Job 9:24

The same illustrated on the widest scale. Job 9:23 spoke of particular calamities afflicting portions of the earth. At the despair of the innocent under these God mocks, distant and indifferent. Now Job makes the sweeping statement that the earth is one scene of injustice. The wicked prevail in it, it is given into their hand, to rule and dominate within it. Comp. ch. 24.

covereth the faces of the judges that they cannot see the right, to give the innocent justice. It is God who covereth their faces; He not only does not hinder wrong, He ensures that it prevail and have the upper hand.

if not, where, and who is he Rather, if not He, who then is it who does all this (Job 9:24), if it is not He? Others besides Job have asked such questions.

In this passage Job's spirit reaches the lowest abyss of its alienation from God. From this time onwards his mind is calmer and the moral idea of God begins to reassert its place in his thoughts. Here God appears to him as a mere omnipotent power, with a bias, if He have one, to evil and cruelty, and he speaks of Him distantly as "he" (cf. ch. Job 3:20). His conception is but the reflection of his own case, as he conceived it, flung over the world, though his conception of his own case was false. To a Shemitic mind who had no conception of second causes or of general laws or of a scheme of providence, but regarded God as the immediate author of every single occurrence, the danger must always have been imminent of being driven to conclude that God was the author of the misery and wrong and cruel hardship under which men groaned.

In these verses Job traverses directly the maxim of his friends in regard to the discriminating righteousness of God, and the examples which he cites he might have used to demolish their theory. But he is little concerned with their theory here; later he does use his examples to drive them from the field. But here he is occupied with himself, with the impossibility of making his innocence which he is conscious of to appear and be admitted; for, of course, to himself and to all others his afflictions were the testimony of God to his guilt. And thus, though in the last verses his view extends to the world in general, he comes back in Job 9:25 to himself.