Job 14:20

20 Thou siezest him for ever, then he passeth away; Thou changest his countenance and castest him forth. 21 If his sons come to honour, he knoweth it not; Or to want, he observeth them not. 22 Only on his own account his flesh suffereth pain, And on his own account is his soul conscious of grief. The old expositors thought that תּתקפהוּ must be explained by תתקף נמנו (Thou provest thyself stronger than he, according to Ges. 121, 4), because תּקף is intrans.; but it is also transitive in the sense of seizing forcibly and grasping, Job 15:24; Ecc 4:12, as Talm. תּקף (otherwise commonly אתקף as החזיק), Arab. taqifa, comprehendere. The many sufferings which God inflicts on him in the course of his life are not meant; לנצח does not signify here: continually, without intermission, as most expositors explain, but as Job 4:20; Job 20:7, and throughout the book: for ever (Rosenm., Hahn, Welte). God gives him the death-stroke which puts an end to his life for ever, he passes away βαίνει, οἴχεται (comp. Job 10:21); disfiguring his countenance, i.e., in the struggle of death and in death by the gradual working of decay, distorting and making him unlike himself, He thrusts him out of this life (שׁלּח like Gen 3:23). The waw consec. is used here as e.g., Psa 118:27. When he is descended into Hades he knows nothing more of the fortune of his children, for as Ecc 9:6 says: the dead have absolutely no portion in anything that happens under the sun. In Job 14:21 Job does not think of his own children that have died, nor his grandchildren (Ewald); he speaks of mankind in general. כּבד and צער are not here placed in contrast in the sense of much and little, but, as in Jer 30:19, in the wider sense of an important or a destitute position; כּבד, to be honoured, to attain to honour, as Isa…

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.