Job 19:20-22

4. He utters a plea for pity. (Job 19:20-22)

TEXT 19:20-22

20 My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh,

And I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

21 Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my Mends;

For the hand of God hath touched me.

22 Why do ye persecute me as God,

And are not satisfied with my flesh?

COMMENT 19:20-22

Job 19:20Though the general meaning is obvious, the verse has failed to yield up its grammatical secrets to those whose very lives have been spent in studying this language. The essence isI have nothing but my bones and the skin of my teeth (Brown, Driver, Briggs understand this as gums), and I am nothing.[211] Mere survival is the only claim he can make. The verse has a certain proverbial tone about it. At least it is possible that the meaning is that suggested by Popemy flesh rots on my bones, my teeth drop from my gums. The LXX suggest that the translators had a different Hebrew text before them under my skin my flesh is corrupted; my bones are held in (my) teeth.

[211] D. R. Blumenthal, Yetus Testamentum, 1966, pp. 497ff.

Job 19:21The repetition of have pity on me is a powerful rhetorical device. The hand of God has stricken me (same verb used in Isaiah 53:4).

Job 19:22His friends are here accused of imitating God by their ceaseless hounding of Job. They are inhuman. Job is their prey. The idiom means and will not stop calumniating me. How appropriate for our age which is preoccupied with the humanization of man, without the redemptive activity of God in the world.[212]

[212] Most contemporary views of redemption are politico-economic in nature, egs. Neo-Marxism, Liberation Theology, Eastern Meditationtechniques of all varieties, etc.