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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 8:16 - 8:16
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
16 He dwells with sap in the sunshine,
And his branch spreads itself over his garden.
17 His roots intertwine over heaps of stone,
He looks upon a house of stones.
18 If He casts him away from his place,
It shall deny him: I have not seen thee.
19 Behold, thus endeth his blissful course,
And others spring forth from the dust.
The subject throughout is not the creeping-plant directly, but the ungodly, who is likened to it. Accordingly the expression of the thought is in part figurative and in part literal, יֶֽחֶזֶה אֲבָנִים בֵּית (Job 8:17). As the creeper has stones before it, and by its interwindings, as it were, so rules them that it may call them its own (v. Gerlach: the exuberant growth twines itself about the walls, and looks proudly down upon the stony structure); so the ungodly regards his fortune as a solid structure, which he has quickly caused to spring up, and which seems to him imperishable. Ewald translates: he separates one stone from another; בֵּית, according to §217, g, he considers equivalent to בֵּינַת, and signifies apart from one another; but although חָזָה = חָזַז, according to its radical idea, may signify to split, pierce through, still בֵּית, when used as a preposition, can signify nothing else but, within. Others, e.g., Rosenmüller, translate: he marks a place of stones, i.e., meets with a layer of stones, against which he strikes himself; for this also בֵּית will not do. He who casts away (Job 8:18) is not the house of stone, but God. He who has been hitherto prosperous, becomes now as strange to the place in which he flourished so luxuriantly, as if it had never seen him. Behold, that is the delight of his way (course of life), i.e., so fashioned, so perishable is it, so it ends. From the ground above which he sprouts forth, others grow up whose fate, when they have no better ground of confidence than he, is the same. After he has placed before Job both the blessed gain of him who trusts, and the sudden destruction of him who forgets, God, as the result of the whole, Bildad recapitulates: