and neither does silence. Deep grief often feels like this.
• "Surely now God has worn me out; he has made desolate all my company" (v7). The Tyndale notes take "company" as Job's household, family and servants, nearly all swept away in chapter 1 (1:15–19). JFB suggests a sharper reading: the people who could have vouched for Job's innocence, now removed.
• "He has shriveled me up, which is a witness against me" (v8). This picks up Eliphaz's legal language. Eliphaz said Job's own lips "testify against" him (15:6). Job says his own body does. His wasted frame and his "leanness" stand up in court like a witness and point at him. In a world where everyone assumed disease was a judgment, Job's skin-and-bones body was the evidence that convicted him in his friends' eyes. JFB puts it well: his wretched state of body is "another 'witness'" that rises against him. The word "witness" comes back in v19, and there it means something very different.
• "He has torn me in his wrath and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me" (v9). Job now pictures God as a wild animal tearing its prey. He had used this picture before: "you hunt me like a lion" (10:16). His "adversary" glares at him, eyes narrowed like a blade. Who is this adversary? Matthew Henry lists three options: Eliphaz, Satan, or God. Guzik notes that some think it is Satan, which would fit chapters 1–2, but answers that v11 names God plainly, and Job never knows about Satan's role. Most readers take the whole passage as Job's description of God, as it seems to him. JFB adds a careful note that Job would not, in calmer moments, truly ascribe "hatred" to God. This is the language of agony, not of a settled theology.
• "Men have gaped at me with their mouth; they have struck me insolently on the cheek" (v10). Now people join in. "Gaped" means opening the mouth wide in mockery. JFB says it is "not in order to devour, but to mock him." A slap on the cheek in the ancient world was more insult than injury, a public act of contempt (1 Kgs 22:24; Lam 3:30). The Tyndale notes connect it with Micah 5:1, where the ruler of Israel is struck "on the cheek," and with Isaiah 50:6, where the servant of the LORD gives his cheeks to those who pull out the beard. "They mass themselves together against me" pictures a crowd closing in.
• "God gives me up to the ungodly" (v11). Job sees God's hand behind the human cruelty. The reader knows from chapters 1–2 that God permitted Satan to strike Job, but Job and his friends never see that scene.
• "I was at ease, and he broke me apart" (v12). His settled life shattered in a single day. The pictures pile up. "He seized me by the neck" may be a wild animal again, but the Tyndale notes think it is more likely a military image of a defeated enemy grabbed by the neck (Gen 49:8). "He set me up as his target" brings in the archer (compare 6:4).
• "He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare" (v13). The kidneys and gall stand for the vital inner organs. Job feels mortally wounded. JFB suggests God's "archers" include the three friends, "whose words wound like sharp arrows."
• "He breaks me with breach upon breach; he runs upon me like a warrior" (v14). Now Job is a city wall, and God is the attacking army. Each assault punches a new hole, a "breach," and through each one the warrior charges. The Tyndale notes observe the bitter twist. Scripture celebrates God as a warrior who fights for his people (Exod 15:3; Ps 24:8). Job feels that the divine Warrior has turned on him, as though Job were the enemy.
• "I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin" (v15). Sackcloth was a coarse, scratchy cloth, usually of goat hair, worn in mourning. "Sewed" suggests it is stitched on, close-fitting and not coming off. JFB notes the word denotes "the tight fit of the mourning garment." The Tyndale notes add that since Job insists he is innocent, this is grief, not repentance. Like Jacob mourning for Joseph, Job refuses to be comforted (Gen 37:34–35).
• "And have laid my strength in the dust" (v15). The word translated "strength" is literally "horn." In Scripture a horn stands for strength and dignity, like the horns of a strong animal (1 Sam 2:1; Ps 75:10). Job has buried his horn in the dust. His standing, honor and power are gone. Henry draws a lesson from it: "Better lay the horn in the dust than lift it up in contradiction to the designs of Providence."
• "On my eyelids is deep darkness" (v16). "Deep darkness" is the word used for death's shadow elsewhere in Job (3:5; 10:21). Death seems already to have settled on his face.
• "Although there is no violence in my hands, and my prayer is pure" (v17). This one line is the reason for all of Job's anguish. If he were guilty, the suffering would at least make sense. "Violence" is chamas, a strong word. The lexicon gives its range as violence and wrong, including the cruel, ruthless wickedness that filled the earth before the flood (Gen 6:11, 13). Job is not claiming sinless perfection. He is saying he is not the kind of violent, wicked man Eliphaz has just described (15:20–35). And "my prayer is pure" answers Eliphaz's charge that Job was "hindering meditation before God" (15:4). The Tyndale notes add that if God is attacking Job like a warrior (vv12–14), Job may be saying, "I am no violent man who needs to be attacked." The words echo those said of the suffering servant in Isaiah: "he had done no violence" (Isa 53:9). The lexicon lists the same word there.
• "O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place" (v18). Job now expects to die. In the ancient world, the blood of a murdered person was thought to cry out from the ground for justice until it was avenged. The first murder set the pattern: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground" (Gen 4:10). Covering blood with earth hid the crime (Ezek 24:7–8; Isa 26:21). Job asks the earth to leave his blood uncovered, so that his cry keeps sounding even after he is dead, and his innocence is never hidden.- "Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he who testifies for me is on high" (v19). This is the high point of the chapter. In v8 Job's shriveled body was a "witness against" him. Here he has a witness for him. "Witness" is the ordinary Hebrew 'ed. "He who testifies for me" is a rarer word, sahed. The lexicon notes that it is borrowed from Aramaic and found only here in the Old Testament. It is the same root Laban uses when he names the heap of stones "Jegar-sahadutha," "heap of witness" (Gen 31:47). His friends will not speak for him, and death is coming, but he is sure someone in heaven knows the truth. "Even now" matters: not one day, but now, in the ashes.
• Who is the witness in heaven? (v19). Faithful readers have answered in three main ways. First, many take the witness to be God himself. Job appeals from God as he seems to be, the warrior attacking him, to God as he truly is, the righteous Judge who knows Job's heart. JFB reads it this way: "God in heaven is sensible of my innocence." So does Matthew Henry, who writes, "This one witness is instead of a thousand." The cross-references support this sense, since the verses usually read alongside it are oaths calling God as witness (1 Sam 12:5; Rom 1:9; 2 Cor 1:23). Second, some scholars think Job means a heavenly figure distinct from God, a kind of advocate in the heavenly court. They point to Job's earlier longing for an "arbiter" to stand between him and God (9:33), and to Elihu's later talk of "a mediator, one of the thousand" (33:23). Third, many Christian readers, while granting that Job did not see clearly, hear in his words a longing that is answered in Christ, the advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1). The Tyndale notes link the verse both to Job 9:33 and 19:25 and to Jesus' promise of the Helper (John 14:16) and to 1 John 2:1. These readings don't have to compete. Job is reaching past the God he cannot understand to a God he can still trust. Christians believe that in Christ God has become exactly that kind of witness.
• "My friends scorn me; my eye pours out tears to God" (v20). The contrast is stark. His friends mock; his tears go to God. The word for "scorn" (luts) is interesting. The lexicon gives it as "deride" in this verse, but the same form elsewhere means an "interpreter" or go-between. Joseph's brothers spoke to him through an "interpreter" (Gen 42:23), and Elihu's "mediator" in 33:23 is the same word. Because of this, a few modern translations read the line, "My intercessor is my friend." The ESV's "my friends scorn me" is the more common reading and is the one the lexicon gives for this verse. Either way, the friends who should have pleaded his case have failed him, and he turns to heaven.
• "That he would argue the case of a man with God" (v21). "Argue the case" is yakach, a courtroom word. The lexicon gives its meaning here as "decide" or "judge," and elsewhere as "prove" or "set right." It is the same verb Job used in 9:33 when he wished for an arbiter who might "lay his hand on us both." Job wants someone to stand in the gap and plead for him before God, the way one person speaks up for a neighbor in the village court. The strange thing is that he asks God to do this, to plead with God. Job is holding together two things he cannot yet reconcile: God seems to be his enemy, and God is his only hope.
• "As a son of man does with his neighbor" (v21). "Son of man" here is the ordinary Hebrew way of saying "a human being" (as in Ps 8:4), and the ESV prints it in lower case. JFB says the Hebrew is literally "the Son of man" and sees the verse as "a prefiguring of the advocacy of Jesus Christ." The words are the same as the phrase, but the Hebrew has no "the," and the grammar does not require a title. Matthew Henry is more careful. He says "some give a gospel sense of this verse, and the original will very well bear it," and goes on to apply it to Christ. Both readings can be held honestly. Job meant a human picture of pleading, and Christians see that picture fulfilled in the one who really is both God and man.
• "For when a few years have come I shall go the way from which I shall not return" (v22). Job expects to die soon, before he is cleared. "A few years" is literally "years of number," that is, years one can count, as JFB explains. "The way from which I shall not return" is death (compare 10:21). This is why the witness in heaven matters so much: if Job is not cleared in this life, he needs someone to keep speaking for him after he is gone.
• Commentators: Matthew Henry says of the friends, "The patient's case is sad indeed when his medicines are poisons," and urges, "Whatever our brethren's sorrows are, we ought by sympathy to make them our own." On vv6–16 he adds that "nothing can be more grievous to a good man than to apprehend God to be his enemy." He sees Job as a picture of Jesus: "Herein Job was a type of Christ, as many of the ancients make him," struck on the cheek (Matt 26:67) and handed over to wicked men (Acts 2:23). Guzik agrees that Job pictures Christ, the righteous sufferer struck and mocked, and passes on the old Puritan John Trapp's view that the striking in v10 was fulfilled at Jesus' trial. Guzik also notes, following Elmer Smick, that Job's "miserable" (v2) repeats Eliphaz's word for "trouble" in 15:35. The lexicon confirms it is the same word, 'amal. On v19 Guzik does not name the witness. He takes it, with G. Campbell Morgan, as Job's faith that God knows the truth. On v21 he connects Job's longing with Christ as the "one mediator" (1 Tim 2:5) and "advocate" (1 John 2:1). JFB reads Job's blood as "my undeserved suffering" (v18), and on v21 JFB adds that in the end "Job himself (Job 42:8) pleaded as intercessor for his 'friends.'" JFB gives only a cross-reference on v2 and has no comment on vv1 and 17. JFB's claim that v21 says "literally, 'the Son of man'" goes beyond the Hebrew, which has no definite article, as noted above.

Pointing to Christ

Job longed for a witness in heaven and for someone to "argue the case of a man with God." The New Testament says that longing has been answered. "There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim 2:5), and "if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1). He "always lives to make intercession" for those who come to God through him (Heb 7:25). But Job 16 points to Christ in a second way, too. Job is the innocent sufferer, with "no violence" in his hands, mocked by those around him, struck on the cheek, and handed over to the wicked. Jesus went further down that same road. He "had done no violence" (Isa 53:9). Men wagged their heads at him and struck him (Matt 26:67; 27:39). He was "delivered up according to the definite plan" of God into "the hands of lawless men" (Acts 2:23). His blood, like Abel's, cried out from the ground, yet it "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (Heb 12:24). It does not cry for vengeance but for mercy. The one Job hoped would plead for him is the one who suffered as Job did, and more, so that he could.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik traces the development of Job's mediator-theology across the book: arbiter/daysman (9:33), witness in heaven (16:19), redeemer (19:25). Each iteration is more personal, more confident. Job is groping toward a full theology of heavenly intercession — which is only fully revealed in Christ. Guzik also notes the remarkable juxtaposition: Job describes God as his attacker (vv.7-14) and his witness (v.19) simultaneously. He appeals to God against God — the ultimate act of faith.
• 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

• What Real Comfort Looks Like (v.5) — Job tells his friends that if their roles were reversed, he would use his words to strengthen them rather than accuse them. Does your presence with someone who is suffering tend to strengthen them or add to their burden?
• Naming God as Attacker Honestly (vv.7-14) — Job describes God's action against him in violent, unflinching terms, refusing to soften or explain away how the pain actually feels. Are you willing to tell God exactly how His actions or His silence feel to you, rather than presenting Him a cleaned-up version of your heart?
• Appealing to God Against God (v.19) — In the same breath that Job describes God as his attacker, he declares that his witness is in heaven, trusting the very God who wounds him to also vindicate him. When God feels like the source of your pain, can you still bring your case to Him rather than turning away?
• Tears as a Form of Prayer (v.20) — Job says his eyes pour out tears to God, treating weeping itself as communication with heaven. Do you let your tears be a prayer, or do you feel you need words before God will listen?