Charles Ellicott Commentary Job 6

But Job answered and said. —Job replies to Eliphaz with the despair of a man who has been denied the sympathy he hoped to find. We cannot trace, nor must we expect to find, a formal, logical reply. Eliphaz, Job feels, has so misjudged his case that he is neither worthy of a direct reply nor receptive to one. It is enough for him to reiterate his complaint and long for one who can enter into it.

Swallowed up. —That is, words are useless and powerless to express it. (See the margin.)

The poison whereof drinketh up my spirit. —Rather, the poison of which my spirit imbibes, the rendering of the Authorised Version being ambiguous.

Do set themselves in array against me. —Like hosts marshalling themselves for battle.

“If the ox or the ass will not low or bray as long as he is satisfied, neither should I complain if I had no valid cause. My groaning is the evidence of a great burden, and consequently, the disdainful way in which you treat it is insipid and distasteful to me—my soul refuses to touch your offered remedies; they are like loathsome food to me.”

According to some, the words rendered “the white of an egg” mean the juice of purslain.

Oh that I might have my request.—Baffled by his fellow human beings, he turns, like many others, to God as his only hope, although it is rather from God than in God that his hope lies. However exceptional Job’s trials, yet his language is the common language of all sufferers who think that relief, if it comes, must come through a change of circumstances rather than through a change within themselves in relation to those circumstances.

Thus Job looks forward to death as his only hope; whereas with God and in God, many years of life and prosperity were in store for him. So strong is this feeling in him, that he calls death the thing that he longs for, his hope or expectation. (Compare to Job 17:0, where even the hope he had in death seems to have passed away and resulted in blank hopelessness.)

Even that it would please God ... —The sequence of thought in these verses is obscure and uncertain. The speaker may mean that, notwithstanding all that might befall him, his consolation would still be that he had never denied the words of the Holy One. The words “I would harden myself in sorrow” are the most doubtful, not occurring elsewhere in Scripture. Some render the two clauses, “I would exult, or rejoice, in pain that spareth not;” but “Let him not spare,” or “Though he spare not,” seems preferable. Others render, “Though I burn in sorrow.”