Charles Ellicott Commentary Job 19

How long? —Job begins as Bildad himself had begun in both cases. His last speech had been so offensive and unfeeling that Job may well ask, “How long will you vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words?” Moreover, Bildad had infused a kind of personal malice into his charges, which Job felt most keenly, so that he is constrained to ask, “If indeed I have erred, does not my error remain with myself? I alone suffer for it, and you do not even sympathize or suffer with me.”

Know now that God hath overthrown me. —Bildad had spoken a great deal about the wicked being snared by his own sin, and now Job, without actually quoting his words—for he uses a word for net that Bildad had not used—speaks to their substance. It is God who has taken him in His net and encompassed him with it. This is the assertion he has made before (Job 16:7; Job 13:27, and elsewhere).

Behold I cry out of wrong. —The description he now gives of himself as persecuted and forsaken by God is necessary to enhance the value of the confession he is about to make. Severely has God dealt with him, but that severity of dealing has only drawn him nearer to God and made him trust the more. He groups together a rich variety of figures to express his desolate condition. He is suffering assault, and can get no protection or redress; he is imprisoned on every side, his hope is torn up like the tree of which he had before spoken (Job 14:7).

He has also kindled ... — Compare Job 16:9; Job 16:12 and following.

He has put my brethren far from me. —The Psalmist has apparently copied this in Psalm 88:8. The sense of human desertion is hardly less terrible than that of being forsaken by God, and this has been added to him.

It is not easy to read these sad complaints of Job without seeing how fittingly they apply to the sorrows of the Man of Sorrows. Those who, with the present writer, believe in the overruling presence of the Holy Ghost will adore His wisdom in this fitness; but at all events it shows how completely Christ entered into the very heart of human suffering, because the deepest expressions of suffering inevitably remind us of Him, whether those expressions are met with in the Book of Job, in the Psalms of David, or in the Lamentations of Jeremiah.