Job 14

A more literal translation of the question: Who can make an unclean person clean? Scholars debate this verse because it doesn’t seem to fit the context of this chapter. Some say it doesn’t belong in the chapter and that perhaps someone wrote a note in the margin of a scroll that later got copied onto the next version of the scroll. (Scrolls wear out and have to be replaced.) Some say they wonder if the point of the verse is that humans are going to sin. But in the context of the surrounding verses, the implied follow up question might be: Why would God bother with insignificant, sinful human beings? Wouldn’t the master of the universe have more important things to do then pick on people like Job?

That’s harsh, even for Job. Some scholars say his animosity toward God is fueled by his visitors who do nothing but judge him guilty, guilty, guilty. This gets to Job because he knows he did nothing wrong and yet it looks to everyone else as though he did something horrible because his tragedies are a parent’s worst case scenario. All God left him was a poor excuse of a wife, who told him to cuss God so God would kill him.

This paraphrase is a guess. It’s unclear what the writer meant. More literally, the verse would read something like this: “The dead feel only their own pain. They grieve for only themselves.” If the writer is talking about feeling bad in the afterlife, he’s the only one in the Old Testament doing so. Many scholars say they don’t take the verse that literally. They seem to take it as a poetic way of describing the dead as cut off from life on earth.