Job 24:1-12

TEXT 24:1-12

24 Why are times not laid up by the Almighty?

And why do not they that know him see his days?

2 There are that remove the landmarks;

They violently take away flocks, and feed them.

3 They drive away the ass of the fatherless;

They take the widow's ox for a pledge.

4 They torn the needy out of the way:

The poor of the earth all hide themselves.

5 Behold, as wild asses in the desert

They go forth to their work seeking diligently for food;
The wilderness yieldeth them bread for their children.

6 They cut their provender in the field;

And they glean the vintage of the wicked.

7 They lie all night naked without clothing,

And have no covering in the cold.

8 They are wet with the showers of the mountains,

And embrace the rock for want of a shelter.

9 There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast,

And take a pledge of the poor;

10 So that they go about naked without clothing,

And being hungry they carry the sheaves.

11 They make oil within the walls of these men;

They tread their winepresses, and suffer thirst.

12 From out of the populous city men groan,

And the soul of the wounded crieth out:
Yet God regardeth not the folly.

COMMENT 24:1-12

Job 24:1Job's reply continues. As in chapter 21, he moves from his specific experience to man's experience in general. He describes the oppression of wicked, unscrupulous princes and the resultant misery of the poor enslaved by the burdens engendered by poverty. This section of Job's speech is a negative parallel to Job 21:7-17. There God did not punish the impious; here He does not recover the poor from oppression. These two emphases are fundamental in the Old Testament doctrine of God, i.e., that He will judge the wicked and liberate the oppressed. Where is the evidence for God's righteous providence in His dealings with man? Job here reflects upon the cosmic dimensions of human misery. Why are the times of judgment (not in the textadded in R. S. V.) for wicked not evident?Job 18:21; Psalms 36:11.

Job 24:2The LXX adds the subject, the wicked, to line one and renders as the wicked remove the landmarks. The Law strictly condemns such actionDeuteronomy 19:14; Proverbs 22:28; Proverbs 23:10; and Hosea 5:10. The powerful wicked not only remove the boundary stones but also seize the flocks of their weaker neighbors, and openly pasture them on stolen land. The images here are crystal clear; the powerful aggressively dispossess the weak, and nothing is done about it. Does God know about this? Does He have any compassion at all?

Job 24:3The defenseless orphans and widows are reduced to abject poverty. Members of these classes had only one animal, and thus they would be rendered without any means of support after their ass or ox was plundered. The wicked publicly flaunt the helpless. Even the Babylonians imposed fines on a person who takes the ox of one in distress (The Code of Hammurabi, No. 241)2 Samuel 12:4; Deuteronomy 24:17; and Exodus 22:26. All pledges from the poor were to be returned if they were necessary for livelihood. Job asks God what He does about the behavior of such calloused men. Their heinous crimes against the poor must be judged if we dwell in a moral universe.

Job 24:4The poor are deprived of their rightsAmos 4:1. The poor, once deprived, have no place to turn. This is suggested in the Hebrew text as it has are hidden together. The normal sense of the reflective form means that they hide themselves, which makes perfectly good sense here.

Job 24:5Hopelessly oppressed, the poor have been destroyed by extortion and diabolical degradation. Even Plato in his Laws and The Republic held that only the elite minority had a claim to human rights and privileges. Our own American history has its own record of depriving thousands, sometimes millions, of their rights, originally from God as beings in His image.

Job 24:6The poor subsist on the type of food used to feed animals. What a precious livelihood. They gather their fodder (A. V. provender), and the shift from plural to singular means each one gathers his own. The A. V. renders an uncertain word glean. Gleaning was an authorized occupation of the poor. If the reaping found in line one is that of a hired laborer, then the parallel would necessitate that the gathering of grapes would be done by those being paid for the work. Often, the rich are adjudged to be wicked, and sometimes they are!

Job 24:7The abject poverty of those described in this verse leaves them without clothing in the cold night wind. Misery begets miseryno food, no clothing, no shelter from the cold. Here Job starkly contrasts the poor and the wicked richJob 24:2-4. Job's agonizing description continues; his heartbreaking picture of human privation versus privilege is further enlarged.

Job 24:8The poor embrace the rocks in the mountains since they have no other shelter. They cling (Genesis 29:13) to the security afforded by the rocks. Hardly a more devastating picture could be sketched to reveal their exposure and wretchedness. Their dearest friends are the rocks.

Job 24:9In transition, the imagery takes us from one exploited group to another. The verse presents a problem to many commentators (egs. Kissane, Gray, Dhorme, Pope, et al), but does it necessarily interrupt the account of the poor as is alleged? Job has thus far described the meagre possession of the poor, the humiliating circumstances under which scavengers reek out a minimal subsistence. We have toured the cities and the desert places; now we must face those in slavery. Those harsh taskmasters are heartless creditors and take a pledge from off of the poor. The Hebrew means to take something that is on the poor, i.e., their clothing, not merely something from the poor. The first line relates a cruel tyrant removing a baby from his mother's breast while she is being sold at auction. The parallel line suggests taking the clothes from their back (see Brown, Driver, Briggs).

Job 24:10This verse confirms the need to modify the weak A. V. translation and also verifies that their clothes have been removed as pledge, in that they are here described as naked. They are starving and yet must carry the sheaves of their masters.[264] Even animals were not treated like these outcastsDeuteronomy 25:4. In Israel one could not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain. Here a laborer is hungry while working in the midst of abundance. How torturing it would be to carry food, which one could not eat, when one is starving. The haves and the have nots are still with us. Though there are have nots in our own midst, the Third and Fourth Worlds are largely composed of the poor,[265] and with Job our contemporary we must ask why it occurs and how can we do anything about it?

[264] E. F. Sutcliffe, Journal Theological Studies, 1969, p. 174.

[265] This presents an enormous challenge to our Christian conscience. Neo-Marxism and various species of socialism are presently being set forth with Messianic vengeance, as though the world's problems are all caused by hedonistic capitalism. The problem is human nature, not per se our socio-politico structures. Socialism has one consistencyfailure.

Job 24:11The Hebrew text can be rendered between their rows(as R. S. V.), i.e., among the olive rows of the wicked they make oil. Dhorme rightly points out that this would be a strange place to press olives, and thus emends the text to read between the millstones. In sight of mouthwatering succulent grapes, they are panting with thirst.

Job 24:12In Job 24:12-16 Job focuses attention on violators of the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth commandments, i.e., murderers, adulterers, and thieves, who compose the city of men. From the city men cry out because of violence and social anomie.[266] Men cry out, but God pays no attention (same idiom in Job 23:6) to the moral malaise. The Hebrew term rendered folly in A. V. means tastelessnessJob 1:22or unseasoned and implies a lack of moral savor; yet God remains silent.

[266] All Christian believers must come to an understanding of this phenomenon. Since Hegel, western social theory has had no room for God's purpose as a solution to our concrete problems of violence and social anomie. Nineteenth century social thought developed from Hegel to Marx by way of Weber, Mannheim, and Durkheim, into The Sociology of Knowledge Thesis (see the critique in my previous work, Newness on The Earth, pp. 44ff) and this socially based theory of knowledge will be critically evaluated in my doctoral thesis: The Kuhn-Popper Debate - Contemporary Revolution in Knowledge Paradigms: The Relationship of Scientific Theory to Scientific Progress. From Marx's creative destruction to views of contemporary modification of classical Marxism, the neo-Marxist based Frankfort School of Social Research utilizes the Freudian psychoanalytic method as a basis of a new epistemology grounded in Interest. Every creative development in 19th-20th century Social Theory makes fundamental contribution to contemporary Violence and Anomie. All forms of PoliticoRevolutionary-Liberation Theologies (e.g., Frankfort School of Social Research represented by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et. al.) must be understood and confronted in the name of Job's redeemer.

See the following works for initial analysis and confrontation with these issues: Georges Soul Classic, Concerning Violence, many editions.

Hanah Arendt, On Violence (Penguin paperback, 1970).

John C. Bennett, ed., Christian Social Ethics in a Changing World (NY: Association Press, 1966).

Jacques Ellul, Violence (Seabury, E. T., 1969). Also, Political Illusion, Knopf, 1967. Oz Guinness, The Dust of Death (Inter-Varsity Press, 1973, chp. 5 Violence: Crisis or Catharsis?, pp. 151-191.

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (NY: Basic Books, 1963) chp. Utopia and Violence; also his The Open Society and Its Enemies (2 vols., Harper Torch).