Job 19:20 Commentary and Bible Study

The phrase ‘skin of my teeth’ has entered into the English language from this passage. Job was alive, but he hardly knew how he was alive. So close had he come to death and so little seemed to keep him from going over the edge that he could not imagine that his life could last much longer. He had become highly emaciated so that his bones protruded through his skin. Yet his mind was still working clearly and he was still able to express the plaintive thoughts of his heart. Appealing to his miserable state which he has described at length and with great force, Job intreats them to have pity on him. How could any fail to have pity on a man in such a condition? They were his friends, or had been in the past. Wouldn’t they soften their hearts towards him and take a gentler, more sympathetic approach? One would have thought that no one could resist such a cry. But no, there was to be no change in their hostile attack on him and they were not to be won over by sympathy. Instead they stuck adamantly to the same line, though they had little new to say in what follows. The reason for this is given in the last clause in this verse: ‘For the hand of God has struck me’. This was also their view of what was happening and they believed that to show sympathy to such a man was to resist the Lord. God had indeed struck him, they thought, and if they were to side with Job they would end up joining him in opposing the Lord. How could they agree with Job that God was treating him unjustly? Though they were right to reject this explanation, just as Job was wrong to believe it, they lacked the wisdom to come to the right explanation. They did not understand these events as Elihu did. Though he too did not know the secret communications that lay behind this assault on Job, his explanation in terms of God’s chastisement and purifying work of sanctification was completely right.‘Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?’ The weakness of Job’s argument made it impossible that the friends should accept it and agree either that God was persecuting him unfairly, or that they should desist from joining God – as they saw it – in strongly opposing him. Job has pleaded with them but has seen enough of their cruelty towards him to know that it is unlikely that they will pay any heed to his pleas, and therefore he adds this edge to his complaint even though such hard language is unlikely to win them over. They are more destructive than a wild animal, he says, for a wild animal, after it has made a kill and devoured the carcase, walks away, but these three are not satisfied to do that; they want to devour his soul as well and see him tormented in every way. It is not enough that they witness his physical misery and the total breakdown of his body; they wish to harry him out of the world and see him deprived of all hope.