Job 21:4-18

4 Is my complaint against a man? Then why should I not be impatient?

5 Look at me and be appalled; put your hand over your mouth.

6 When I remember, terror takes hold, and my body trembles in horror.

7 Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?

8 Their descendants are established around them, and their offspring before their eyes.

9 Their homes are safe from fear; no rod of punishment from God is upon them.

10 Their bulls breed without fail; their cows bear calves and do not miscarry.

11 They send forth their little ones like a flock; their children skip about,

12 singing to the tambourine and lyre and making merry at the sound of the flute.

13 They spend their days in prosperity and go down to Sheol in peace. ^[a]

14 Yet they say to God: ‘Leave us alone! For we have no desire to know Your ways.

15 Who is the Almighty, that we should serve Him, and what would we gain if we pray to Him?’

16 Still, their prosperity is not in their own hands, so I stay far from the counsel of the wicked.

17 How often is the lamp of the wicked put out? Does disaster come upon them? Does God, in His anger, apportion destruction?

18 Are they like straw before the wind, like chaff swept away by a storm?

Job 21:4-18 Meaning and Commentary

INTRODUCTION TO JOB 21

This chapter contains Job's reply to Zophar's preceding discourse, in which, after a preface exciting attention to what he was about to say, Job 21:1-6; he describes by various instances the prosperity of wicked men, even of the most impious and atheistical, and which continues with them as long as they live, contrary to what Zophar had asserted in Job 20:5, Job 21:7-15; as for himself, he disapproved of such wicked men as much as any, and owns that destruction comes upon them sooner or later, and on their posterity also, Job 21:16-21; but as God is a God of knowledge, and needs no instruction from any, and is a sovereign Being, he deals with men in different ways; some die in great ease, and peace, and prosperity, and others in bitterness and distress, but both are alike brought to the dust, Job 21:22-26; and whereas he was aware of their censures of him, and their objections to what he had said, he allows that the wicked are reserved to the day of destruction, which is future, and in the mean while lie in the grave, where all must follow; yet they are not repaid or rewarded in this life, that remains to be done in another world, Job 21:27-33; and concludes, that their consolation with respect to him was vain, and falsehood was in their answers, Job 21:34.

Footnotes

• [a] Or in an instant