Read Job chapter 14 online with LogosAI Bible study tools, highlights, and cross references.
Job 14 is part of “First Cycle of Dialogue” (4–14) in the outline of Job.
Job 14 summary
Job had turned from speaking to his friends, finding it to no purpose to reason with them, and here he goes on to speak to God and himself. He had reminded his friends of their frailty and mortality (Job 13:12); here he reminds himself of his own, and pleads it with God for some mitigation of his miseries. We have here an account, I. Of man's life, that it is, 1. Short (Job 14:1). 2. Sorrowful (Job 14:1). 3. Sinful (Job 14:4). 4. Stinted (Job 14:5, Job 14:14). II. Of man's death, that it puts a final period to our present life, to which we shall not again return (Job 14:7-12), that it hides us from the calamities of life (Job 14:13), destroys the hopes of life (Job 14:18, Job 14:19), sends us away from the business of life (Job 14:20), and keeps us in the dark concerning our relations in this life, how much soever we have formerly been in care about them (Job 14:21, Job 14:22), III. The use Job makes of all this. 1. He pleads it with God, who, he thought, was too strict and severe with him (Job 14:16, Job 14:17), begging that, in consideration of his frailty, he would not contend with him (Job 14:3), but grant him some respite (Job 14:6). 2. He engages himself to prepare for death (Job 14:14), and encourages himself to hope that it would be comfortable to him (Job 14:15). This chapter is proper for funeral solemnities; and serious meditations on it will help us both to get good by the death of others and to get ready for our own.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706–21; Romans–Revelation completed by Nonconformist ministers). Public domain. Digital text: Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org).
1 “Man, who is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble.
2 He grows up like a flower, and is cut down. He also flees like a shadow, and doesn’t continue.
3 Do you open your eyes on such a one, and bring me into judgment with you?
4 Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.
5 Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his bounds that he can’t pass.
6 Look away from him, that he may rest, until he accomplishes, as a hireling, his day.
7 “For there is hope for a tree if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, that the tender branch of it will not cease.
8 Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stock dies in the ground,