Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.
Job appeals that with his own hands God made him and carefully fashioned him together round about, yet now destroys him. The cry belongs to the colloquies between Job and his three friends in Job 3-31, and more nearly to Job 8-10, which take up the cause and object of human suffering under God's providence. There Job speaks conscious of his own integrity yet unable to understand God's dealings with him in affliction, without charging God foolishly; his afflictions are God's disciplining of him and do not prove that he has sinned, though his friends wrongly insist that his suffering proves he has sinned. God saw the end from the beginning and was working out through that suffering what would glorify himself forever after, giving comfort and hope to thousands of suffering ones and proving a blessing to Job himself, so the verse must be studied as part of the whole book and not torn out alone.
The making and fashioning describes God forming a person's whole being in the womb, compared to shaping clay and to milk poured out and curdled like cheese. The "me" God made like clay is the whole person, and that same person is the one destroyed and brought back to dust, not an immortal soul dwelling separately in a body. The verse therefore gives no support for an immortal soul, unless that soul too is made of dust and returns to dust. Scripture's language about God making and fashioning people does not prove that each soul or each body is formed immediately and separately by God apart from natural causes, but is compatible with God's work through the ordinary processes of generation and bodily formation in the womb. As in Isaiah 57:16 where God speaks of the souls he has made, the body made and fashioned in Job 10:8-11 is produced by the natural process of generation when parents multiply themselves with all their characteristics, endowments and attributes, showing that soul and body are transmitted together with the body. The verse shows that the sinner is God's handiwork and creature, made in God's image and originally like him, though now fallen and corrupted.
Job appeals that with his own hands God made him and carefully fashioned him together round about, yet now destroys him. The cry belongs to the colloquies between Job and his three friends in Job 3-31, and more nearly to Job 8-10, which take up the cause and object of human suffering under God's providence. There Job speaks conscious of his own integrity yet unable to understand God's dealings with him in affliction, without charging God foolishly; his afflictions are God's disciplining of him and do not prove that he has sinned, though his friends wrongly insist that his suffering proves he has sinned. God saw the end from the beginning and was working out through that suffering what would glorify himself forever after, giving comfort and hope to thousands of suffering ones and proving a blessing to Job himself, so the verse must be studied as part of the whole book and not torn out alone.
The making and fashioning describes God forming a person's whole being in the womb, compared to shaping clay and to milk poured out and curdled like cheese. The "me" God made like clay is the whole person, and that same person is the one destroyed and brought back to dust, not an immortal soul dwelling separately in a body. The verse therefore gives no support for an immortal soul, unless that soul too is made of dust and returns to dust. Scripture's language about God making and fashioning people does not prove that each soul or each body is formed immediately and separately by God apart from natural causes, but is compatible with God's work through the ordinary processes of generation and bodily formation in the womb. As in Isaiah 57:16 where God speaks of the souls he has made, the body made and fashioned in Job 10:8-11 is produced by the natural process of generation when parents multiply themselves with all their characteristics, endowments and attributes, showing that soul and body are transmitted together with the body. The verse shows that the sinner is God's handiwork and creature, made in God's image and originally like him, though now fallen and corrupted.