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Job_10:22 A land of darkness, as darkness [itself; and] of the shadow of death, without any order, and [where] the light [is] as darkness.
Ver. 22. A land of darkness, &c.] This is not a description of hell, and of the state of the damned (as some would have it), for Job never meant to come there, no more than Jacob did, Gen_37:35; Gen_42:38; but it is such an elegant description of the grave, as exceedeth the phantasy of poet, and the rhetoric of all heathen orators. There is something like it in David’s Psalms, especially Psa_88:11-12, where the grave is called a place of perdition, a land of forgetfulness, and of darkness, whereinto they who descend praise not God, Psa_115:17. In respect of their bodies they do not, they cannot, Isa_38:18. Hell, indeed, is much more a land of darkness as darkness itself; it is that outer darkness, a darkness beyond a darkness, as the dungeon is beyond the prison; and the pains of hell are the chains of darkness. Now death is hell’s harbinger to the wicked, and hence it is so dreadful in the apprehension and approach of it, that men’s hearts do even die within them, as Nabal’s did, through fear of death; and they tremble thereat as the trees of the wood, or leaves of the forest, with Ahaz, Isa_7:2. Darkness, we know, is full of terror: the Egyptians were sorely frightened by their three days’ thick darkness, insomuch as that none stirred off his stool all that while, Exo_10:23, and it was the more terrible, doubtless, because they had no warning of it, as they had of other plagues. How oft do men chop into the chambers of death (their long home, the grave) all on the sudden, as he that travelleth in the snow may do over head and ears into a clay pit! Death of any sort is unwelcome to nature, as being its slaughterman: but when sudden, it is so much the more ghastly; and those that desperately dare death to a duel cannot look it in the face with blood in their cheeks: only to those that are in Christ the bitterness of death is past, the sting of it pulled out, the property altered, as hath been already noted. Christ, the Sun of righteousness, saith a learned expositor here (Mr Caryl), lay in the grave, and hath left perpetual beams of light there for his purchased people. The way to the grave is very dark, but Christ hath set up lights for us, &c.
And of the shadow of death] The shadow is the dark part of the thing, so that the shadow of death is the darkest side of death, death in its most hideous and horrid representations; the shadow of death is the substance of death, or death with addition of greatest deadliness.
Without any order] Heb. And not orders. What then? confusion surely, without keeping to rules or ranks: men’s bones are mingled in the grave; whether they have been princes or peasants it cannot be discerned; Omnia mors aequat: as chessmen are put up all together in the bag when the game is ended, without distinction of king, duke, bishop, &c., so here. Junius rendereth it, expertem vicissitudinum, without any interchanges, distinctions, vicissitudes, or varieties (as of day, night, summer, winter, heat, cold, &c.) of which things consisteth the greatest part of the brevity of this world.
And where the light is as darkness] How great then must needs be that darkness? as our Saviour speaketh in another case, Mat_6:23. Surely when, by the return of the sun, there is light in the land of the living, in the grave all is abyssed and sunk into eternal night; as the bodies of those two smothered princes were by their cruel uncle, Richard III, in the black deeps, a place so called at the Thames’ mouth. In the grave light and darkness are both alike; and as the images in Popish temples see nothing, though great wax candles be lighted up before them; so the clearest light of the sun shining in his strength would be nothing to those that are dead and buried. Let this be much and often thought on; mors tua, mors Christi, &c. thine deathe, the death of Christ &c. Cyrus, that great conqueror, lying on his death bed, praised God, saith Xenophon, that his prosperity had not puffed him up; for he ever considered that he was but mortal, and must bid adieu to the world. Charles V, emperor of Germany, caused his sepulchre and grave clothes to be made five years before his death, and carried them closely with him whithersoever he went. Samuel sent Saul newly anointed to Rachel’s sepulchre, 1Sa_10:2-4, that he might not become proud of his new honours, &c.