Job 24:1

CHAPTER XXIV

Job asserts that there are various transgressors whose

wickedness is not visited on them in this life; and

particularizes the adjust and oppressive, 1-6;

those who are cruel to the poor, 7-13;

the murderer, 14;

the adulterer, 15;

thieves and plunderers, 16, 17.

Nevertheless they have an accursed portion, and shall die, and

their memory perish, 18-20.

He speaks of the abuse of power, and of the punishment of

oppressors, 21-24;

and asserts that what he has said on these subjects cannot be

contradicted, 25.

NOTES ON CHAP. XXIV

Verse Job 24:1. Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty] Mr. Good translates: "Wherefore are not doomsdays kept by the Almighty, so that his offenders may eye their periods?" Doomsdays are here used in the same sense as term times; and the wish is, that God would appoint such times that the falsely accused might look forward to them with comfort; knowing that, on their arrival, they should have a fair hearing, and their innocence be publicly declared; and their detractors, and the unjust in general, meet with their deserts. But God reserves the knowledge of these things to himself. "The holy patriarch," says Mr. Good, "has uniformly admitted that in the aggregate scale of Providence the just are rewarded and the wicked punished for their respective deeds, in some period or other of their lives. But he has contended in various places, and especially in Job 21:7, that the exceptions to this general rule are numerous: so numerous, as to be sufficient to render the whole scheme of providential interposition perfectly mysterious and incomprehensible,Job 23:8; so in the passage before us: if the retribution ye speak of be universal, and which I am ready to admit to a certain extent to be true and unquestionable, I not only ask, Why do the just ever suffer in the midst of their righteousness? but, Why do not the wicked see such retribution displayed before their eyes by stated judgments, so that they may at one and the same time know and tremble?"