Job 14
Job 14 closes the long reply Job began in chapter 12. Chapter 12 dismissed the friends with sarcasm and named God's sovereignty in a cataract of verbs. Chapter 13 demanded a hearing in God's court and declared the most famous statement of trust-in-spite-of-death in the wisdom literature. Chapter 14 turns inward. The fight with the friends is over for the moment. What remains is the actual question that has been driving Job all along: what is a human being, and what becomes of one when the dust closes over?
The chapter opens with the most quoted meditation on human mortality in the Old Testament. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not (14:1-2). Job is not just talking about himself; he is talking about every reader of his chapter. We are all born into the same condition - short days, much trouble - and we are all going to the same earth. The chapter then works through a sustained comparison between human life and the rest of creation. A tree cut down can sprout again at the scent of water. A river can dry up and refill. A human being who dies, in the wisdom literature's grim observation, does not.
And then, in v. 14, the chapter reaches the question the Old Testament does not yet have the resources to answer with full clarity but cannot stop asking. If a man die, shall he live again? Job has no settled doctrine of resurrection. The clear resurrection-hope of Daniel 12:2 (“many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”), Isaiah 26:19 (“thy dead men shall live”), and Ezekiel 37's valley of dry bones is later. What Job has is a longing, a question, and a strange dream-image - that God might hide him in the grave (Sheol) while His wrath passes, then call him by name and have him answer (14:13, 15). The chapter ends in despair, but the question has been spoken. Two thousand years later, on a road outside Bethany, the answer arrives in person: I am the resurrection, and the life.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Job 14:1-6Of Few Days and Full of Trouble
1Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. 2He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. 3And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? 4Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. 5Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; 6Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day.
Verse 1 has anchored Christian thought on human mortality since the first century1. It appears in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer's burial service in the lines that have been said over almost every English-speaking Christian grave for four centuries: “Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.” The verse is universal. Job is not narrating his own special suffering; he is narrating the human condition every reader of his chapter shares. We are all born of women. We are all of few days. We are all full of trouble.
Verse 4's question - who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one - is one of the wisdom literature's most quoted statements of the human condition. The Bible elsewhere is careful with the claim (children are not unclean by birth in the Old Testament's purity language; the verse is about the chain of mortality and weakness, not about culpability before God). What Job is naming is that the chain we are born into is one no one in it can break by their own resources. The chain runs through every generation. The cutting it requires has to come from outside.
Job 14:7-12The Tree, the River, the Sleep
7For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. 8Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; 9Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. 10But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? 11As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: 12So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.
Verses 7-9 are the chapter's most luminous image. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Job is observing what every farmer in the Levant knew - many trees, when felled, regenerate from the stump. Olive trees especially. A cut-down olive can lie in apparent death for months, until the first winter rains arrive, and then small shoots burst out of the apparently-dead stump. Through the scent of water it will bud. The Bible loves this image. Isaiah 11:1 uses it for the Messiah: there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots - a Branch sprouting out of a stump that looked like the end of a line. The image Job sets up in 14:7 to contrast with human hopelessness becomes, in the prophets, the very image of Messianic hope.
Verse 10's grief is real and the chapter does not soften it. Man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? The tree sprouts; the man, by every visible measure, does not. Job is not yet able to see a way out of the asymmetry. The Old Testament has only fleeting glimpses of resurrection at this point in its development. What the chapter is doing is drawing the contrast as starkly as possible, so that the question of v. 14 can land with the weight it needs to land with. Where the tree has a visible answer to the question of what comes next, the human in v. 10 does not - and the Bible refuses to pretend otherwise.
Job 14:13-17If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?
13O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! 14If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. 15Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. 16For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin? 17My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity.
Verse 13's prayer is unlike anything else in the wisdom literature. O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!2 Job is asking for the grave not as oblivion but as a hiding place - a safe room where God's wrath against his life can pass over him, and from which God might one day call him back. The Old Testament does not yet have a developed doctrine of resurrection - the explicit doctrine arrives in Isaiah 26:19, Ezekiel 37, and Daniel 12:2 - but Job 14:13 is one of the earliest places it appears as longing. The grave as a Passover-like hiding place where the angel of judgment passes over until God Himself calls is one of the most haunting images in the Old Testament. It is, in a quiet way, exactly the picture Paul will eventually give of the believer's death: asleep in Jesus (1 Thess. 4:14), waiting for the trumpet.
Job 14:18-22The Chapter That Ends Where It Began
18And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. 19The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man. 20Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away. 21His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. 22But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.
The chapter ends in a wave of imagery as bleak as any in the wisdom literature. Mountains crumble. Rocks shift. Water wears stones to nothing over enough centuries. Everything that looks permanent eventually goes. Job is not contradicting the hope of vv. 13-15; he is being honest that the hope is fragile, glimpsed and lost. The chapter ends back in the grief it started in. The Bible refuses to write a clean ending. Many chapters of the believer's life close exactly this way - the hope was real for a moment, and then the grief came back, and the chapter ends where the chapter ends. That is permitted.
Verse 21's grief is the grief of the parent. His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. Job is mourning the way death cuts a person off from the future of the people they love. He will not see his children's vindication; he will not see their failure either. Both are taken from him. The chapter is honest about what death actually removes. It is not just life that ends. It is participation in the next chapter of the lives of those you loved. The Bible is unsentimental about this, and the resurrection-hope of the chapter has to bear the weight of what 14:21 names. It does. But the chapter is willing to sit honestly with what the resurrection is going to have to do.
Further study
- Hebrew text with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Ramban on Job's mortality meditation and the famous question of v. 14 - including the rabbinic discussion of whether Job is asking despairingly or hopefully.
- Resurrection in the Old TestamentBible Odyssey (SBL)SBL overview of the development of resurrection-hope in the Old Testament - from the proto-glimpses in Job 14:14, 19:25-27 to the explicit doctrine in Isaiah 26:19, Ezekiel 37, and Daniel 12:2.
- Job 14:14 ↔ John 11:25 · 1 Cor 15:51-52Intertextual BibleJesus' declaration at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:25) and Paul's “we shall all be changed” (1 Cor 15:51) are the New Testament's direct answers to Job 14:14's question and v. 14's phrase “till my change (chalifati) come.”
Where this echoes in Scripture
Of Few Days and Full of Trouble
- Galatians 4:4-5God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.The phrase Job 14:1 opens with - turned into the gospel statement of the Incarnation.
- Psalm 90:9-10We spend our years as a tale that is told… they are soon cut off, and we fly away.Moses on the same theme, in the same vocabulary.
The Tree, the River, the Sleep
- Isaiah 11:1There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.The tree-image Job 14:7 uses to contrast with human hopelessness, turned into the Messianic prophecy.
- Romans 6:5If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.The cut-down-and-springing-again pattern, made personal in baptism.
If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?
- John 11:25-26I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.Christ’s direct answer to Job 14:14, given outside the tomb of Lazarus.
- 1 Corinthians 15:51-52We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump… and we shall be changed.Paul’s “changed” (<em>allagēsometha</em>) is the same word-family as Job’s “change” (<em>chalifati</em>).
- John 5:28-29The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth.The calling Job dreams of in 14:15, made explicit by Christ Himself.
The Chapter That Ends Where It Began
- Ecclesiastes 1:4One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.The Preacher on the same theme - Job 14’s mortality meditation, in Ecclesiastes’ voice.
- Revelation 21:4God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.The chapter the Bible eventually writes on the far side of Job 14:22.