Biblion Bible Commentary
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Job: One Dies in Full Strength
Job 21:17-34
17 “How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out, that their calamity comes on them, that God distributes sorrows in his anger? · WEB
Two men die, one comfortable and one bitter, and the dust makes no distinction between them.
The rebuttal is put as a measurement question, which is the only fair way to test a rule about how often things happen. How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? Job 21:17.
Bildad had promised that the light of the wicked would go out Job 18:5. Job does not deny that it ever happens. He asks for the rate, and the friends have never counted.
He then takes up the standard evasion, which is to move the punishment to the next generation. You say, 'God lays up his iniquity for his children' Job 21:19. His answer is exact: let the man be repaid himself, that he may know it. A penalty a man does not live to feel is not a penalty he experienced, and what does he care for his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off? Job 21:21.
The principle behind that objection is one Scripture states directly elsewhere — every man dies for his own sin Deuteronomy 24:16 Ezekiel 18:20 — and it is the ground on which Bildad's explanation of the ten dead children Job 8:4 falls apart.
Then the two portraits, set side by side in four verses, and they are the most economical thing in the poem.
One man dies in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet, his pails full of milk, the marrow of his bones moist Job 21:23–24. Another dies in bitterness of soul, and never tastes of good Job 21:25.
No moral information is given about either. That is the point: from the outside, and from the way they die, you cannot tell which was which.
And the last line closes the argument. They lie down alike in the dust. The worm covers them Job 21:26.
The grave takes both without distinction. Job has said this before, when he described the place where the small and the great are together and the servant is free from his master Job 3:19, and there it was a comfort. Here it is evidence: if the ledger is settled in this life, the settlement is invisible, and the friends are reading a page that is blank.
He finishes by naming what they will say next — where is the house of the prince? Job 21:28 — and sending them to ask travelers, people who have been somewhere and seen other cases Job 21:29. The wicked man is borne to the grave with a watch kept over his tomb and the clods of the valley lying sweet on him Job 21:32–33. He gets a good funeral.
So how can you comfort me with nonsense, because in your answers there remains only falsehood? Job 21:34. The second cycle ends there, and nobody has anything left.
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