Job 19
About JobWritten by AI
Job is a long poem framed by a short story. A good man loses his wealth, his children, and his health, and no one tells him why. The writer and the date are unknown: the story is set in the age of the patriarchs, but the book may have been written much later, and Christians hold different views on when. Some Jewish tradition credits Moses.
After two prose chapters, Job and three friends trade speeches in rounds. The friends insist suffering must be punishment for sin; Job insists he is innocent and pleads for God to answer him. A younger man, Elihu, speaks next. Then the LORD Himself answers out of the whirlwind, and the story closes in prose.
Read the friends with care. They say many true things about God, but they apply them wrongly, and at the end God says they have not spoken of Him accurately as Job has (42:7). Watch for Job's flashes of hope in the dark: “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Before you read Job 19Written by AI
Job feels wronged by God and abandoned by everyone: relatives, guests, servants, even his wife. He begs his friends for pity. Then comes one of the great statements of faith in the Bible: he knows his Redeemer lives, and that he will see God with his own eyes. Christians have long heard Christ in these words.
Job: My Redeemer Lives
Then Job answered:
“How long will you torment me
and crush me with your words?
Ten times now you have reproached me;
you shamelessly mistreat me.
Even if I have truly gone astray,
my error concerns me alone.
If indeed you would exalt yourselves above me
and use my disgrace against me,
then understand that it is God who has wronged me
and drawn His net around me.
Though I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I get no response;
though I call for help, there is no justice.
He has blocked my way so I cannot pass;
He has veiled my paths with darkness.
He has stripped me of my honor
and removed the crown from my head.
He tears me down on every side until I am gone;
He uproots my hope like a tree.
His anger burns against me,
and He counts me among His enemies.
His troops advance together;
they construct a ramp against me
and encamp around my tent.
He has removed my brothers from me;
my acquaintances have abandoned me.
My kinsmen have failed me,
and my friends have forgotten me.
My guests and maidservants count me as a stranger;
I am a foreigner in their sight.
I call for my servant, but he does not answer,
though I implore him with my own mouth.
My breath is repulsive to my wife,
and I am loathsome to my own family.
Even little boys scorn me;
when I appear, they deride me.
All my best friends despise me,
and those I love have turned against me.
My skin and flesh cling to my bones;
I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.
Have pity on me, my friends, have pity,
for the hand of God has struck me.
Why do you persecute me as God does?
Will you never get enough of my flesh?
I wish that my words were recorded
and inscribed in a book,
by an iron stylus on lead,
or chiseled in stone forever.
But I know that my Redeemer lives,
and in the end He will stand upon the earth.
Even after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God.
I will see Him for myself;
my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger.
How my heart yearns within me!
If you say, ‘Let us persecute him,
since the root of the matter lies with him,’
then you should fear the sword yourselves,
because wrath brings punishment by the sword,
so that you may know there is a judgment.”