Biblion Bible Commentary
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Zophar: The Triumphing of the Wicked Is Short
Job 20:1-29
1 Then Zophar the Naamathite answered, · WEB
The last speech Zophar ever makes is one sustained image of swallowed wealth vomited up, and it settles nothing.
Zophar admits at the outset that he is speaking out of injury. I have heard the reproof which puts me to shame Job 20:3. What follows is an answer to being embarrassed.
His thesis is old and he says so: don't you know this from old time, since man was placed on earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short? Job 20:4–5. Again the authority is antiquity, and again the claim is one Job is about to test against what everyone can see.
The governing image is eating, and it is developed with real skill. Wickedness is sweet in his mouth, hidden under his tongue, kept there because he will not let it go Job 20:12–13. Then the digestion turns: the food in his bowels is cobra venom within him, and he has swallowed down riches, and he will vomit them up again Job 20:15.
It is a picture of gain that cannot be kept down. The man does not lose his wealth to a thief; his own body rejects it. And the last stroke is that God does the expelling: God will cast them out of his belly.
One verse in the middle gives the moral content of the charge, and it is the only concrete accusation the friends ever make. He has oppressed and forsaken the poor. He has violently taken away a house, and he will not build it up Job 20:19.
That is the sin Zophar has in mind, and Job will answer it in his own words later, at length, when he swears to what he actually did with the poor, the widow and the fatherless Job 31:16–22. Neither man says the name, and both know who is meant.
The ending gathers the disasters. An arrow through the body, terrors, and an unfanned fire will devour him. It will consume that which is left in his tent Job 20:26.
A fire nobody lit, burning what is left in the tent. Fire fell from the sky on Job's flocks in chapter 1 and a wind took the house where his children were eating. Zophar has reached for the two images that fit the case in front of him most exactly, and calls them the portion of a wicked man from God Job 20:29.
This is the last time he speaks. When the third round comes, Eliphaz will manage a full speech and Bildad six verses, and Zophar will not answer at all. The system has one more elaboration in it and no more arguments, and this is it.
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