Job 10:21

Job lives in the land of Uz, outside Israel and probably in Edom or Arabia. His friends hold that God always repays people in this life, so that prosperity shows his favour and suffering shows sin. Job knows he is blameless, and he finds his suffering impossible to fit into that scheme. Chapters 9 and 10 are his answer after Bildad has spoken. In Job 9 he grants that God is all-powerful, and yet he feels that power crushing him without any cause he can see. In Job 10 he turns from defending himself before his friends and speaks to God directly.

The chapter moves in steps. Job tells God that his soul is weary of his life (Job 10:1) and asks why God contends with him, when God knows, as Job says, “that I am not wicked” (Job 10:2–7). He remembers how carefully God formed him (Job 10:8–12), and then complains that the same God is now set on destroying him and afflicts him again and again (Job 10:13–17).

Our five verses close that prayer. After all he has said in Job 10:1–17, Job comes back to the place where his first lament began. In Job 3 he cursed the day of his birth. Here he puts the question to God himself, so the complaint moves from the day to the One who gave it. Then he asks for a little rest before death, and ends with the darkest picture of death in the chapter.

Prayers like this were an accepted way to pray in Israel, and the Psalms are full of them (Psalm 6 is one). In a lament a sufferer pours out grief, confusion and even anger before God and asks him to act. Job’s words belong to that kind of prayer.

Job opens with a question asked for its force more than for an answer. “Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb?” is a cry of bewilderment and protest. The verb yâtsâʼ means to go or come out, and in the form used here, to bring out. Job names God as the one who brought him out of the womb, rechem, and so he holds God answerable for his life and for everything he now suffers in it. The question follows straight on from what Job has just said. If God formed him with such care only to afflict him, why let him be born at all?

“Oh that I had given up the ghost” is the old English way of saying “breathed my last”. The verb gâvaʻ means to breathe out, to expire, and it is an ordinary word for dying. Job wishes he had died at the moment of birth, “and no eye had seen me”. The word ʻayin is the eye, and it can also mean a fountain or spring. Here it stands for any witness at all. Job wishes he had passed out of the world unseen and unknown, which would have spared him the suffering and the shame he now carries in front of everyone.

Verse 19 says the same thing twice, the second time as a picture. “I should have been as though I had not been” is the plain wish, and “I should have been carried from the womb to the grave” draws it. The womb, beṭen, is the belly and especially the womb, and the grave, qeber, is a grave, tomb or burying place. They are the two ends of every human life, and Job wishes they had touched. The verb yâbal means to flow or to bring, often of being led along in procession, and the KJV gives it as “carried”. The newborn would have been borne straight from the one to the other and spared every day of trouble that has come since.

The womb is where God forms us and knows us. “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb,” says the psalmist (Psalm 139:13). Job knows this as well as anyone, which is why his wish is so painful. He wishes away the very work of God that the psalm praises.

Job has said this before. In Job 3:11–16 he asked, “Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?” Jeremiah asked God the same question: “Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” (Jeremiah 20:14–18). The Preacher wrote, “Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 4:2–3), and a psalmist cried, “I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up” (Psalm 88:15).

Verse 20 turns from the past to the little time Job has left. “Are not my days few?” is a question that answers itself. Job is sure his life is short and running out, and his suffering makes him feel it all the more. The Psalms speak of the same brevity: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten … for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10), and “LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am” (Psalm 39:4).

Then come two commands in a row. The first, châdal, means to cease, leave off or refrain, and it asks God to stop. The second, shîyth, is a verb of very wide use that means to place, put or set, and here the KJV renders it “let me alone”. Together they ask God to lift his hand from Job for a while. Job feels that hand pressing on him without a break, and he begs for room to breathe. He made the same plea earlier: “let me alone; for my days are vanity” (Job 7:16).

The purpose is small: “that I may take comfort a little”. The verb bâlag means to brighten up, to recover a little strength and composure, and mᵉʻaṭ is “a little”, a short while. Job asks for a breathing space before the end, a moment of ease, and that is all. He asks for a brief reprieve before death, and healing and restoration are beyond what he dares to ask. The smallness of the request shows how great the suffering is.

Other sufferers have prayed for the same relief. “Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed” (Psalm 6:2). In Lamentations the writer remembers “mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall”, and goes on, “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope” (Lamentations 3:19–21).

Job wants his small comfort “Before I go whence I shall not return”. The verb yâlak means to walk or go, literally or figuratively, and shûwb means to turn back or return. Death is a journey with one direction, and Job speaks of it with the resignation of a man who expects his suffering to end only when he dies. He has said it before: “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more” (Job 7:6–10).

He calls the destination “the land of darkness and the shadow of death”. The word chôshek is darkness, the absence of light, and it is used figuratively for misery, sorrow and death. In Scripture light goes with life and the presence of God, and darkness goes with death. The word tsalmâveth, “the shadow of death”, is made from the words for shade and death, “the shade of death”, and it is also used for the deepest darkness, a gloom that carries the dread of death and danger. It is the same phrase as in Psalm 23:4.

Verse 22 heaps up the picture. “A land of darkness, as darkness itself” uses repetition as a superlative: darkness as thick as darkness can be. The word ʼôphel, darkness or gloom, often linked with calamity, suffering and death, is the word in “as darkness itself” and again in “the light is as darkness”. The shadow of death comes back, and then a phrase found here: “without any order”. The noun çeder means arrangement or order, and Job says this land lacks it entirely. In Genesis 1 God set light and darkness, day and night, each in its place. Job pictures the grave as a place where all that arrangement is gone, and his own life feels just as disordered, full of suffering that defies every reason he can find.

The last clause turns the picture inside out: “where the light is as darkness”. Behind “the light is” stands the verb yâphaʻ, to shine. In this land whatever shines is like darkness, and the line between light and dark has collapsed. Job has already said that however he washed himself, God would plunge him in the ditch (Job 9:30–31). Now he describes a place where light itself fails. A psalm says the opposite of God’s own presence: “For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9).

The Son of God was brought forth into the world himself. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”, who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” and “was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:3–5). On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), so God himself knows the pain of feeling abandoned. He suffered without sin of his own, as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and his suffering redeems. Job wished that “no eye had seen” him. In Christ God answers that wish with his own loving gaze. He sees his people, suffers with them and redeems them.

Job saw a road that runs one way into darkness. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25–26). He “hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). Christ is risen, “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20), and for the believer to be “absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). The man who said “whence I shall not return” is answered by a Saviour who goes to prepare a place and says, “I will come again, and receive you unto myself” (John 14:2–3). In the end “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).

Job’s land where the light is as darkness has its answer too. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). In the holy city “the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (Revelation 21:23), “there shall be no night there” (Revelation 22:5), and God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4). The place Job pictured as darkness without order is overcome by the perfect order and light of God.

The little comfort Job begged for is given in full. Jesus says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He sent “the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost” (John 14:26), the Spirit of truth who “will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13), and by faith “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Job asked for a moment’s peace, and in Christ we receive everlasting peace with God.

Job shows us that faith and anguish can live in the same heart. A righteous man can come to the point where life feels like a burden too heavy to carry, and he can say so to God. God put these verses in his word, so you can bring your rawest questions to him, even your complaints, knowing that he hears them. Faith often looks like Job’s wrestling: holding on to God in the dark and speaking to him while his ways are hard to understand.

These verses also shape how we treat those who suffer. Job’s friends came with ready answers. What a suffering person needs is someone who listens without judgment, stays with them and offers compassion before explanations. When someone says what Job says here, take it as a cry for help, and help them find it.

And Job’s few days are ours as well. Our days are short, and the comfort Job could ask for only “a little” is offered to us in full in Christ, who went into the shadow of death and came out of it alive.