Job 8:4

The construction of the English version is possible, which makes the whole of Job 8:4 the supposition or protasis and begins the second member of the sentence with Job 8:5. But more probably Job 8:4 is complete in itself: if thy children have sinned so(or, then) he hath, &c.

cast them away for Rather lit., he hath sent them away, or, let them go, into the hand of their transgression. The idea is that evil carries its own retribution with it, and that a sinner is destroyed by the very sin which he commits, a common idea in the Book, cf. ch. Job 4:8; Job 15:31; Job 15:35; Job 18:7-8; Job 20:12 seq. Though Bildad puts his reference to the children of Job hypothetically there is great harshness in the allusion, and we may understand how the father would smart under it from his own reference later in the Book to the time when his children were yet alive: "When my boys were about me," ch. Job 29:5. A wiser and more human-hearted Teacher than Bildad has instructed us from the instances of the affliction of blindness (John 9:2-3) and the accident in the tower of Siloam (Luke 13:4) that calamity is no proof of guilt in those on whom it falls, and that evil may serve in the hand of God wider uses than the chastisement of individuals. This is the very lesson of the Book of Job, though it seems that men in the days of our Lord had not yet learned it. The verse refers back to ch. Job 1:19, and is evidence that the Prologue forms an integral part of the Book.