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The Bible · 453 of 1189

Job 17

1.My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready for me. 2. Are there not mockers with me? and doth not mine eye continue in their provocation? 3. Lay down now, put me in a surety with thee; who is he that will strike hands with me? 4. For thou hast hid their heart from understanding: therefore shalt thou not exalt them. 5. He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail. 6. He hath made me also a byword of the people; and aforetime I was as a tabret. 7. Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are as a shadow. 8. Upright men shall be astonied at this, and the innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite. 9. The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger.

10.But as for you all, do ye return, and come now: for I cannot find one wise man among you. 11. My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart. 12. They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness. 13. If I wait, the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness. 14. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. 15. And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it? 16. They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust.

Asked of Guide

Why does Job say “I have made my bed in the darkness” and call corruption his father?

Job says “I have made my bed in the darkness” to describe how his life has settled into death and hopelessness; he pictures the grave as his home and death as an intimate relation when he calls corruption his father. The image gathers his bodily decay, social disgrace, and the sense that hope has been taken from him—“where is now my hope?” he asks—so the language is meant as vivid, resigned realism about his present condition.

This chapter also insists on moral clarity: the righteous “shall hold on his way” while Job’s friends fail him, and Job challenges them—“I cannot find one wise man among you”—for offering empty consolation. That tension between suffering’s raw fact and the failure of pious speech echoes Ecclesiastes’ sober face toward mortality, which also treats death as an unavoidable, leveling reality.

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