Job 22:20

Whereas; or, when; or, seeing that; or, because; for this Hebrew particle im is oft used for chi. And so the following words may contain the reason of the joy and laughter of the innocent, mentioned Job 22:19, because when wicked men are destroyed, they are preserved; because our substance, i.e. our souls, and bodies, and subsistence, was now cut down. He should have said their substance, i.e. the substance of the righteous; but he changeth the person, and saith, our substance; either as including himself in the number of righteous persons, and thereby intimating that he pleaded the common cause of all such, whilst Job pleaded the cause of the wicked, as is elsewhere observed; or because he would hereby thankfully acknowledge some eminent and particular preservation given to him amongst other righteous men; or because he and his brethren were of the same substance with and descended from the loins of them whom God had miraculously preserved, when others round about them were cut off; as God had done for Abraham and his posterity, of which race these are conceived to have been. And a like change both of person and number we find Hosea 12:4, He found him (i.e. Jacob) in Beth-el, and there he spake with us, i.e. with him, as representing us, and for all our good. The remnant; all that was left undestroyed in the general calamity. Or, their excellency; all their desirable and delectable things. Of them, i.e. of those who are opposed to the righteous, and in whose destruction the righteous rejoiced. The fire, to wit, of God's wrath: some dreadful judgment, either proper fire, possibly that which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, which such knowing and inquisitive persons could not be ignorant of, as a thing done near their times and places; or some other sore calamity; for such oft come under the name of fire. But this whole verse is and may be otherwise rendered, and that interrogatively. Is not (or rather, was not, the Hebrew prefix he being here understood, after the manner of the language, from Job 22:15, where it is expressed) our substance (i.e. almost all our nature and kind) cut off, (almost all destroyed in the flood,) and did not the fire consume a remnant of them, i.e. of mankind, and of ungodly men, in Sodom and Gomorrah?