Job 3:24

before I eat lit. before my meat, as margin. The temporal meaning of beforegives no sense here. In 1 Samuel 1:16 the same expression occurs, "Count not thine handmaid fora daughter of Belial." Therefore render, my sighing cometh for(instead of, or, like) my meat; it is his constant, daily food.

like the waters Rather, like water, i. e. a broad, unbroken stream.

25, 26, the thing which I feared These two verses read thus,

For let me fear an evil, and it cometh upon me,

And whatsoever I dread, it overtakes me;

I have no ease, neither quiet nor rest,

But trouble cometh.

The whole passage from Job 3:20 describes Job's present condition. The speaker says, if he but imagines an evil, if he but "fears a fear," it is immediately upon him. The words are put hypothetically in the past tense: Have I feared a fear, it cometh upon me; but the reference cannot be to the real past, as in the English Version, because it would be contrary to the idea of the poem to suppose that Job even in the days of his golden prime was haunted with indefinite fears of coming misfortune. On the contrary the picture he gives of himself, ch. 29, shews that his piety reflected itself in a full and trustful peace of mind; see his own words ch. Job 16:12; Job 29:18 seq.

Job 3:26 means that Job has no pause between the waves of his affliction, no time to recover from one before another overwhelms him.

"Trouble" here is the fit or paroxysm of trouble.

Job's three friends sat silent before him seven days. Then Job spake and cursed his day. His speech opened his friends" mouths and probably also their eyes. Job's language and demeanour were not what they would have looked for from one in his condition. His violent complaints and his indirect allusions to Heaven were not only unbecoming in themselves, but cast an unwelcome light upon his past life. Job speaks no doubt with the passion of despair and in the bitterness of his misery, and his indirect allusions to God betray impatience and are uttered with a tone of resentment, though there is as yet no direct charge of injustice against God, only an impatient demand why He continues life to one in such misery. His tone of mind is very different from that exhibited when his trials had newly befallen him or when he replied to the suggestions of his wife. And it is this tone, suggesting so much more than it expressed, that the three friends lay hold of and attach their exhortations to, and which is thus the point out of which the whole succeeding debate developes itself.