Job 20
Eliphaz has spoken twice, Bildad has spoken, Job has answered each - and now the third friend rises for his second turn. Zophar the Naamathite is offended, and he does not hide it: Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste… I have heard the check of my reproach. Job's last words have stung him - he feels rebuked, corrected, talked down to - and the sting is what propels his speech. He has not come to weep with a grieving man; he has come, in haste and heat, to put Job back in his place. And before we weigh a word of it, the book asks us to hold in mind what Zophar cannot see: in the council of heaven God Himself has called this suffering man a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil (Job 1:8). The friend about to describe the doom of the wicked is starting, like the others before him, from a premise the reader already knows to be false - that Job's ruin marks him as a wicked man.3
Zophar's answer is a single, sustained portrait, and its thesis is stated at once as an ancient and undeniable law: Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment? Hear the claim carefully, because it is half true and that is what makes it dangerous. The triumph of the wicked really is, in the end, brief; the godless really do not flourish for ever; Scripture itself says of them, thou castedst them down into destruction… how are they brought into desolation, as in a moment (Ps. 73:18-19). Zophar has hold of a real truth. But watch what he does with it. He pours it out in image after vivid image - the wicked man whose excellency mounts to the heavens and who perishes like his own dung; the sin that is sweet in his mouth and turns to the gall of asps in his belly; the riches he swallows and must vomit up again - and every line is built so that Job will see his own ruin reflected in the doomed man's. The true principle becomes a mirror held up to the sufferer: this is what becomes of the wicked, and look what has become of you.
So the whole chapter turns on one distinction the reader must hold from the first verse to the last. The kernel is true: the joy of the wicked is fleeting, and the pleasures of sin do not endure. The application is false and merciless: that Job, being ruined, must therefore be that wicked man, his losses the wages of a hidden crime. Zophar ends with the verdict toward which the entire poem has driven - This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the heritage appointed unto him by God - as though he could read the divine ledger and assign Job his place in it. But the book will overturn the verdict utterly. The reader has stood in the throne room of heaven and knows the calamity was no wage of sin; and the LORD will say to Zophar himself, with Eliphaz and Bildad, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right. The study before you keeps that line steady throughout: it honors the genuine truth Zophar half-grasps - the triumph of the wicked is short - while refusing the cruelty he builds on it, that a suffering man's pain is the proof of his guilt.
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Job 20:1-11The Triumphing of the Wicked Is Short
1Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said, 2Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste. 3I have heard the check of my reproach, and the spirit of my understanding causeth me to answer. 4Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, 5That the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment? 6Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds; 7Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?
Zophar does not open as Eliphaz once did, with apology and reluctant courtesy. He opens with heat: Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste.3 His thoughts press on him; he cannot keep silent; he answers in haste - and the haste is itself a confession. A man at rest in the truth can afford to be slow; a man stung into speech rushes. Job's last words have provoked him, and Zophar mistakes provocation for inspiration. He feels the urgency rising in him and reads it as the warrant to speak, as though the strength of his agitation were the measure of his rightness. It is worth pausing on, because we are all prone to it: the feeling of being compelled to answer is no proof that the answer is true. Some of the cruelest words ever spoken to a sufferer have come out of exactly this - the certainty, the heat, the inner pressure that will not let a man hold his peace. Zophar is about to speak with great force. He has not stopped to ask whether force is what his friend in the ashes needs.
He names what has stung him: I have heard the check of my reproach. The word check here carries the sense of correction, rebuke, a charge laid against him - Zophar feels reproved by Job's words, and the feeling rankles. This is the engine of the whole speech. Zophar is not answering Job's grief; he is answering his own wounded pride. He has been corrected, and he will not stand for it. Notice how the conversation has drifted from its true subject. Job is the one suffering - bereaved, diseased, sitting in ashes - and yet Zophar speaks as the injured party, the man who has been insulted and must defend his honor. The sufferer's pain has receded entirely behind the friend's offense. It is a familiar and ugly turn: a man in genuine anguish says something sharp out of his anguish, and his comforter, instead of bearing it, takes it as a personal affront and answers the affront. Zophar adds that the spirit of my understanding causeth me to answer - he dresses his stung pride in the language of insight, as though his retort flowed from deep wisdom rather than from a bruised ego. The reader should be wary of every word that follows. It is spoken not to heal but to even a score.
Now Zophar lays down his thesis, and he lays it as a law so old and so obvious that only a fool could miss it: Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment? Hear it rightly, for everything turns on hearing it rightly. The claim is, in itself, true. The triumph of the wicked really is brief when measured against eternity; the godless really do not flourish for ever; their apparent victory is a candle that gutters and goes out. Scripture says exactly this - thou castedst them down into destruction… how are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! (Ps. 73:18-19).2 So Zophar has hold of a genuine truth, and if he had spoken it as comfort - the wicked who oppress you, Job, will not stand for ever - it would have been a good word. But that is not how he means it. The wider ancient world wrestled with the same assumption he presses - that calamity must be the just receipt for wickedness against heaven.4 Zophar means the truth as a frame into which Job must fit, and the frame is already closing: if the wicked perish, and Job is perishing, then Job is the wicked man. The premise is sound. The leap is lethal.
Zophar sharpens the portrait with an image of dizzying height followed by utter collapse: Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds; yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung. The wicked man climbs - his greatness towers, his head brushes the clouds, he seems untouchable, lifted above the reach of any judgment. And then, in a single brutal line, he is gone, and gone in the most degrading image the poet can find: he perishes like his own dung, swept away as refuse, so wholly erased that those who once admired him ask, Where is he? There is a genuine truth buried in the picture; the height of the wicked is no guarantee against their fall, and Scripture knows the proud brought suddenly low. But notice the relish with which Zophar paints it - the loftiness, the squalor of the end, the onlookers searching for a man who has vanished into nothing. This is not the sober warning of one who grieves over judgment; it is a portrait drawn with a kind of satisfaction, and it is drawn for Job to recognize. Job, too, was once great in the east; Job, too, has fallen far and fast. The image of the towering man reduced to dung is laid before him not as a general truth but as a likeness he is meant to own.
8He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night. 9The eye also which saw him shall see him no more; neither shall his place any more behold him. 10His children shall seek to please the poor, and his hands shall restore their goods. 11His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust.
The wicked man vanishes as a dream, chased away as a vision of the night; his children must beg from the poor and hand back what he seized; and then Zophar reaches a line of peculiar cruelty: His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust. The picture is of a sin so deep-set that it has soaked into the very bones - the wickedness of a man's young years lodged in his frame, carried with him into the grave, so that even his skeleton is, as it were, saturated with guilt. This is retribution theology pressed to its furthest point: not merely that the wicked are punished, but that their guilt is written into their bodies, that their ruin and their very bones testify against them. And the aim, once again, is Job - Job whose body is covered in sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head (Job 2:7), Job whose flesh is the most visible thing about his suffering. Zophar is inviting him to read his diseased body as Zophar reads the wicked man's bones: as the physical record of hidden sin. It is the cruelest possible misuse of a sufferer's affliction - to treat the wound itself as the evidence of the crime. The reader knows better. Job's sores are not the sin of his youth surfacing in his bones; they are the marks of a trial he never earned.
Job 20:12-22Sweet in the Mouth, Gall in the Belly
12Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue; 13Though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth: 14Yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it is the gall of asps within him.
Zophar turns from the wicked man's downfall to the inner mechanism of it, and he chooses an image of startling vividness: wickedness eaten like a delicacy. Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue; though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth.3 Picture a man who has found a morsel so delicious he will not swallow it quickly - he tucks it under his tongue, savors it, refuses to let it go, rolls the sweetness around in his mouth to make the pleasure last. That, says Zophar, is how the wicked man treats his sin. He does not blunder into evil and regret it; he loves it, cherishes it, hoards it like a treasured taste. And here Zophar has seen something real about the nature of sin. There is a sweetness to wickedness - this is no Puritan exaggeration but plain truth; sin would have no power if it were not, for a moment, genuinely sweet. The lie of it is never that the pleasure is unreal; the lie is that the pleasure will last. Zophar understands the sweetness. What he does not understand is that the man he is describing - the connoisseur of his own evil - is nothing like the man sitting before him, who has lost everything precisely while fearing God and eschewing evil.
Then the image turns, and turns horribly: Yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it is the gall of asps within him. The sweet morsel, once swallowed, does not nourish - it becomes venom. What was honey on the tongue becomes the gall of asps in the belly, the poison of serpents working in the gut. The picture is precise and unforgettable: the pleasure of sin is real but brief, confined to the mouth; its true nature is revealed only after it is swallowed, when it turns to poison in the inward parts. As a description of what sin actually does, this is profoundly true. The thing that delights in the tasting destroys in the digesting; the sweetness is the bait and the poison is the hook. Scripture knows this well - the strange woman's lips drop as an honeycomb, but her end is bitter as wormwood (Prov. 5:3-4). Zophar is right about the mechanism. His error is the same one that runs through every friend's speech: he assumes that because sin poisons the one who swallows it, every poisoned man must have swallowed sin. He sees Job in agony - sores, ashes, grief - and concludes that Job's torment is the gall of asps working in him, the delayed venom of a wickedness he once savored. But suffering is not always the body of sin coming due. Sometimes the most poisoned-looking life belongs to the most innocent man.
15He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly. 16He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay him. 17He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. 18That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down: according to his substance shall the restitution be, and he shall not rejoice therein.
The eating image widens from sin to wealth: He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly. The wicked man has gulped down riches greedily, bolting them as a man bolts food - and he will not keep them. God will make him bring them all back up; what he swallowed by force he disgorges by force. The picture is grotesque and deliberate: ill-gotten wealth is not nourishment but something the body must violently reject. He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter - all the abundance he grasped at will be denied him; he will never enjoy the streaming plenty he imagined. That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down… and he shall not rejoice therein. The sharpest stroke is that last phrase: he shall not rejoice therein. The wicked man gets, in the end, no joy even from what he keeps for a moment; his gain turns to ash before he can delight in it. And as a meditation on the emptiness of greedily-gotten wealth, this is true - riches seized at the cost of the soul never satisfy, and a man can spend his life clutching what he can never enjoy. But Zophar means it as a portrait of Job, the man who was once the greatest of all the men of the east (Job 1:3) and is now stripped bare. He invites Job to see his lost wealth as wealth God tore out of him in judgment - riches vomited up because they were swallowed in sin. The reader knows otherwise. Job's wealth was not the plunder of the wicked; it was the gift of God, taken away in a trial Job did nothing to provoke.
19Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not; 20Surely he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that which he desired. 21There shall none of his meat be left; therefore shall no man look for his goods. 22In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits: every hand of the wicked shall come upon him.
Zophar names at last the crimes he has been implying: Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not. The wicked man of his portrait is an oppressor - he has ground down the poor, seized homes he did not build, taken by force what was not his. And the sentence that follows is poetic justice in its strictest form: Surely he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that which he desired. The belly that swallowed by violence will never know peace; the greed that was never satisfied in getting will never be satisfied in keeping. In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits - at the very height of his abundance, distress will seize him; the moment he thinks himself most secure, every hand will turn against him. As a description of how oppression devours the oppressor, there is hard truth in it; the violent man builds his own ruin, and a conscience gorged on stolen things does not rest. But hear what Zophar has now done. He has filled in the indictment - oppressor of the poor, seizer of houses - and laid it implicitly at Job's feet. He is no longer merely saying the wicked fall; he is sketching the specific wickedness that must, in his scheme, lie behind Job's fall. And it is a portrait the reader can only hear as monstrous, for Job will answer with the truth of his life: he was eyes to the blind, and feet… to the lame, a father to the poor (Job 29:15-16). The crimes Zophar invents are the very opposite of the man Job actually was.
Job 20:23-29The Wrath of God upon Him
23When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating. 24He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall strike him through. 25It is drawn, and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering sword cometh out of his gall: terrors are upon him.
The poem rises to its climax of violence: When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating.3 The timing is the point. Judgment falls not when the wicked man is weak but at the very moment of his fullest indulgence - the fork halfway to the mouth, the belly about to be filled, the pleasure at its peak. God rains His fury down on him while he is eating, in the middle of his feast. And then the weapons come: he flees the iron weapon only to be struck through by the bow of steel; the arrow is drawn out of his body, the glittering sword cometh out of his gall. It is a picture of a man hunted down, pierced, with no escape in any direction - flee the one weapon and the next finds him. There is a sobering truth folded into the image, that the wicked have no final refuge from the justice of God, that no fullness of present comfort secures a man against the day of reckoning. But Zophar has not drawn this to sober anyone. He has drawn it to terrify Job, and to suggest that the calamities which have rained on Job - the raiders, the fire, the wind that killed his children (Job 1:13-19) - were exactly this: the fury of God's wrath poured out on a wicked man in the midst of his feasting. The reader, who watched those calamities fall, knows they were no such thing.
Zophar caps the assault with a phrase that has haunted the whole book: terrors are upon him. The wicked man, pierced and bleeding, is overtaken by terrors - the dread that comes when every defense has failed and judgment is closing in. It is a powerful image, and it would carry real weight as a warning to the genuinely wicked. But there is a bitter irony in Zophar using it against Job, for terrors are precisely what Job has been describing in his own innocent suffering. Job has cried that God scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions (Job 7:14); he has said the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me (Job 6:4). Job knows terror - not as the deserved dread of a guilty man, but as part of the inexplicable affliction that has fallen on a faithful one. Zophar takes the very word for Job's anguish and reassigns it to the wicked, as though to say: your terrors prove your guilt; the dread that hounds you is the dread of the condemned. This is the deepest cruelty of the retributive scheme - it turns the sufferer's own pain into the evidence against him. The more Job hurts, the guiltier he must be. But the book has shown us the truth from the throne room: Job's terrors are the marks of a trial, not the sentence of a court.
26All darkness shall be hid in his secret places: a fire not blown shall consume him; it shall go ill with him that is left in his tabernacle. 27The heaven shall reveal his iniquity; and the earth shall rise up against him. 28The increase of his house shall depart, and his goods shall flow away in the day of his wrath. 29This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the heritage appointed unto him by God.
The judgment becomes cosmic, the whole creation turned witness and executioner: a fire not blown shall consume him - a fire no human hand kindled, a fire from God - and then the heaven shall reveal his iniquity; and the earth shall rise up against him. There is no hiding the wicked man's sin any longer; what he concealed under his tongue, what he buried in his secret places, the heavens themselves expose, and the earth he walked on turns against him. His house empties out; his goods flow away in the day of his wrath. The vision is total: heaven above and earth beneath unite to drag the hidden sin into the light and sweep the sinner away. And there is a true and even gospel-shaped seed in it - nothing hidden shall remain hidden, every secret thing will be brought into judgment (Eccl. 12:14), the day will come when the books are opened. But Zophar means it now, and means it about Job. He is telling a man whose every loss has been public - whose calamity the whole region has witnessed - that heaven and earth are testifying to a guilt Job is hiding. He reads Job's exposure as the unveiling of secret sin. The reader knows the unbearable irony: heaven has indeed spoken about Job - and what heaven said was a perfect and an upright man (Job 1:8). The very heaven Zophar summons as witness against Job has already declared him innocent.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Job 20 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for rega behind “but for a moment” in verse 5, for the vivid digestion imagery of the sweet morsel turned to the gall of asps (vv. 12-14), and for the legal force of portion and heritage in the closing verdict (v. 29).
- Job 20 ↔ Psalm 73 · Hebrews 11 · 1 John 2 · Matthew 6Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Zophar's the triumphing of the wicked is short (v. 5) to the psalmist's thou castedst them down into destruction (Ps. 73:18-19), the fleeting sweetness of sin (vv. 12-13) to the pleasures of sin for a season (Heb. 11:25), and the swallowed riches that must be vomited up (v. 15) to the treasure that endures (Matt. 6:19-20; John 6:27).
- Job 20 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Job 20 - the haste and offense behind Zophar's opening (vv. 2-3), the proverbial brevity of the wicked's joy (v. 5), the graphic metaphor of sin as a delicacy that becomes serpent's venom in the belly (vv. 12-16), and the courtroom vocabulary of the closing “portion” and “heritage” (v. 29).
- Ludlul bel nemeqi · the “Babylonian Job”The British MuseumCuneiform tablets of a Babylonian poem about a righteous sufferer baffled that ruin has fallen on him though he has done no wrong - the wider ancient world wrestling with the very assumption Zophar presses, that catastrophe must be the just receipt for wickedness against heaven.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Triumphing of the Wicked Is Short
- Job 1:8Hast thou considered my servant Job… a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God?God’s own verdict on Job - the man Zophar paints as the doomed wicked is the one heaven calls upright.
- Psalm 73:18-19Thou castedst them down into destruction… they are utterly consumed with terrors.The true kernel of v. 5 - the wicked’s triumph really is fleeting; the error is in Zophar’s aim.
- Job 2:7Smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.The afflicted body Zophar invites Job to read as the “sin of his youth” in his bones (v. 11).
- Job 42:7Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.The LORD’s final verdict on Zophar and his friends - the reason this portrait cannot be read as the book’s teaching.
Sweet in the Mouth, Gall in the Belly
- Proverbs 5:3-4Her lips drop as an honeycomb… but her end is bitter as wormwood.The same mechanism Zophar names (vv. 12-14) - sin sweet at first, bitter at the last; true as a principle.
- Job 29:15-16I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame… a father to the poor.The opposite of the oppressor Zophar invents (v. 19) - the man Job actually was.
- Psalm 73:7Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart could wish.The psalmist’s honest report - the wicked often do prosper long, which Zophar’s tidy scheme cannot allow.
- Matthew 27:34They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall.The bitter gall (v. 14) pressed to the lips of the one man who never tasted the sweet morsel of sin.
The Wrath of God upon Him
- Ecclesiastes 12:14God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing.The true seed in v. 27 - hidden things will be revealed; the error is reading Job’s public ruin as that unveiling.
- Isaiah 53:12He was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many.The Righteous One given the wicked’s portion (v. 29) - suffering that was never the proof of His guilt.
- Hebrews 11:25-26Than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches.The fleeting joy of v. 5 turned into a choice - weighing sin’s short pleasure against the lasting treasure.
- 1 Peter 1:4To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven.The true <em>nachalah</em> against Zophar’s black inheritance (v. 29) - the portion that cannot be torn away.