ChristadelphianBooksOnline
David Baird
The Education of Job

Chapter 20 - The Second Cycle of Speeches - Zophar

	20:1-5	I am insulted and exasperated
	20:6-11	The prosperity of the wicked is short-lived
	20:12-19	Sin and its retribution
	20:20-22	The wicked cannot escape from his inevitable punishment
	20:23-28	God's vengeance on the sinner
	20:29	Zophar's conclusion - his philosophy summarised

Zophar's response is a rambling stream of indignation. He is indignant that Job is warning them. He is indignant that Job is unmoved and refuses to accept their wisdom. He is indignant that Job fails to appreciate what they are doing for him. So his indignation bubbles over in a speech where he virtually loses self-control. He is more harsh than before, adding rudeness and coarseness to his earlier hostility. His denunciation of Job is but barely concealed. The gist of his speech that the prosperity of the wicked is short-lived and God will catch up with them is basically correct. It is, however, like most of the expressions uttered against Job, misapplied to Job's circumstances.

20:1-5 I am insulted and exasperated

Job's closing warning (19:28-29) motivates Zophar to reply, quickly and sharply. The whole of Job's speech has riled Zophar. He picks up on Job's early remark, "Ten times have ye reproached (kalam) me" (19:3), and retorts with, "I have heard the check of my reproach (kelimma from kalam)" (20:3). How dare Job say he has been put to shame by his friends when it is they who have been embarrassed by Job - "the reproof which putteth me to shame" (RV). His understanding inspires him to reply.

What is Zophar's understanding? Verses 4-5 neatly summarise it. Everybody knows, ever since Adam was a boy, that the joy of the wicked is brief. That's all there is to it. But in case Job has missed the point, Zophar launches into a lengthy editorial.

20:6-11 The prosperity of the wicked is short-lived

Even though the wicked man can reach the greatest heights and his "pride" (TWOT, NIV) mount up to the heavens, he shall perish forever like, to use Zophar's crude analogy, "his own dung" (20:7). And possibly picking up on Job's declaration of being forgotten by his familiar friends (19:14), people who once knew him will say, "Where is he?" Sort of like, "Whatever happened to that once great man Job?" Zophar's answer; "He perished because of his wickedness. He is gone like a dream, like a vision of the night."

Zophar then (20:9) cruelly reworks Job's soliloquy of 7:8-10, which was spoken when Job had plummeted to a major low, and applies it to the humiliated hypocrite.

Retribution will be swift, dramatic and premature. Even his children (what children?) will be forced to seek the favour of the poor and anything extracted by the wicked, while in his prosperity, will have to be restored (20:10).

The final picture in this section is of a man dead, cut down in his prime. "With the vigour of his youth his bones were filled, now it lies in the dust with him" (20:11 JB).

20:12-19 Sin and its retribution

Having described the fate of the wicked, Zophar now proceeds to demonstrate that it is due to his sin. It brings its own punishment. There may be some foundation of fact in what Zophar is saying. If judgment is slow it could be because God is using the person's own wickedness to bring about his downfall. Or to mangle a proverb, "Time wounds all heals." Sooner or later the very pleasure of the self-indulgent will defeat him.

To illustrate this, Zophar uses a vivid, albeit coarse, image of the epicure who delights in the taste of his wickedness. He keeps it in his mouth as long as he can to savour its sweetness. "He is loath to let it go" (20:13 RSV). But when he swallows it, it converts to bitter and deadly poison; the toxic venom of a snake. The initial taste is lost and reality strikes as his body rejects the ill-gotten wealth he has ingested - "he shall vomit them up again" (20:15). Furthermore, rather than being self-induced, God makes him disgorge it. God turns the sweet food into poison in the victim's stomach.

How God does this is not explained by Zophar. Such technicalities only detract from the persistent image of a disgusting, public humiliation of a once-wealthy hypocrite.

Zophar pushes on with more viperine allusions (20:16). Zophar is vigorously summoning up the most despised of deadly creatures (Deut 32:33; Psa 140:3) to mankind to describe the conduct and destiny of wicked men. His wickedness will be changed to snake poison and it will be his executioner.

The hypocrite will not see the rivers (pelagga - "canals" TWOT, Soncino), floods and brooks of honey and butter (20:17). As the Jerusalem Bible paraphrases, "Streams that run with oil, or the torrents of honey and cream." The plenty he once enjoyed will dry up. He will derive no pleasure from his ill-gotten gains and he will be forced to restore what he had inappropriately appropriated (20:18).

Why? Because he had oppressed and forsaken the poor. He has taken a house to which he was not entitled. Such statements could not apply to Job. After all Eliphaz had acknowledged Job's charity way back in 4:3-4. Job also knew, and vehemently protested, that such charges could not be true of himself (29:12-17).

But such is the indignant and cynical bitterness of Zophar that all Job's previous positive attributes are now interpreted by Zophar as masquerade; an act that merely concealed an evil man, with evil intentions, whose sweet food has been turned into poison by the Almighty Himself.

20:20-22 The wicked cannot escape from his inevitable punishment

The section heading virtually says all that needs to be reported on these three verses. It is more of the same except it is complicated by the various interpretations forwarded by different commentators and translators.

What Zophar appears to be asserting is that the wicked, whose greed was once insatiable, can no longer be saved by what he has hoarded. Because nothing escaped his avarice, his prosperity will be terminated. His life will be characterised by distress (Ges - AV "strait" 20:22) and misery (TWOT - AV "wicked" 20:22 - amal. See comments 4:8, 16:2).

20:23-28 God's vengeance on the sinner

As Zophar marches to his conclusion he winds himself up, rattling off one graphic image after another. His message is simple; "God targets the wicked and He doesn't miss. God's judgment of the wicked is final and gruesome."

Verse 23	When the wicked is filled God will loose all His wrath on him, hurling a hail of arrows against his flesh (Psa 11:6).

Verse 24	No use running from iron weapons because the bow of bronze will shoot him through (see Amos 5:19). The word for "strike him through" (*halap*) is also used of Jael's handiwork on Sisera in Judges 5:26.

Verse 25	The wicked is severely wounded by an arrow that has thudded into him and emerged on the other side of his body ("It teareth, then cometh forth out of his body" Delitzsch, see also JB). This shaft of "lightning" (Green, "gleaming point" NIV) pierces his liver. He cannot escape. "Terrors are upon him."

Verse 26	All that is dark (*chosek* 10:21 - related to death) lies in ambush for him and a fire prepared by God (1:16; 15:34; Amos 7:4) will consume everything he has.

Verse 27	Heaven will declare the iniquity of the sinner and the earth will rise up against him. Is this a response to Job's appeal to heaven and earth in 16:18-19 or just Zophar dragging in yet another cliché to impress his point?

Verse 28	A raging flood will sweep away his possessions. They will be carried away in the Day of God's Wrath.

The vexatious Zophar has painted a gaudy yet dismal picture. Gaudy in that it is full of lurid colour - bronze arrows tipped in blood, fire, turbulent floods. Dismal in that everything relates to death.

Yet a number of the images are accurate portrayals, supported by Scripture, of what God will do to the wicked. Can such language be applied to Job? As a judgment against sin-prone mortality, yes. In the context of Job and his circumstances, no.

20:29 Zophar's conclusion - his philosophy summarised

Zophar, having finished his amazing rave against the wicked (and, by virtually unconcealed implication, Job), pauses, makes an expansive gesture and declares, "Such is the fate God allots the wicked, such his inheritance assigned by God" (JB).

That's all there is to it. There is nothing more to say, and Zophar says nothing more. He does not, unlike Eliphaz and Bildad, make a third speech. While some, notably the Jerusalem Bible, unfortunately conjure up a third speech, Bildad's anaemic final effort (Chapter 25) betrays that the friends are running out of things to say. Zophar can add nothing more. He has exhausted his supply of vitriol, insults and bulldozing forcefulness and retires from the debate. Besides, as far as he is concerned, he has said what had to be said, he knows he is right and that Job is reaping what Job has sown.

Zophar's retirement could also have been caused by Job's demolition of his reasoning in the chapter that follows.