Job 3:24

For my sighing cometh before I eat - Margin, “My meat.” Dr. Good renders this,” Behold! my sighing takes the place of my daily food, and refers to Psalms 42:3, as an illustration:

My tears are my meat day and night.

So substantially Schultens renders it, and explains it as meaning, “My sighing comes in the manner of my food,” “Suspirium ad modum panis veniens” - and supposes it to mean that his sighs and groans were like his daily food; or were constant and unceasing. Dr. Noyes explains it as meaning, “My sighing comes on when I begin to eat, and prevents my taking my daily nourishment;” and appeals to a similar expression in Juvenal. Sat. xiii. 211:

Perpetua anxietas, nec mensae tempore cessat.

Rosenmuller gives substantially the same explanation, and remarks, also, that some suppose that the mouth, hands, and tongue of Job were so affected with disease, that the effort to eat increased his sufferings, and brought on a renewal of his sorrows. The same view is given by Origen; and this is probably the correct sense.

And my roarings - My deep and heavy groans.

Are poured out like the waters - That is,

(1) “in number” - they were like rolling billows, or like the heaving deep.

(2) Perhaps also in “sound” like them. His groans were like the troubled ocean, that can be heard afar. Perhaps, also,

(3.) he means to say that his groans were attended with “a flood of tears,” or that his tears were like the waves of the sea.

There is some hyperbole in the figure, in whichever way it is understood; but we are to remember that his feelings were deeply excited, and that the Orientals were in the habit of expressing themselves in a mode, which to us, of more phlegmatic temperament, may seem extravagant in the extreme. We have, however, a similar expression when we say of one that “he burst into a “flood of tears.””