Job 27:15

15 A plague will kill those who are left alive. The widows of sinful men won't even sob over their own children.

Job 27:15 Meaning and Commentary

Job 27:15

Those that remain of him
Of the wicked man after his death; or such that remain, and have escaped the sword and famine:

shall be buried in death:
the pestilence, emphatically called death by the Hebrews, as by us the mortality, see ( Revelation 6:8 ) . This is another of God's sore public judgments wicked men, and is such a kind of death, by reason of the contagion of it, that a person is buried as soon as dead almost, being infectious to keep him; and so Mr. Broughton translates the words,

``his remnant shall be buried as soon as they are dead;''

or the disease of which such die being so very infectious sometimes, no one dares to bury them for fear of catching it, and so they lie unburied; which some take to be the sense of the phrase, either that they shall be hurried away to the grave, and so not be embalmed and lie in state, and have an honourable and pompous funeral, or that they shall have none at all, their death will be all the burial they shall have: or else the sense is, they shall die such a death as that death shall be their grave; and they shall have no other, as the men of the old world that were drowned in the flood, ( Genesis 7:23 ) ; and Pharaoh and his host in the Red sea, ( Exodus 15:4 ) ( Psalms 136:15 ) ; and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who were swallowed up in the earth, ( Numbers 16:27 Numbers 16:31 Numbers 16:32 ) ; and such as are devoured by wild beasts; and if this last could be thought to be meant, we have all the four sore judgments of God in this verse and ( Job 27:14 ) , sword, famine, pestilence, and evil beasts, see ( Ezekiel 14:21 ) :

and his widows shall not weep;
leaving more than one behind him, polygamy being frequent in those times; or else these are his sons' wives, left widows by them, as Bar Tzemach thinks, they being the persons immediately spoken of, dying by various deaths before mentioned; but whether they be his widows, or theirs, they shall weep for neither of them; either because they themselves will be cut off with them; or their husbands dying shameful deaths, lamentation would be forbidden; or they would not be able to weep through the astonishment and stupor they should be seized with at their death; or having lived such miserable and uncomfortable lives with them, they should be so far from lamenting their death, that they should, as Jarchi interprets it, rejoice at it; the Septuagint version is,

``no one shall have mercy on their widows.''

Job 27:15 In-Context

13 "Here's what God does to sinful people. Here's what those who are mean receive from the Mighty One.

14 All of their children will be killed with swords. They'll never have enough to eat.

15 A plague will kill those who are left alive. The widows of sinful men won't even sob over their own children.

16 Sinners might store up silver like dust and clothes like piles of clay.

17 But people who do what is right will wear those clothes. People who haven't done anything wrong will divide up that silver.