Job 24
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 24Written by AI
Job asks why God does not set times for judgment. He describes the poor being robbed and oppressed while God seems to charge no one with wrong. The end of the chapter (verses 18 to 25) sounds more like the friends; readers differ on whether Job is quoting them or making his own point.
Job: Judgment for the Wicked
“Why does the Almighty not reserve times for judgment?
Why may those who know Him never see His days?
Men move boundary stones;
they pasture stolen flocks.
They drive away the donkey of the fatherless
and take the widow’s ox in pledge.
They push the needy off the road
and force all the poor of the land into hiding.
Indeed, like wild donkeys in the desert,
the poor go to work foraging for food;
the wasteland is food for their children.
They gather fodder in the fields
and glean the vineyards of the wicked.
Without clothing, they spend the night naked;
they have no covering against the cold.
Drenched by mountain rains,
they huddle against the rocks for want of shelter.
The fatherless infant is snatched from the breast;
the nursing child of the poor is seized for a debt.
Without clothing, they wander about naked.
They carry the sheaves, but still go hungry.
They crush olives within their walls;
they tread the winepresses, but go thirsty.
From the city, men groan,
and the souls of the wounded cry out,
yet God charges no one with wrongdoing.
Then there are those who rebel against the light,
not knowing its ways or staying on its paths.
When daylight is gone, the murderer rises
to kill the poor and needy;
in the night he is like a thief.
The eye of the adulterer watches for twilight.
Thinking, ‘No eye will see me,’ he covers his face.
In the dark they dig through houses;
by day they shut themselves in,
never to experience the light.
For to them, deep darkness is their morning;
surely they are friends with the terrors of darkness!
They are but foam on the surface of the water;
their portion of the land is cursed,
so that no one turns toward their vineyards.
As drought and heat consume the melting snow,
so Sheol steals those who have sinned.
The womb forgets them;
the worm feeds on them;
they are remembered no more.
So injustice is broken like a tree.
They prey on the barren and childless,
and show no kindness to the widow.
Yet by His power, God drags away the mighty;
though rising up, they have no assurance of life.
He gives them a sense of security,
but His eyes are on their ways.
They are exalted for a moment,
then they are gone;
they are brought low and gathered up like all others;
they are cut off like heads of grain.
If this is not so, then who can prove me a liar
and reduce my words to nothing?”